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by juanbyrge 2003 days ago
Human brains are also the culmination of billions of years of iterative development. Computers were only invented in the last century. I would not be surprised if computers could catch up given a few tens or hundred more years.
2 comments
absolutelyrad 2003 days ago
Yeah, I'd give 30(realistically 15) years tops for AGI. And then we'll call it the end of history.

That is if we don't kill ourselves by making stupid mistakes.

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dragonwriter 2003 days ago
> I'd give 30(realistically 15) years tops for AGI.

I think 30 years is probably reasonable, if for “30 years” one reads “twice as long from now as commercially viable fusion generation actually was when first widely hailed as 15 years away”.

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acdc4life 2003 days ago
I think this is false. My general opinion of computer scientists and engineers (especially in silicon valley) lack the scientific training that one gets in other disciplines like in physics or other hard sciences. Psychology, linguistics, cognitive science and neuroscience has generated a rich diverse experimental data in the past 50 years, and now is the prime time for a theory to emerge to connect everything. To make what I’m saying clearer, you needed Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell and Plank and Coulomb to develop and discover the science of electricity and atoms in order for us to engineer the silicon transistor. Without the original scientific knowledge, building such devices would have been impossible. This machine learning, ai, deep learning and this obsession with benchmarks are, in my opinion, a hinderance to AGI
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bumby 2003 days ago
I think the error in your thinking is the assumption that scientific discovery is predicated on previously defined theory.

Theory is required for understanding, not for discovery. They are two different things. What gets a lot of scientists and statisticians worked up is how ML can outperform traditional models without always being interpretable. It’s like claiming the Wright brothers couldn’t build a flying machine without having a thorough understanding of the mechanics of flight. I can improve performance of my car by remapping the fuel without necessarily understanding the nuances of optimizing enthalpy. There’s levels of understanding, and they may not correlate completely to effectiveness. To that extent, it’s more engineering than science

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