[stanfordkid]

It's fairly clear to me that there is no such thing as AGI. Intelligence is a process of integrating sensory input with action and reward mechanisms -- nothing more, nothing less.

Are there specific structures and architectures that have evolved that are very unique which give humans, say, language ability or visual processing? Certainly. Perhaps by gods spark or some random chance on the board game of life human beings developed examples of very particular structures. Perhaps there are undiscovered ones lying within the minds of peregrine falcons, tree roots or deep sea squid. We don't even know how to look for them because we don't even know such perception and intelligence exists.

The point I'm trying to make is that there is no "goal post" of AGI, there is no quantification of intelligence yet. We don't even know what sorts of intelligence exist out there because we haven't even begun to fully characterize what it is. It seems foolish to me to search for something when we can't even define it.

It's like trying to find "the ultimate general animal" when what you really have is a phylogenetic tree of huge diversity.

[photon_lines]

Sorry, but I completely disagree with your general take. An AGI is a generalized agent which is able to perform extreme information compression on any available set of inputs. Think Force = m*a and coming up with the laws of the universe. You can store each possible action in memory of all available results OR -- a generalized agent will find the most succinct and least complex form of modelling the state of a system. An AGI to me in other words is a form of intelligence which is able to extract information and compress it such a way to not allow the lossy compression or storage to hinder its ability to predict real outputs from a set of training data fed into it. By the way, I have some ideas on how to create one and I'll be sharing some of the key algorithms and data structures that I'll be using here for anyone interested:

https://github.com/photonlines/AGI-Algorithms-and-Prototypes...

[esafak]

Intelligence as compression is a well-established notion. An earlier debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24395822

[mdp2021]

> goal post ... define it

But we have a pretty clear idea of what we want. Just looking at the remarkably intelligent and spectacularly unintelligent should give a definite picture to work on. (When the spectacularly unintelligent is responsible for important resources a sense of urgency can easily be added.)

> integrating sensory input with action and reward mechanisms

There you reveal you may not be speaking about what others will call intelligence (just read the paragraph above).

Or, if you meant that "intelligence would just be cybernetics" (as was already a supposition in 1956), the problem remains that we are interested in an "ontology refiner", so the primary question would remain of how to create an ontology refiner from sheer cybernetics. And if it made sense to have a cybernetic implementation spawn it, instead of implementing the ontology refiner and its feedback parts in parallel directly.

[ballenf]

> But we have a pretty clear idea of what we want.

The bellwether for me personally is waiting for a system that can generate something conceptually novel. Something like the move from the real to the complex number systems. Or the move from Newtonian motion to relativistic understanding. Maybe systems already have such insights but don't have the vocabulary to explain it.

A system that when presented with a problem we don't even know how to tackle, can "invent" the tools/approach needed to solve the problem.

In terms of the Langland problem in math, a system that can define a new landmass there or a new bridge between existing domains.

Is that too high or too low a bar?

[mdp2021]

> too high or too low a bar

I would say that is where we would like to head, and I do not see why we would not go there if we found the operational definition of intelligence.

An issue may be in the possibility of intelligence as a collection of more faculties.

[hcta]

surely being able to construct a turing-complete computing device is a sufficient condition to qualify as general intelligence, and it seems like a reasonable bar for considering a purported intelligent agent as interesting.

> It seems foolish to me to search for something when we can't even define it.

This is backwards. The vast majority of concepts outside mathematics are pretty hard to rigorously define. The way we approach the problem of trying to find a sensible definition is by searching for examples and counterexamples and performing induction.