> Having done some work with the state-of-the-art of AI, I personally don't think AGI is near - might not even be possible.
(Just venting here, not even primarily at you.)
360k babies are born each day. Clearly it is possible to reproduce intelligent machines. The only way it would be impossible to artificially do the same is literally if life was a magic, non-physical thing. I wish people who state things like this would also state any religious beliefs that lead them to think so.
Yes, we can find a mate and create a baby. We can't know whether it will be ready to fill a particular functional role after 20 years of training. This works OK for an entire society filling its workforce or army, but seems rather inadequate for a technology company to deliver working products on spec and within a reasonable contract delivery period.
If this is the basis of future AGI, I have to wonder if which flavor of dystopia we'll get to enjoy. Will it be a child-selling dystopia where we all raise a dozen kids hoping that some of them will pay off? Or more like silk-farming, where some capitalized breeder sells kits to all the villagers, and buys back the developed products if and only if the villager was lucky enough to raise them to fruition?
Also, if a human baby is our only basis for assuming AGI, then we ought to think about it like genetic-engineering or human augmentation. We'd better anticipate providing schools, hospitals, psychiatrists, courts, and prisons to deal with the wide variety of behaviors and misbehaviors which will come with these new products which have so little determinism as a baby's lifecycle.
Just because we can observe something happening, doesn't mean we can understand the mechanisms of how that thing happens and even if we CAN understand the mechanism, it doesn't mean the mechanism is feasibly reproducible within our resource capability.
An example might use crypto... you observe random information flying through the air, you may recognize it as an encrypted channel and you may see a machine acting in response to this encrypted signal.
With enough observation you may be able to mimic the encrypted signal to get the machine to act in a certain way, but you haven't decrypted the actual signal (and can't ever, if you believe in strong crypto) and can't ever say with any certainty you know the full scope of communication taking place or the capabilities of the machine you've been observing.
At any point you can make your own version of the machine mimicking the language tuning it to be an exact replica of the original and even responding to the original signal. Yet, is it truly a copy of the original?
You're missing the point several times over. The entire point is very simple: if there is no magic involved it's down to physics. If it's possible to create brains without magic, it is possible to do so artificially.
I don't think I am... if a task is possible, but takes 100x the lifetime of the universe to accomplish, is it actually "possible"? Or is accomplishing that task the same as "magic"?
It I send a message using a one-time pad, the other person knows what I sent, you can ask questions and see that communication is actually happening... so if we're not using magic to communicate, it must be possible to communicate in the same way, right?
Yet it's mathmatically impossible to do so without access to hidden information (shared key)... no laws says that you can access that information, even with all the computational ability available in the universe.
The mechanisms and communication patterns of consciousness are similar, if it takes till the sun explodes to train a true AGI then aren't we just getting pedantic about what is possible/magic?
That doesn't really make much sense to me, I'm afraid. Please bear with me, but my first guess is that you have invented a coping mechanism that allows you to deal with conflicting information in your mind. Are you by any chance religious?
(I figure I should be allowed to ask such a normally speaking quite loaded question because of my previous statements, up the thread.)
No, I am not, by any chance, religious. I don't rule out the possibility of a God or God-like intelligence existing in the Universe, but that's simply as a result of the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" principle I hold to.
I don't really see how religion factors into this though... I feel like I'm talking about a simple concept too. If I show you an encrypted message and show you that other people can read the contents with a key, then ask you to read it without the key, why can't you? It's not magic, it's math.
I don't think anyone is saying there won't be human level AI 500+ years into the future. Like you said, it's not against the laws of physics or anything.
The question is, will it happen in less than 50-100 years, or would we be like medieval alchemists rushing to outline the first nuclear weapons treaties, right after they have just invented black gunpowder.
(Just venting here, not even primarily at you.)
360k babies are born each day. Clearly it is possible to reproduce intelligent machines. The only way it would be impossible to artificially do the same is literally if life was a magic, non-physical thing. I wish people who state things like this would also state any religious beliefs that lead them to think so.