Comment by fxd
9 hours ago
“AGI” never made sense to me. It’s a purely marketing term right?
I’ve ignored it thinking it would go away, but it keeps coming up.
I get that consciousness differs from intelligence and that our waking awareness of life is a complete mystery.
Knowledge and thus intelligence however I consider as actively being solved by these large ML models. That is, with the right combination of machinery and know-how, you’ll get it.
But you’d be no nearer to solving consciousness.
Given this thought trajectory - what is AGI supposed to be?
Not sure why you are bringing up consciousness, that’s largely orthogonal to intelligence. AGI is usually taken to mean the capability to match or surpass human intelligence across all conceivable cognitive tasks, as opposed to being limited to certain kinds of tasks, or to not matching the general level of human intelligence in some respect.
Intelligence, and hence AGI, doesn’t require consciousness or emotions or sentience.
capability to match or surpass human intelligence across all conceivable cognitive tasks
What human intelligence do you mean? Genius? Professional? Educated? Random person? “Dumb” person?
I think the distinction between these options probably doesn’t matter alll that much if the threshold you’re using is either “random person” or higher? Maybe bump it up to “random educated person”?
They are still different concepts of course, but I imagine that once one is achieved, the others aren’t far off.
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“General”.
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The OpenAI charter defines it as:
"highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work"
https://time.com/article/2026/08/26/openai-sam-altman-interv...
So vague it’s useless.
We cannot in a declarative sense define what is economically valuable work even now let alone into the future.
People take what they can get for pay. Very few individuals can demand a wage. The value of employment is obviously designed around that, not some arbitrary definition of “valuable”.
Of course an AI will accept $0/hr, it doesn’t mean it does the job.
Anyone who could accurately define the value of work would be wildly successful without having to try.
That is not a useful definition for me unfortunately.
That's the challenge of defining intelligence. What is intelligence?
Do you want to take a stab at defining/quantifying it? I'm s afraid anything specific you can come up with will also be useless.
> Knowledge and thus intelligence
How can you conflate the two.
> solving consciousness
We are very much not interested in that. We just need a proper problem solver.
Right, you are interested in “AGI” and presuming none of that requires consciousness right?
For example, how do you know that “feeling pain” is not a functional prerequisite for a task. And that consciousness is a prerequisite for feeling pain
Unproven, but it could very well be some problems require consciousness to be solved.
I like recursive self improvement instead. It seems like something that is actually quantifiable and kinda “the point” of why consciousness is important to humans.
So basically, being able to set it free on some long running goal and it sort of “lives” and autonomously does its own tasks?
I wonder at what point consciousness is necessary… that is, if you can have anything like that without it.
To the point that solving consciousness (and combining it with intelligence) is what gives you the autonomous, recursive, self-improving thing otherwise it can only drive in the dark and make big mistakes.
To your point I think - it’s why we don’t see too many non-conscious advanced biology (it rarely survives against those with it).
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