[steve1977]

> Maybe? I guess the better question is "when?"

And also at what cost and at what scale?

Will we be able to construct a supercomputer/datacenter that can match or exceed human intelligence? Possibly, even probaby.

But that would only be one instance of such an AGI then and it would be very expensive. IMHO it will take a long time to produce something like that as a commodity.

[red75prime]

So far it looks like AI will go the same road as other technological analogues of biological systems: not a self-contained unit (powered by currently technologically unreachable nano-mechanisms), but infrastructure that produces and maintains specialized units.

A tractor can't reproduce or repair itself, but it is better than a horse for farming. A self-driving car can't learn by itself, but a datacenter can use its data to train a new version of the car software. A humanoid robot by itself might not be flexible enough to count as AGI, but it can defer some problems to an exascale datacenter.

[pixl97]

Remember when a digital computer was not a device, but the entire floor of a building?

We will be able to construct a datacenter that exceeds human intelligence. And every year after that the size of the datacenter will get smaller for the same intelligence output. Eventually it will be a rack. Then a single server. Then something that is portable.

[steve1977]

> Remember when a digital computer was not a device, but the entire floor of a building?

Well I don't actually remember, because - depending on your definition of digital computer - it was around 80 years ago and I wasn't born yet. Which is kind of my point. Eventually, we might get there. And I can imagine that simpler AI systems will help to bootstrap more AI systems. But there is still a lot work to be done.