Comment by EigenLord
7 days ago
I've been thinking lately about how AGI runs up against the No Free Lunch Theorem. This is what irritates me: science is not determining the narrative. Money is. I highly recommend mathematician David Wolpert's work on the topic. I think he inadvertently proved that ASI is physically impossible. Certainly he proved that AOI (artificial omniscient intelligence) is impossible.
One thing he showed is that you can't have a universe with two omniscient intelligences (as it would be intractable for them to predict the other's behavior.)
It's also very questionable whether "humanlike" intelligence is truly general in the first place. I think cognitive neurobiologists would agree that we have a specific "cognitive niche", and while this symbolic niche seems sufficiently general for a lot of problems, there are animals that make us look stupid in other respects. This whole idea that there is some secret sauce special algorithm for universal intelligence is extremely suspect. We flatter ourselves and have committed to a fundamental anthropomorphic fallacy that seems almost cartoonishly elementary for all the money behind it.
TIL there actually is something called "no free lunch in search and optimization"[1].
See however that the theorem is quite weak. Requires eg the assumption that the search space has no structure. They even have the example of quadratic problems. It's mostly a useless saying, it appears to me.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_...
AGI can't be defined, because it's the means by which definitions are created. You can only measure it contemporaneously by some consensus method such as ARC.
You can't define AGI, any more than you can define ASA (artificial sports ability). Intelligence, like athleticism changes both quantitively and qualitatively. The Greek Olympic champions of 2K yrs ago wouldn't qualify for high school championships today, however, they were once regarded as great athletes.
ASI is as different from AOI as BB(8) is from infinity. The impossibility of AOI says bubkis about ASI.
When hasn't money determined the narrative?
Ironically, you missed the point. The person you're responding to is saying the opposite: the narrative (that there is something unique about how our brain solves problems) determines the money (invested).