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For #2 you've touched on the "AI Effect"[0] or moving goal posts. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

daveguy 10y ago
At some point a consensus of AI researchers will decide that we have a generally intelligent system (able to adapt and learn many tasks, pass a legitimate turing test, etc). Currently there are zero AI researchers that would claim such a thing even with our current breakthroughs in specialized tasks. The moving goalpost has been less an issue of "what is AI" and more an issue of "what are difficult task at the edge of AI research". People with passing interest (even most programmers) don't distinguish between the two. Of course "difficult tasks in AI research" is a moving goalpost and it will be moving until we achieve general intelligence and beyond. This is a requirement for progress in AI research. If those goalposts stop moving before we have a general intelligence then something is wrong in the field. When researchers (not the general public) start arguing whether the goalposts should be general intelligence or super intelligence that is when we know we have traditional AI. When we try to figure out how to get adult human level intelligence to take hours or days to train on the top supercomputers rather than months or years -- that is when we have AI. Even then, if the training part requires that much computational intensity, how many top supercomputers are going to be dedicated to having a single human level intelligence? You could train current algorithms used in AI research for decades and have nothing resembling general human intelligence.
- jimfleming 10y ago
  I agree, but I guess my point (in this comment and others) would be that we should stop thinking of intelligence, consciousness, free-will and other attributes as a hard line but rather gradients or quantities.

daveguy 10y ago

At some point a consensus of AI researchers will decide that we have a generally intelligent system (able to adapt and learn many tasks, pass a legitimate turing test, etc). Currently there are zero AI researchers that would claim such a thing even with our current breakthroughs in specialized tasks. The moving goalpost has been less an issue of "what is AI" and more an issue of "what are difficult task at the edge of AI research". People with passing interest (even most programmers) don't distinguish between the two. Of course "difficult tasks in AI research" is a moving goalpost and it will be moving until we achieve general intelligence and beyond. This is a requirement for progress in AI research. If those goalposts stop moving before we have a general intelligence then something is wrong in the field. When researchers (not the general public) start arguing whether the goalposts should be general intelligence or super intelligence that is when we know we have traditional AI. When we try to figure out how to get adult human level intelligence to take hours or days to train on the top supercomputers rather than months or years -- that is when we have AI. Even then, if the training part requires that much computational intensity, how many top supercomputers are going to be dedicated to having a single human level intelligence? You could train current algorithms used in AI research for decades and have nothing resembling general human intelligence.

jimfleming 10y ago
I agree, but I guess my point (in this comment and others) would be that we should stop thinking of intelligence, consciousness, free-will and other attributes as a hard line but rather gradients or quantities.