[benreesman]

These guys know better than to rev the tachometer up in the lay press talking about AGI and “achieve human level intelligence” and stuff. This fluff, unfortunately, sells and so when you’ve got an ego big enough to be talking this way in the first place I suppose you feel like you have to do it?

Machine learning researchers optimize “performance” on “tasks”, and while those terms are still tricky to quantify or even define in many cases, they’re a damned sight closer to rigorous, which is why people like Hassabis who get shit done actually talk about them in the lay press, when they deal with the press at all.

We can’t agree when an embryo becomes a fetus becomes a human with anything approaching consensus. We can’t agree which animals “feel pain” or are “self aware”. We can sort of agree how many sign language tokens silverbacks can remember and that dolphins exhibit social behavior.

Let’s keep it to “beats professionals at Go” or “scores such on a Q&A benchmark”, or “draws pictures that people care to publish”, something somehow tethered to reality.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: lots of luck with either of the words “artificial” or “intelligent”, give me a break on both in the same clause.

[jonathankoren]

My personal thoughts about AGI is that we’ll never “achieve” it for pretty much the same reasons you, and philosophers for hundreds, if not thousands, of years have said. We can’t even be sure that anyone else is conscious and intelligent, or just a clever facsimile.

As AI (in the broadest sense) has developed, we always end up moving the goal posts. Sometimes this is because we genuinely don’t know what is difficult and what is easy due to several billion years of evolution. But some of this is because we know how the system works, and so it can’t be “intelligence”.

I think of it as like a magic trick. When you watch a someone do an illusion well, it’s amazing. They made the coin disappear. It’s real magic! But then you find out all they did was stick in their pocket, or used a piece of elastic, and then “magic” is gone.

Essentially this is partially what the Chinese Room is about. You think the Chinese speaker is real, but then you find out it’s just some schlub executing finite state machine.