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You’re engaging in the time-honored tradition of dismissing progress with the term “just”. In the spirit of the article, I recommend you list and publish specif

You’re engaging in the time-honored tradition of dismissing progress with the term “just”. In the spirit of the article, I recommend you list and publish specific things that are too hard to achieve in the next five years. And then commit to not dismissing them post-hoc.

randomsearch 9y ago
This is a really difficult question to answer, because humans are super-clever. Whatever I pick, humans can quickly work out ways to game the metric. Turing invents the Turing test, and rather than go for an AGI, we take shortcuts to spit out convincing sentences. I think for a start you'd have to move away from things that can be gamed through statistics on large amounts of data. For example, show a child a single object, it can then recognise instances of that object all over the place with almost perfect recall (in the statistical sense). I think a computer would find this a hard task. Eliminate the advantage of big data. Or perhaps turn it around and put the emphasis on the machine to invent its own test for intelligence, allow the machine to come up with something that is convincing - make it argue for its own consciousness with an argument that it creates entirely for itself. But... I'm sure someone would find a way to game these examples. That's because humans are very smart. We've outsmarted Turing, so I don't hold much hope for my snap ideas in a five minute HN post :-/
- afthonos 9y ago
  A very interesting opinion combo: 1. Of course we should be prepared for the existential threats of AGI and ASI. 2. BUT the threat isn't imminent, so we should prepare later. The article (and I, mostly following its lead) is trying to encourage people to concretely answer the question "Okay, if not now, when? How will you know?" The problem is, most people aren't answering based on a model ("If we can solve problem X, we have 50% probability of AGI within X years.") Instead, they're using the difficulty heuristic, and the insufficiently-impressed heuristic. ("This is really hard right now, and I'm not impressed by what I've seen so far. Therefore, 100 years.") Your concerns about gaming are only a problem if the notes were to form the basis of an argument. I was suggesting you have them for yourself. (The act of publishing them is to encourage thinking about them now, not to be a gotcha later.) So you'll know what you mean, you won't be arguing with yourself over definitions, and you'll have thought hard about what looks dangerous to you. It's about being honest with yourself. Incidentally, the child example is misleading. Children spend literally years understanding things like depth perception, object permanence, etc. A child is already a highly trained agent; that training comes from daily interaction with the environment. You show a baby an unmoving object somewhere and to my knowledge there is no evidence that the baby will identify it as a separate object, much less recognize it in a different configuration.

randomsearch 9y ago

This is a really difficult question to answer, because humans are super-clever. Whatever I pick, humans can quickly work out ways to game the metric. Turing invents the Turing test, and rather than go for an AGI, we take shortcuts to spit out convincing sentences. I think for a start you'd have to move away from things that can be gamed through statistics on large amounts of data. For example, show a child a single object, it can then recognise instances of that object all over the place with almost perfect recall (in the statistical sense). I think a computer would find this a hard task. Eliminate the advantage of big data. Or perhaps turn it around and put the emphasis on the machine to invent its own test for intelligence, allow the machine to come up with something that is convincing - make it argue for its own consciousness with an argument that it creates entirely for itself. But... I'm sure someone would find a way to game these examples. That's because humans are very smart. We've outsmarted Turing, so I don't hold much hope for my snap ideas in a five minute HN post :-/

afthonos 9y ago
A very interesting opinion combo: 1. Of course we should be prepared for the existential threats of AGI and ASI. 2. BUT the threat isn't imminent, so we should prepare later. The article (and I, mostly following its lead) is trying to encourage people to concretely answer the question "Okay, if not now, when? How will you know?" The problem is, most people aren't answering based on a model ("If we can solve problem X, we have 50% probability of AGI within X years.") Instead, they're using the difficulty heuristic, and the insufficiently-impressed heuristic. ("This is really hard right now, and I'm not impressed by what I've seen so far. Therefore, 100 years.") Your concerns about gaming are only a problem if the notes were to form the basis of an argument. I was suggesting you have them for yourself. (The act of publishing them is to encourage thinking about them now, not to be a gotcha later.) So you'll know what you mean, you won't be arguing with yourself over definitions, and you'll have thought hard about what looks dangerous to you. It's about being honest with yourself. Incidentally, the child example is misleading. Children spend literally years understanding things like depth perception, object permanence, etc. A child is already a highly trained agent; that training comes from daily interaction with the environment. You show a baby an unmoving object somewhere and to my knowledge there is no evidence that the baby will identify it as a separate object, much less recognize it in a different configuration.