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"The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim." Edsger Dijkstra I suspect you're right. I bel

"The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim." Edsger Dijkstra I suspect you're right. I believe there's nothing that can be formally defined that is impossible for an AI to do and possible for a person to do. Furthermore, AGI is not formally defined or defined tightly enough to be a target we can actually hit. It's a hand wavy way of saying "AI as smart as a person". The "Anti AGI" crowd moves the goalposts every time a huge breakthrough occurs but as long as there is a goalpost (formal definition) to hit AI will surely hit it. The "Pro AGI" crowd is also guilty of not being precise with exactly what AGI is. I also fundamentally believe the whole concept of AGI is flawed and biased to what people perceive as intelligence rather than intelligence itself. This is partially why there is so much effort and hoopla around things like GPT-3, (or in the past the Turing test). These programs which demonstrate something like human intelligence which is difficult to nail down in terms of a formal definition of ability. Both groups point at it and claim victory or point at a flaw. AI progresses inexorably regardless of what the hell AGI even means.

LesZedCB 6y ago
> biased to what people perceive as intelligence rather than intelligence itself this statement is only reifying the presupposition that "intelligence" as a property of the universe, any more than something such as "crime" or "mental illness" is a fundamental property and not emergent from culture values and norms. the reason why "AI conservatives" keep moving the goalposts is because it is a myth in the collective consciousness of people who believe that intelligence is fundamentally not something a silicon substrate machine could possess. i think breaking out of the dichotomy of intelligent or unintelligent is necessary for the discussion. a "human level intelligence" is not real, so whatever does "human level intelligence" things is human level intelligence. if it quacks like a duck... it even may be imbued with "subjectivity" if you ask me.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  A 'human level intelligence' simply means something that is roughly capable of doing the same things as a human, all at the same time, at least at a pure cognitive level (Stephen Hawking was not physically able to make fire, but that does not disqualify him from being considered a human-level intelligence). At the very least, this involves understanding how to interact with the world, understanding basic physics, being able to create tools to interact with the world, and being able to communicate at least with others of your 'species' about ANY knowledge you have gained (so a crow isn't a human level intelligence, because it is unable to communicate more than a handful of kinds of information). For a machine without a physical realization, this becomes trickier to manage, anf often must rely on also specifically learning human language so that it can be probed aboht its understanding of the world. But if we built a robot that could walk around, gather food, build some tools or shelter, and teach another robot what it discovered, I think most people would be happy to call that AGI, even if it couldn't read Shakespeare and weep.
tsimionescu 6y ago
I don't think AGI has ever moved in its goalposts, defined rather well by the Turing test. AGI must be general, capable of reasoning at least as well as a human in any domain of inquiry, at the same time. Showing more than human reasoning in certain domains is trivial, and has been happening since at least Babbage's difference engine. However, while AI has been overtaking human reasoning on many specific problems, we are still very far from any kind of general intelligence that could conduct itself in the world or in open-ended conversation with anything approaching human (or basically any multicellular organism) intelligence. Furthermore, it remains obvious that even our best specific models require vastly more training (number of examples + time) and energy than a human or animal to reach similar performance, wherever comparable. This may be due to the 'hidden' learning that has been happening in the millions of years of evolution that are encoded in any living being today, but it may also be that we are missing some fundamental advancements in the act of learning itself
- pygy_ 6y ago
  The Turing is not about intelligence, it's about being able to credibly ape humans. You don't need to be able to credibly describe what it's like to fall from a bike or to fall in love in order to be intelligent... But you have to in order to pass a Turing test. The first chat bots that I remember claiming to have passed the Turing test were actually credibly dumb (mimicking a teenage, non-native English speaker with deliberate grammar mistakes to paper over misunderstandings).
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    The Turing test ('the imitation game') was designed as an objective way to answer the question 'can this machine think'. The fact that it can be gamed by feigning stupidity or bad language skills is a weakness of the specifics of the test perhaps, but not the idea in principle. Instead, the idea is to have an open-ended conversation with the machine, to explore its ability to display general human-level intelligence. It's true that intelligence in general is far more broad (after all, an ant colony would not even begin to pass the Turing test, but it still possesses general intelligence in a way that no AI does yet. Building an artificial ant colony (or even 1 artificial ant that lives in a real colony) with all of the problem-solving abilities of a real one would still be a monumental achievement in AI. I think there is even hope that if we could do that, advancing to human level intelligence and beyond would be just around the corner, though that remains to be seen.

