[pdimitar]

I don't trust any discussion on this topic anymore.

When I was much younger, "AI" was what "AGI" is now. Now people started using "AGI" for "cars with several sensors and okay algorithms for collision detection" and then you have loud advocates going on obviously logically broken rants about the nature of "actual" intelligence -- and those are philosophical and not scientific.

But still, we don't have anything even 1% close to AGI. And no, Chess and Go have NEVER EVER been about AGI. I have no idea how people ever mistook "combinatorics way beyond what the human brain can do" with "intelligent thought" but that super obvious mistake also explains the state of the AI sector these days, I feel.

So before long, I guess we'll need another term, probably AGIFRTTWP == Artifical General Intelligence, For Real This Time, We Promise.

And then we'll start adding numbers to it. So I am guessing Skynet / Transcendence level of AI will be at about AGIFRTTWP-6502.

As for the state of this "industry", what's going on is that people with marketing chops and vested interests hijack word meanings. Nothing new, right? But it also kills my motivation to follow anything in the field. 99.9% are just loud mouths looking for the next investment round with absolutely nothing to show for it. I think I saw on YouTube military-sponsored autonomous cars races 5+ years ago (if not 10) where they did better than what the current breed of "autonomously driving cars" are doing.

Will there be even one serious discussion about the general AI that you can put in a robot body and it can learn to clean, cook, repair and chat with you? Of course not, let's focus on yet-another-philosophical debate while pretending it's a scientific one.

As a bystander -- not impressed. You all who are in this field should be ashamed of yourselves.

[PeterisP]

I don't know how much long ago was "When I was much younger" but even if we go as far back as the 1960s and look at the Artificial Intelligence scientific literature of that time, you'd find the understanding of what the terms they defined back then to be something far closer to what we have now, not your expectation of "the general AI that you can put in a robot body and it can learn to clean, cook, repair and chat with you"; and the philosophy has always been a key part of the science of AI even before I was born.

I'm not seeing any drift of terms here - the only thing that seems to be happening for AI and AGI terms is correcting for what has happened in the sci-fi media and bringing the usage back to what it always has been in the computer science literature, now that it's closer to reality than mere fiction.

[pdimitar]

No, I don't go back as far as the 1960s so if you say so I'll have to believe you.

I come from a generation where AI was Skynet, Terminators, the Johny Depp's Transcendence movie AI, even HAL-9000, and other such like.

I still think putting the word "intelligence" is completely dishonest however. There's nothing intelligent about what we have today, even "self-driving" cars fail very badly on what seems trivial conditions. They are a huge mish-mash of if/else chains and some statistical models sprinkled in.

And please don't say "but what if human intelligence is just a chain of if/else statements and statistical models sprinkled in?" because it's very apparent and visible that it's more than that. F.ex. we can learn just from a few trials and errors whereas the so-called "AI" nowadays can't get things quite right even after billions of training sequences.

[gitfan86]

Sounds like you are looking for an Android in the style of BladeRunner. That would be cool, but I don't understand why you are against LLMs and FSD being labeled as AI. They are using neural networks to generate content and drive cars in ways that humans find valuable.

[pdimitar]

They are semi-valuable. There are tons of posts out there demonstrating GPT writing code that compiles but is utterly wrong, for example.

Using NNs is just a first step. To me labeling this as actual intelligence is childishly rushing into conclusions.

[gitfan86]

It isn't "Actual Intelligence" it is Artificial Intelligence. The whole point of this article is that we should separate the philosophical argument about "What is intelligence" from the work of automation with Neural Networks.

My preference is that we declare AGI to have been completed at AlphaZero. And now the people who want to work on replicating human intelligence can specifically say that is what they are working on, "Human Intelligence Replication" And people who want to use Neural Networks to automate parts of the economy and increase productivity can work on "Neural Network Functionality and Automation"

[pdimitar]

I guess what you say can be viewed as fair but it leaves a sour taste, as in "constantly changing definitions of words" sour, which gets tiring and to me still comes across as marketing and hype because we want investor money.

> It isn't "Actual Intelligence" it is Artificial Intelligence.

Having the word "intelligence" have completely another meaning if you smack "artificial" in front of it seems counter-intuitive in terms of how language works.

> The whole point of this article is that we should separate the philosophical argument about "What is intelligence" from the work of automation with Neural Networks.

Which is meaningless and a non-goal to me. Just tell to your investors: "We're looking into making our cars more intelligent than before", that should be enough, no?

---

As for the economics and humans factor, I am not an optimist. It's very obvious that the capital holders want anything and everything AI-related to just replace human workers. But do they pay higher taxes to offset the higher unemployment rate that results from them firing thousands? They don't. Will they be mandated to provide money for the UBI funds in the future? So far it doesn't look like it.

But these are completely separate discussions indeed.