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I'm not following completely – surely there were people arguing that human flight was impossible, without strong reasons, and they were wrong? EDIT: missed "una

by 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.

ebbv 10y ago
> Based on everything else we know about the world now, we can "just" simulate a brain. Right, we think we can. But we don't know. I would argue that as we get closer to doing it, it will become a fact that we can (or we will find that we can't.) The fact that we still don't know for sure that we can (or cannot) is an indicator or a symptom of how far away we are from actually doing it.
- sambe 10y ago
  Are there examples of similar things where we have failed? i.e. nature gives us an example, we expend massive resources on it over a long period of time and cannot even make substantial progress? Probably I'd just say "tech in that area is only 10 years old" ;) Is the argument that we're still just hitting the low-hanging fruit of the technological age, so have false confidence in all the things we've equalled or beaten? I guess what I'm trying to get at is that most of the hardest things may not be logically possible (c.f. incompleteness theorem) or may not be physically possible (c.f. time travel). Having such clear physical possibility (and at multiple levels of complexity/advancement that only arose through selection and mutation) seems like strong evidence we will be able to do it eventually. A claim of impossibility is not illogical, but requires a stronger argument than "there's always a small chance".
notahacker 10y ago
> 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. In order to accurately simulate a particular brain, we'd need the technology to (i) accurately read all the information encoded in a particular brain, which everything we know about the brain suggests depends on getting a snapshot of the state of 85 billion neurons - and chemical interactions of those neurons' constituent proteins - at a particular millisecond in time. (ii) manipulate matter (or write matter-simulating code) such that we duplicate the state of that brain at that time, and probably the associated body too, with sufficient accuracy for the biochemical reactions (or digital emulation of the biochemical reactions) continue to produce a patterns resembles the thought processes of the emulated brain in their outputs. I don't think we need to invoke "magic" or vitalism or quantum brains to suggest that replicators capable of reproducing a particular state of a mind-bogglingly complex set of biochemical processes without significant information loss may not be a practical possibility in future. If anything, that sounds harder than achieving AGI or something approaching it via other means. As for the hype about general AI, we're responding to a thread musing on whether we'll get "close" to achieving it this year.
- sambe 10y ago
  My comment was in the context of GAI feasibility - possibly "the brain" would have been clearer than "a brain"? I didn't want to exclude non-human/non-mammalian brains, even if very similar. Simulating an existing, specific brain was not my intention: that seems like it would involve - as you say - a rather different and larger set of problems. If "all the hype" is a single HN question (not even an assertion) this counts as "over the top", then what would be an appropriate amount of discussion other than none at all?
  - notahacker 10y ago
    Simulating "the brain" for any non trivial brain[1] sounds even harder than simulating "a brain" (or creating AI in some non-brain-resembling form) since it would appear to imply identifying what the billions of constituent parts of a brain do well enough to generalise rather than merely copy patterns of brain function. Someone who probably isn't wholly uninformed asking if we're getting close to AGI this year is obviously a symptom rather than the cause of the hype. I mean, if we're working on Ray Kurzweil's Singularity is Near timescale, I'll be able to buy computational power equivalent to the human brain for $999 in three years' time. Still, Peter Diamindis did update that a couple of years ago by pushing that deadline out to 2025, so I guess at least I'll still be smarter than my next bottom-spec Macbook Air. [1]C elegans is pretty trivial

by sambe 10y ago

ebbv 10y ago

> Based on everything else we know about the world now, we can "just" simulate a brain. Right, we think we can. But we don't know. I would argue that as we get closer to doing it, it will become a fact that we can (or we will find that we can't.) The fact that we still don't know for sure that we can (or cannot) is an indicator or a symptom of how far away we are from actually doing it.

sambe 10y ago
Are there examples of similar things where we have failed? i.e. nature gives us an example, we expend massive resources on it over a long period of time and cannot even make substantial progress? Probably I'd just say "tech in that area is only 10 years old" ;) Is the argument that we're still just hitting the low-hanging fruit of the technological age, so have false confidence in all the things we've equalled or beaten? I guess what I'm trying to get at is that most of the hardest things may not be logically possible (c.f. incompleteness theorem) or may not be physically possible (c.f. time travel). Having such clear physical possibility (and at multiple levels of complexity/advancement that only arose through selection and mutation) seems like strong evidence we will be able to do it eventually. A claim of impossibility is not illogical, but requires a stronger argument than "there's always a small chance".

notahacker 10y ago

> 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. In order to accurately simulate a particular brain, we'd need the technology to (i) accurately read all the information encoded in a particular brain, which everything we know about the brain suggests depends on getting a snapshot of the state of 85 billion neurons - and chemical interactions of those neurons' constituent proteins - at a particular millisecond in time. (ii) manipulate matter (or write matter-simulating code) such that we duplicate the state of that brain at that time, and probably the associated body too, with sufficient accuracy for the biochemical reactions (or digital emulation of the biochemical reactions) continue to produce a patterns resembles the thought processes of the emulated brain in their outputs. I don't think we need to invoke "magic" or vitalism or quantum brains to suggest that replicators capable of reproducing a particular state of a mind-bogglingly complex set of biochemical processes without significant information loss may not be a practical possibility in future. If anything, that sounds harder than achieving AGI or something approaching it via other means. As for the hype about general AI, we're responding to a thread musing on whether we'll get "close" to achieving it this year.

sambe 10y ago
My comment was in the context of GAI feasibility - possibly "the brain" would have been clearer than "a brain"? I didn't want to exclude non-human/non-mammalian brains, even if very similar. Simulating an existing, specific brain was not my intention: that seems like it would involve - as you say - a rather different and larger set of problems. If "all the hype" is a single HN question (not even an assertion) this counts as "over the top", then what would be an appropriate amount of discussion other than none at all?
- notahacker 10y ago
  Simulating "the brain" for any non trivial brain[1] sounds even harder than simulating "a brain" (or creating AI in some non-brain-resembling form) since it would appear to imply identifying what the billions of constituent parts of a brain do well enough to generalise rather than merely copy patterns of brain function. Someone who probably isn't wholly uninformed asking if we're getting close to AGI this year is obviously a symptom rather than the cause of the hype. I mean, if we're working on Ray Kurzweil's Singularity is Near timescale, I'll be able to buy computational power equivalent to the human brain for $999 in three years' time. Still, Peter Diamindis did update that a couple of years ago by pushing that deadline out to 2025, so I guess at least I'll still be smarter than my next bottom-spec Macbook Air. [1]C elegans is pretty trivial