Comment by mcbuilder
7 hours ago
It's funny how this definition has shifted. I feel like growing up in the 90s it was pretty clear that AGI was very related to consciousness. For instance, Commander Data in ST:TNG to pick one of 100s of popular depictions of AGI at the time.
Now the idea of AGI has been narrowed and scoped to economically viable work. Even Turing had a different idea when he asked "Can machines think?".
We lack a definition of consciousness that allows us to tell whether Data is conscious or not. Neither can we tell whether a rock is conscious or not. We believe other humans to be generally intelligent without being able to tell whether they are conscious or not therefore consciousness can’t be relevant for general intelligence.
People somehow forget how the Turing test was considered the definitive way of showing something to be "human-level consciousness".
Now programmers and mathematicians are being superseded by AI, both professions long deemed the pinnacle of human intelligence. Somehow, now plumbers occupy that spot.
How is "people not knowing what consciousness is" relevant here in the first place? AI already can do practically everything the human brain can, and often better or at least faster. The "tipping point" arguably isn't only close, but we're practically on top of it.
Turing’s imitation game is a party game like Werewolf or Mafia. It hasn’t been beat and nobody is really trying. LLM’s have obvious tells and will just straight up admit to being AI if you ask. Also, there’s no pool of human players to train against.
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The AI cannot smell a rose, nor mourn the loss of a parent, nor envision a more just world. These aren't fringe abilities of the human brain/mind either, they've been pretty definitional.
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>> People somehow forget how the Turing test was considered the definitive way of showing something to be "human-level consciousness".
People somehow forget that the original Turing Test was designed to compare two participants chatting through a text-only interface: one AI and one human. The goal was to spot the imposter. Today, the test is simplified from three participants to just two: a human and an LLM. This changes the test from a comparison to a judgment.
Stop spreading misinformation and partial truths!
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Curiously, Star Trek I think had Data intended as an artificial person, in a context where AGI is already normal. The computers are depicted with significant AI capabilities including analysis, question-answering, generation, chat interfaces, and the holodeck (their favourite toy) is substantially better than Data at human imitation. Nobody seems to be confused about it, or especially impressed. One of the holodeck episodes centres on the holodeck outwitting Data specifically, after they inadvertently prompt it to do so. Part of Data's deal is he actually has to work his way up as a fully embodied, physically limited artificial man with personal ambitions. Really interesting to view this in hindsight from 2026!
You're misremembering. The first known use of AGI was in 1997, but that was a single, mostly unknown use in one paper. It wasn't until at least a decade later that the term started entering mainstream use after being independently reinvented in the 2000s. AGI just wasn't a term in the 90s.
We called it “strong AI” in the 90s
It’s really not that confusing. The problem is people keep adding stuff to the definition that doesn’t really matter, and twisting it to serve themselves, then calling it confusing.
What really matters are the core aspects of intelligent behavior. Pattern recognition, planning, adaptation, etc.
It really doesn’t matter if an intelligent system is conscious, or how similar it is to commander data, or even how much economically viable work it can do.