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There is another way of saying the same thing. A lot of seemingly groundbreaking progress in AI usually happens when people (people, not machines) discover a clever way of mapping a new unsolved problem to another - well-solved - problem. That's a valid and insightful observation that you shouldn't dismiss with such an ease.



Why 'seemingly'? Why is that not 'actual' groundbreaking progress? The achievement of any level of AI will by necessity require the chaining together of processes which are not themselves 'intelligent'. It has to be bootstrapped somehow.

On the day they build a walking, talking AI who can converse fully with a human, write a symphony, design a building, feel and express emotions and all the rest of the things we define as being essentially in the domain of humain intelligence, everyone will say, "But of course, none of those things required intelligence at all. This is all an elaborate collection of illusions and ugly hacks."

And they'll be right, but I suspect that the brain is the same way.


Why 'seemingly'? Why is that not 'actual' groundbreaking progress?

Because mapping problems to pre-existing algorithms is bread and butter of computer science and software engineering. To be groundbreaking a work needs to change our understanding of the underlying issues. In a lot of popularized cases that does not happen.


i tend to agree with that. it does seem like there's some general instinct in people that other things (animals, "artificially" intelligent machines) could possess human-like intelligence and subjective experience. i mean, we both seem to be tacitly agreeing to that here. there's also obviously a general instinct that's completely the opposite, and i'd guess that's probably the more prevalent instinct (in the population at large and in many conflicted individuals).

i think the opinion that humans are less special than we once thought, especially on expansive time scales, will only become more widespread.




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