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No. Stop reading reddit.com/r/futurology or that _awful_ article by waitbutwhy. Sure its a possibility but we're still making baby steps and tiny tools, pasti

No. Stop reading reddit.com/r/futurology or that _awful_ article by waitbutwhy. Sure its a possibility but we're still making baby steps and tiny tools, pastiches of intelligence as opposed to genuine intelligence or conscious. People who ask questions such as this often don't consider that it remains eminently possible that AGI is an impossibility for us to build. Also remember that anything an AI can do in the future a human + an AI can probably do better. Right now at least they're just tools we use and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

sambe 10y ago
What is the strongest argument for impossibility being a possibility?
- Quarrelsome 10y ago
  my point being that some people treat AGI as an inevitability and I think we're a fair way off a proof.
- arethuza 10y ago
  There are arguments, notably in "The Emperors New Mind", that assert that consciousness must be based on quantum mechanics in some ill-defined way and therefore that "algorithmic" computers can't therefore be conscious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind NB I didn't find this argument particularly strong, but it's a long time since I read it. The brain would have to be doing something spectacularly strange for it to be impossible for us to emulate in one way or another.
  - sambe 10y ago
    Out of context it indeed sounds rather fuzzy and weak. It's not even intuitive to me that consciousness comes first. Maybe they are even independent. I should probably read the book though. More generally, I don't think invoking quantum effects is an especially strong argument for impossibility in the general case. We already use quantum effects to some extent and make progress on quantum computation. It may be evidence of greater difficulty, but not of impossibility. Unless there is a strong case for some particular quantum effect being unharness-able.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - k_vi 10y ago
      "It may be evidence of greater difficulty, but not of impossibility"
  - adrianN 10y ago
    The argument is particularly poor considering that normal Turing machines can simulate quantum TMs (albeit with an exponential slowdown).
    - logophobia 10y ago
      At the scale an actual brain works, an actual exponential slowdown because of "quantum brains" would make the problem flat-out impossible. An actual human brain has an average of 100 billion neurons. To simulate an actual brain, you'd get an 'additional' slowdown of 2^100,000,000,000. The problem would go from possible in maybe 20-50 years to impossible unless we manage invent some sort of quantum/neural computer. Not that quantum mechanisms in brains are likely, so probably not an issue.
  - m-i-l 10y ago
    Pretty much everyone I've talked to who knows about AI (including a former Penrose student who was a classmate on my postgrad AI degree) strongly refute the claims in The Emperor's New Mind. I believe Penrose was at Oxford when he wrote it (in 1989), in which case he would surely have come across David Deutsch's universal quantum computer (from 1985).
- baboun 10y ago
  It's that possibility is not an impossibility.
- ebbv 10y ago
  That's approaching it from the wrong angle. That's like saying "What's the proof that unaided human flight is not possible?" (Edit: Note the unaided part. As without a plane or something. I guess I should have chosen something less easy to confuse like walking through walls or something.) The issue is that we do not have proof that general AI is possible. We conjecture that it is based on the assumption that our brains could be simulated by enough artificial neurons, (or some other method) but we don't know that for a fact. And so far we can't even fully simulate a mouse brain, let alone a human brain. We can make something that imitates aspects of mouse behavior, but we can't actually simulate a mouse brain. All the hype around General AI being "just over the horizon" right now is just like it was back in the 80s (or the 60s.) It's a bit over the top. If you look at it from a critical perspective there isn't a lot of solid reason to be so bullish.
  - zamalek 10y ago
    Flight is where one argument for the possibility of general AI comes from: the assumption is that we can do whatever nature has demonstrated to us. This argument makes the process seem trivial, though. Rephrasing it to use fusion as the example instead of flight is more realistic. Even so, we know how fusion works and have no idea about intelligence. It's a very long way off.
  - sambe 10y ago
    I'm not following completely – surely there were people arguing that human flight was impossible, without strong reasons, and they were wrong? EDIT: missed "unaided". I think you can make a strong case for that impossibility that isn't being made against GAI. Based on everything else we know about the world now, we can "just" simulate a brain. "Just" may mean "after another 200 years of work", of course. The alternative is "the brain is magical somehow", which is not a strong argument on its own – we don't often end up finding magic to be the answer. Where do you see hype about General AI being just over the horizon? Most popular discussion I read is about two things: a) the replacement of human work by increasingly-improved specific AI; b) the possibility of rapid advancement of general AI once invented. I haven't seen anyone say b) is imminent – only that it is likely to be fast/dangerous when it happens.
- simonh 10y ago
  I think it's entirely possible it's too complex a problem for us to solve. After all, if you think about it by definition a more intelligent being than us would be able to solve problems we can't. Maybe this is one of those, so there might not be any way for us to bootstrap to a general AI. I don't really buy that argument (even though it's mine, I've not seen anyone else argue this). We design systems so complex and built from learning algorithms and neural nets such that ultimately we don't actually know precisely how they are doing what they do. We could brute force it by evolving a solution maybe. But it's at least plausible that we won't be able to engineer and design an AI architecturally because we're not up to the task.
