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by sh461 2127 days ago
The overwhelming probability is that none of us will see AGI in the span of our lives. The economic disruption is another thing - that can happen without AGI.
1 comments

We have no idea when AGI might appear. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already running quietly somewhere in OpenAI or Google datacenter.
1. > We have no idea when AGI might appear.

We do know when it might not appear. This isn't a movie where AI is created by a single person in an afteroon because they had a creative thought. It's an effort by many people over a prolonged period of time. Everything that we know from decades of AI research tells us that it certainly doesn't exist and that we aren't close to discovering it. Also your common sense should tell you that if Google had AGI, they wouldn't currently get most of their revenue from ads and they wouldn't have a smaller market cap than a company that makes phones.

2. Your statement is non-falsifiable. It's similar to claiming that I wouldn't be surprised if humans have already been to Mars. It's an outrageous claim that no one can accurately disprove. Non-falsifiability is also a way some conspiracy theories spread. Because when someone says "No way" to such a claim (like the sibling comment), you can always respond with "How do you know?". Falsifiability separates science from non-science - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

We do know when it might not appear

No, we don't. The progress in AI has been exponential. Anything exponential is hard for humans to estimate. This is perfectly illustrated by statements like "decades of AI research tells us ... that we aren't close". Every significant AI breakthrough has caught most AI experts by surprise (chess, IBM Watson, Imagenet results in 2012, Atari games, Go, GPT-2/3). If you made a poll of AI researchers a year or two before each one of these breakthroughs has happened, you would get estimates that would have been overly pessimistic in their timelines. We had no idea that scaling the original transformer would lead to GPT-3, and we don't have any idea of what's going to happen if we scale GPT-3 another factor of 100x.

if Google had AGI

We have no idea what an "AGI" would look like. More precisely, any ideas you might have about it probably came from Hollywood. For example, you seem to believe AGI will be superintelligent, even though it simply needs to be as intelligent as a regular human to be considered "AGI". It might be superintelligent, but we don't know.

Your statement is non-falsifiable

Relax. We are not proving a theorem here. Yes, it's unlikely Google has AGI. But I wouldn't be surprised if it does (ok, maybe a little surprised). But I would be very surprised if we don't have AGI within next 20 years. To me it's more likely we have it already than we don't have it within our lifetime.

Not a chance.
How do you know?
You make a claim that could not possibly be proven one way or the other. Therefore it is a meaningless claim.
No, I simply make a claim that your claim is false.