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Diogenes holds up a plucked chicken and proclaims "Behold, a man!" The hypesters are defining AGI (and even General Intelligence) like Plato defined man, "A fe

Diogenes holds up a plucked chicken and proclaims "Behold, a man!" The hypesters are defining AGI (and even General Intelligence) like Plato defined man, "A featherless biped". Either they know this, and they are hucksters, or their thinking is that shallow, and thus have nothing meaningful to say on the subject. General Intelligence has drivers, like curiosity, hope, a sense of fairness and injustice, and hunger, pain, pleasure, fear. And those things probably drove the refinement of intelligence, and as such, a housecat is less like a simple machine than a earthworm is. I think AGI is possible. Ultimately we're all machines, and I don't believe in a free will particle, but it is fairly obvious that an earthworm merely acts, while a cat acts interestingly, pulling in qualia unavailable to the worm. A worm is either active, or its dead, while my cat is clever enough to cut corners, to seek efficiency or pleasure, to be lazy. And humans are even better at it. Therein lies the rub: people working on AI don't seem to aiming for real intelligence, they want their convenient action machine, more like a worm than a cat. And the hypesters (and doomsters) hand wave and say "suddenly, it will become self aware and magically motivated." Suuuure. We're far more likely to be thoughtlessly killed off before a machine muses, "I think, therefore I am". Just because it "am", does not mean it thinks. To be intelligent is to be able to consider "why?" and "how?", to be able to fool one's self, even in the face of cold reality, to yell "no fair!", "I don't wanna", and to wonder how one might take short cuts or avoid tasks at all. Which is how and why we're chasing AI, but nobody is working out how to make it cry. The cart will be build, and the horse will suddenly appear, all haltered up? The rain will follow the plough? No. That's magical thinking. It took about a billion years of massive parallel organic computation for evolution to synthesize general intelligence, and we're to believe that some malfunctioning quine machine is going to break out, 75 years from the starting gate? Not by accident, and certainly not be design.

rawoke083600 5y ago
>General Intelligence has drivers, like curiosity, hope, a sense of fairness and injustice, and hunger, pain, pleasure, fear I love this thinking ! I've never thought about the "drivers" part of AGI, only ever thought about AGI as a "general-toolbox" to "solve-many-problems" One thing, I think did aid in development of our GI, was the fact we had a physical-body. Thus we had to "adapt and optimise" our GI with that constraint. I.e limited energy(sure computing-power could be a good proxy), but things like pain, survive-ability (poisons, being hunted) the first would help that we develop good visual pattern recognition to identity the poisonous snake, the latter(being hunted) that we had to evolve strategies that were in the realms of our bodies capabilities. Like running away, setting traps. BUT your body is not a static-container, your risk tolerance, capabilities, sensor systems changes as you ages. We have been building AI, with mostly a "non-corporeal" (i.e digital living space) in mind. At first we(ok me) thought it was an advantage since we could iterate faster and simulate many solutions, but now I think it might be a distinct disadvantage) to NOT include the "limitations" of a physical-container like a body-proxy (energy, vulnerability, limited-capabilities etc). If synergy is defined(and valued) as: The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, then maybe: The sum of our limitations(body) is of greater value to the overall-fitness of the organism to evolve intelligence ? YMMV :)
- Alan_Dillman 5y ago
  Exactly! You said it much more intelligently than I. Bodily go where no thinking machine has gone before. I remember thinking that entropy was bad when I first heard of the concept, but now I see life as tumbling down that slope, and making use of it. There is a synergy, as you say. We must land with a thud, but we're throwing off new forms of order. And that's not just a metaphor. Our intellect sharpens from birth as neurons get trimmed. Early in life we have fluid intelligence, later in life it's crystalized.
  - rawoke083600 5y ago
    >but now I see life as tumbling down that slope, and making use of it. There is a synergy, as you say. We must land with a thud, but we're throwing off new forms of order. Absolutely ! I think the saying "Necessity is the mother of all invention" is equally true for AGI :) > We must land with a thud: Can't help but wonder what would "Terry Pratchett's" thoughts be on the matter of intelligence, AGI and the origin of it ! That man had a unique way to look at the world and how it came to be.

rawoke083600 5y ago

>General Intelligence has drivers, like curiosity, hope, a sense of fairness and injustice, and hunger, pain, pleasure, fear I love this thinking ! I've never thought about the "drivers" part of AGI, only ever thought about AGI as a "general-toolbox" to "solve-many-problems" One thing, I think did aid in development of our GI, was the fact we had a physical-body. Thus we had to "adapt and optimise" our GI with that constraint. I.e limited energy(sure computing-power could be a good proxy), but things like pain, survive-ability (poisons, being hunted) the first would help that we develop good visual pattern recognition to identity the poisonous snake, the latter(being hunted) that we had to evolve strategies that were in the realms of our bodies capabilities. Like running away, setting traps. BUT your body is not a static-container, your risk tolerance, capabilities, sensor systems changes as you ages. We have been building AI, with mostly a "non-corporeal" (i.e digital living space) in mind. At first we(ok me) thought it was an advantage since we could iterate faster and simulate many solutions, but now I think it might be a distinct disadvantage) to NOT include the "limitations" of a physical-container like a body-proxy (energy, vulnerability, limited-capabilities etc). If synergy is defined(and valued) as: The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, then maybe: The sum of our limitations(body) is of greater value to the overall-fitness of the organism to evolve intelligence ? YMMV :)

Alan_Dillman 5y ago
Exactly! You said it much more intelligently than I. Bodily go where no thinking machine has gone before. I remember thinking that entropy was bad when I first heard of the concept, but now I see life as tumbling down that slope, and making use of it. There is a synergy, as you say. We must land with a thud, but we're throwing off new forms of order. And that's not just a metaphor. Our intellect sharpens from birth as neurons get trimmed. Early in life we have fluid intelligence, later in life it's crystalized.
- rawoke083600 5y ago
  >but now I see life as tumbling down that slope, and making use of it. There is a synergy, as you say. We must land with a thud, but we're throwing off new forms of order. Absolutely ! I think the saying "Necessity is the mother of all invention" is equally true for AGI :) > We must land with a thud: Can't help but wonder what would "Terry Pratchett's" thoughts be on the matter of intelligence, AGI and the origin of it ! That man had a unique way to look at the world and how it came to be.