Mister_Y 10y ago
Thanks for your answer, I think on the same line as you, but I was here with a colleague that believes it's soon possible so we wanted to check what the community feels like it's gonna happen
- Quarrelsome 10y ago
  Sorry to be harsh, I just tend to be harsh as a push-back to the seemingly exceptionally popular belief that AGI is inevitable. Its just lots of that stuff from the waitbutwhy article really rankles me: e.g. having an x-axis for "human advancement" and then only valuing recent developments while under valuing things like writing or the printing press or treating intelligence as an integer value where an AGI can keep multiplying its intelligence and become completely unassailable by humans. There's a lot of bollocks intertwined with people that hope for AGI and it upsets me. I feel like it devalues and undermines the current progress that is being made.
  - Mister_Y 10y ago
    I think you have the right to be harsh when you see all these posts by people who don't have a strong knowledge on AI and you strongly believe in what you're saying and you have expertise in it. As I said I'm on your way of thinking! Thanks again for your answer
  - arethuza 10y ago
    I've been reading breathless articles explaining that AGI is going to happen "real soon now" since the early 1980s - to a certain extent I actually believed this and this is what motivated me to get into AI research in the late 80s and early 1990s, which was pretty close to the point where "good old fashioned AI" was dying out. My own view is that it's highly likely that we'll have something like AGI - but we might also find that it's not actually that useful, or really necessary, and anyway I suspect it will take a long time to get there (I'd guess 100-200 years).
  - notahacker 10y ago
    Assuming it's this one: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu... I don't think the waitbutwhy article rankles so much as makes me scratch my head and think "is this intentional parody?" I'm particularly fond of the Back to the Future example of how rapidly and unpredictably technological progress was accelerating, which completely ignored the fact that Back to the Future had a sequel whose tongue-in-cheek version of 2015 based entirely on 1980s culture is pretty much dead on, bar the hovering/flying stuff we haven't got around to inventing yet.
nolemurs 10y ago
> People who ask questions such as this often don't consider that it remains eminently possible that AGI is an impossibility for us to build. I 100% agree that AGI is probably a long ways off barring some surprise (not that such a surprise is impossible, but definitely not expected). That said, the fact that the human brain works means that brains can be made. Unless you think there's something literally magical going on in the brain, then the brain is just a physical thing, and other physical things with similar behavior can be constructed. Maybe we won't be able to do it with current computer hardware, but some day we'll manage it. I've never heard an argument that AGI was impossible that didn't basically boil down to "No, we're special, and you can't prove otherwise." Not a very convincing argument.
- Quarrelsome 10y ago
  > "No, we're special, and you can't prove otherwise." More the opposite. What makes you assume we're smart enough to fully understand how it is that we work and reproduce it non-biologically? My main issue is around some people treating it as an inevitability as opposed to a possibility. I mean I'm all for humans performing crazy engineering feats but we have to ask ourselves if some feats are beyond us. Could we build a star? Would we build a star? Will we build one 2017? You get me?
  - dasboth 10y ago
    Is it not possible that we could simulate a star though? Not in 2017, but at some point?
    - Quarrelsome 10y ago
      sure but we haven't even started to define what constitutes a valid simulation. That's half of the point here, we're trying to recreate something that we don't know.
      - dasboth 10y ago
        That's true. The big if is whether we can ever have the resources to fully simulate the human brain. If we ever get close to that, then we can worry about the "intelligence explosion" and so on. It feels very possible that we'd work out how the human brain works at some point, though.
Balgair 10y ago
I agree but I am more pessimistic about it. There are 2 inter-related factors that will stop AGI from occurring at the level we all dream of: Competition and Specialization. An AGI is not something that will occur in a vacuum. It will be developed and created in the world we all are living in. The one with dirt and mortgages and greedy people. More importantly, it will come about in a world where half of the people are dumber than average. The AGI does not need to solve the Riemann-Zeta hypothesis. It just needs to afford to have it's owners/creators bills paid and maybe make some on the side for profit. That is all that it needs to do. Yes, it can do more, a lot more, but it only needs to be a little bit smarter than the average human so that it's owners can scam us by proxy. Look at the Ashley Madison hack. You had real human men paying real world dollars to suss out if they were talking to a bot or not. That's all that AGI really needs to do to sustain itself over a short time interval. How long a time interval do you want it to go for will then add the complexity and get it to 'human' levels of general intelligence as it tries to deal with rarer and less common failure modes (like itself getting hacked in the Ashley Madison case). AGIs will have to fork out of the super-targeted AIs that we now have that make monetary sense. That will take a lot of time and money to do this, and the returns on the investments are uncertain to me.
paki123 10y ago
Where could someone go and read up on the latest progress on AI that's not marred by hype and marketing? Is this something that I could only truly get by messaging university professors?

sambe 10y ago

What is the strongest argument for impossibility being a possibility?