LesZedCB 6y ago

> biased to what people perceive as intelligence rather than intelligence itself this statement is only reifying the presupposition that "intelligence" as a property of the universe, any more than something such as "crime" or "mental illness" is a fundamental property and not emergent from culture values and norms. the reason why "AI conservatives" keep moving the goalposts is because it is a myth in the collective consciousness of people who believe that intelligence is fundamentally not something a silicon substrate machine could possess. i think breaking out of the dichotomy of intelligent or unintelligent is necessary for the discussion. a "human level intelligence" is not real, so whatever does "human level intelligence" things is human level intelligence. if it quacks like a duck... it even may be imbued with "subjectivity" if you ask me.

tsimionescu 6y ago
A 'human level intelligence' simply means something that is roughly capable of doing the same things as a human, all at the same time, at least at a pure cognitive level (Stephen Hawking was not physically able to make fire, but that does not disqualify him from being considered a human-level intelligence). At the very least, this involves understanding how to interact with the world, understanding basic physics, being able to create tools to interact with the world, and being able to communicate at least with others of your 'species' about ANY knowledge you have gained (so a crow isn't a human level intelligence, because it is unable to communicate more than a handful of kinds of information). For a machine without a physical realization, this becomes trickier to manage, anf often must rely on also specifically learning human language so that it can be probed aboht its understanding of the world. But if we built a robot that could walk around, gather food, build some tools or shelter, and teach another robot what it discovered, I think most people would be happy to call that AGI, even if it couldn't read Shakespeare and weep.

tsimionescu 6y ago

I don't think AGI has ever moved in its goalposts, defined rather well by the Turing test. AGI must be general, capable of reasoning at least as well as a human in any domain of inquiry, at the same time. Showing more than human reasoning in certain domains is trivial, and has been happening since at least Babbage's difference engine. However, while AI has been overtaking human reasoning on many specific problems, we are still very far from any kind of general intelligence that could conduct itself in the world or in open-ended conversation with anything approaching human (or basically any multicellular organism) intelligence. Furthermore, it remains obvious that even our best specific models require vastly more training (number of examples + time) and energy than a human or animal to reach similar performance, wherever comparable. This may be due to the 'hidden' learning that has been happening in the millions of years of evolution that are encoded in any living being today, but it may also be that we are missing some fundamental advancements in the act of learning itself

pygy_ 6y ago
The Turing is not about intelligence, it's about being able to credibly ape humans. You don't need to be able to credibly describe what it's like to fall from a bike or to fall in love in order to be intelligent... But you have to in order to pass a Turing test. The first chat bots that I remember claiming to have passed the Turing test were actually credibly dumb (mimicking a teenage, non-native English speaker with deliberate grammar mistakes to paper over misunderstandings).
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  The Turing test ('the imitation game') was designed as an objective way to answer the question 'can this machine think'. The fact that it can be gamed by feigning stupidity or bad language skills is a weakness of the specifics of the test perhaps, but not the idea in principle. Instead, the idea is to have an open-ended conversation with the machine, to explore its ability to display general human-level intelligence. It's true that intelligence in general is far more broad (after all, an ant colony would not even begin to pass the Turing test, but it still possesses general intelligence in a way that no AI does yet. Building an artificial ant colony (or even 1 artificial ant that lives in a real colony) with all of the problem-solving abilities of a real one would still be a monumental achievement in AI. I think there is even hope that if we could do that, advancing to human level intelligence and beyond would be just around the corner, though that remains to be seen.