Quarrelsome 10y ago
my point being that some people treat AGI as an inevitability and I think we're a fair way off a proof.
arethuza 10y ago
There are arguments, notably in "The Emperors New Mind", that assert that consciousness must be based on quantum mechanics in some ill-defined way and therefore that "algorithmic" computers can't therefore be conscious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind NB I didn't find this argument particularly strong, but it's a long time since I read it. The brain would have to be doing something spectacularly strange for it to be impossible for us to emulate in one way or another.
- sambe 10y ago
  Out of context it indeed sounds rather fuzzy and weak. It's not even intuitive to me that consciousness comes first. Maybe they are even independent. I should probably read the book though. More generally, I don't think invoking quantum effects is an especially strong argument for impossibility in the general case. We already use quantum effects to some extent and make progress on quantum computation. It may be evidence of greater difficulty, but not of impossibility. Unless there is a strong case for some particular quantum effect being unharness-able.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - k_vi 10y ago
    "It may be evidence of greater difficulty, but not of impossibility"
- adrianN 10y ago
  The argument is particularly poor considering that normal Turing machines can simulate quantum TMs (albeit with an exponential slowdown).
  - logophobia 10y ago
    At the scale an actual brain works, an actual exponential slowdown because of "quantum brains" would make the problem flat-out impossible. An actual human brain has an average of 100 billion neurons. To simulate an actual brain, you'd get an 'additional' slowdown of 2^100,000,000,000. The problem would go from possible in maybe 20-50 years to impossible unless we manage invent some sort of quantum/neural computer. Not that quantum mechanisms in brains are likely, so probably not an issue.
- m-i-l 10y ago
  Pretty much everyone I've talked to who knows about AI (including a former Penrose student who was a classmate on my postgrad AI degree) strongly refute the claims in The Emperor's New Mind. I believe Penrose was at Oxford when he wrote it (in 1989), in which case he would surely have come across David Deutsch's universal quantum computer (from 1985).
baboun 10y ago
It's that possibility is not an impossibility.
ebbv 10y ago
That's approaching it from the wrong angle. That's like saying "What's the proof that unaided human flight is not possible?" (Edit: Note the unaided part. As without a plane or something. I guess I should have chosen something less easy to confuse like walking through walls or something.) The issue is that we do not have proof that general AI is possible. We conjecture that it is based on the assumption that our brains could be simulated by enough artificial neurons, (or some other method) but we don't know that for a fact. And so far we can't even fully simulate a mouse brain, let alone a human brain. We can make something that imitates aspects of mouse behavior, but we can't actually simulate a mouse brain. All the hype around General AI being "just over the horizon" right now is just like it was back in the 80s (or the 60s.) It's a bit over the top. If you look at it from a critical perspective there isn't a lot of solid reason to be so bullish.
- zamalek 10y ago
  Flight is where one argument for the possibility of general AI comes from: the assumption is that we can do whatever nature has demonstrated to us. This argument makes the process seem trivial, though. Rephrasing it to use fusion as the example instead of flight is more realistic. Even so, we know how fusion works and have no idea about intelligence. It's a very long way off.
- sambe 10y ago
  I'm not following completely – surely there were people arguing that human flight was impossible, without strong reasons, and they were wrong? EDIT: missed "unaided". I think you can make a strong case for that impossibility that isn't being made against GAI. Based on everything else we know about the world now, we can "just" simulate a brain. "Just" may mean "after another 200 years of work", of course. The alternative is "the brain is magical somehow", which is not a strong argument on its own – we don't often end up finding magic to be the answer. Where do you see hype about General AI being just over the horizon? Most popular discussion I read is about two things: a) the replacement of human work by increasingly-improved specific AI; b) the possibility of rapid advancement of general AI once invented. I haven't seen anyone say b) is imminent – only that it is likely to be fast/dangerous when it happens.
simonh 10y ago
I think it's entirely possible it's too complex a problem for us to solve. After all, if you think about it by definition a more intelligent being than us would be able to solve problems we can't. Maybe this is one of those, so there might not be any way for us to bootstrap to a general AI. I don't really buy that argument (even though it's mine, I've not seen anyone else argue this). We design systems so complex and built from learning algorithms and neural nets such that ultimately we don't actually know precisely how they are doing what they do. We could brute force it by evolving a solution maybe. But it's at least plausible that we won't be able to engineer and design an AI architecturally because we're not up to the task.

Mister_Y 10y ago

Thanks for your answer, I think on the same line as you, but I was here with a colleague that believes it's soon possible so we wanted to check what the community feels like it's gonna happen

Quarrelsome 10y ago
Sorry to be harsh, I just tend to be harsh as a push-back to the seemingly exceptionally popular belief that AGI is inevitable. Its just lots of that stuff from the waitbutwhy article really rankles me: e.g. having an x-axis for "human advancement" and then only valuing recent developments while under valuing things like writing or the printing press or treating intelligence as an integer value where an AGI can keep multiplying its intelligence and become completely unassailable by humans. There's a lot of bollocks intertwined with people that hope for AGI and it upsets me. I feel like it devalues and undermines the current progress that is being made.
- Mister_Y 10y ago
  I think you have the right to be harsh when you see all these posts by people who don't have a strong knowledge on AI and you strongly believe in what you're saying and you have expertise in it. As I said I'm on your way of thinking! Thanks again for your answer
- arethuza 10y ago
  I've been reading breathless articles explaining that AGI is going to happen "real soon now" since the early 1980s - to a certain extent I actually believed this and this is what motivated me to get into AI research in the late 80s and early 1990s, which was pretty close to the point where "good old fashioned AI" was dying out. My own view is that it's highly likely that we'll have something like AGI - but we might also find that it's not actually that useful, or really necessary, and anyway I suspect it will take a long time to get there (I'd guess 100-200 years).
- notahacker 10y ago
  Assuming it's this one: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu... I don't think the waitbutwhy article rankles so much as makes me scratch my head and think "is this intentional parody?" I'm particularly fond of the Back to the Future example of how rapidly and unpredictably technological progress was accelerating, which completely ignored the fact that Back to the Future had a sequel whose tongue-in-cheek version of 2015 based entirely on 1980s culture is pretty much dead on, bar the hovering/flying stuff we haven't got around to inventing yet.

nolemurs 10y ago

> People who ask questions such as this often don't consider that it remains eminently possible that AGI is an impossibility for us to build. I 100% agree that AGI is probably a long ways off barring some surprise (not that such a surprise is impossible, but definitely not expected). That said, the fact that the human brain works means that brains can be made. Unless you think there's something literally magical going on in the brain, then the brain is just a physical thing, and other physical things with similar behavior can be constructed. Maybe we won't be able to do it with current computer hardware, but some day we'll manage it. I've never heard an argument that AGI was impossible that didn't basically boil down to "No, we're special, and you can't prove otherwise." Not a very convincing argument.

Quarrelsome 10y ago
> "No, we're special, and you can't prove otherwise." More the opposite. What makes you assume we're smart enough to fully understand how it is that we work and reproduce it non-biologically? My main issue is around some people treating it as an inevitability as opposed to a possibility. I mean I'm all for humans performing crazy engineering feats but we have to ask ourselves if some feats are beyond us. Could we build a star? Would we build a star? Will we build one 2017? You get me?
- dasboth 10y ago
  Is it not possible that we could simulate a star though? Not in 2017, but at some point?
  - Quarrelsome 10y ago
    sure but we haven't even started to define what constitutes a valid simulation. That's half of the point here, we're trying to recreate something that we don't know.
    - dasboth 10y ago
      That's true. The big if is whether we can ever have the resources to fully simulate the human brain. If we ever get close to that, then we can worry about the "intelligence explosion" and so on. It feels very possible that we'd work out how the human brain works at some point, though.

Balgair 10y ago

I agree but I am more pessimistic about it. There are 2 inter-related factors that will stop AGI from occurring at the level we all dream of: Competition and Specialization. An AGI is not something that will occur in a vacuum. It will be developed and created in the world we all are living in. The one with dirt and mortgages and greedy people. More importantly, it will come about in a world where half of the people are dumber than average. The AGI does not need to solve the Riemann-Zeta hypothesis. It just needs to afford to have it's owners/creators bills paid and maybe make some on the side for profit. That is all that it needs to do. Yes, it can do more, a lot more, but it only needs to be a little bit smarter than the average human so that it's owners can scam us by proxy. Look at the Ashley Madison hack. You had real human men paying real world dollars to suss out if they were talking to a bot or not. That's all that AGI really needs to do to sustain itself over a short time interval. How long a time interval do you want it to go for will then add the complexity and get it to 'human' levels of general intelligence as it tries to deal with rarer and less common failure modes (like itself getting hacked in the Ashley Madison case). AGIs will have to fork out of the super-targeted AIs that we now have that make monetary sense. That will take a lot of time and money to do this, and the returns on the investments are uncertain to me.

paki123 10y ago

Where could someone go and read up on the latest progress on AI that's not marred by hype and marketing? Is this something that I could only truly get by messaging university professors?