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Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized (2020)

• kelseyfrog 4y ago
  We're going to keep having these even after computers pass the Turing test aren't we?
  • mdp2021 4y ago
    The "Turing test" per se is not a good test. (As it increasingly appears. Unless one lives in the "outside" state the writer of the submitted page theorizes)
    • mindcrime 4y ago
      I've come to strongly dislike the idea of the "Turing Test" and agree that it's not a good test. IMO, all it's really doing is testing our ability to create a computer than can lie effectively. That does not seem to me to be the most useful thing to focus on.
      • mdp2021 4y ago
        > than can lie effectively Sure. And of course, do not forget that the testers are known for a disposition of potentially being fooled - and that we are still, collectively, societally, civilization-wise, generally unable to do proper selection.
  • Oarch 4y ago
    Good thing we still have Voigt-Kampf in our back pockets.
    • mindcrime 4y ago
      The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.
      • mdp2021 4y ago
        «Would the tortoise be you, Mr. Holden? I approve of that.» Which is not in the script, unfortunately. Had not to be, because it was just a construed example of a successful Turing test. If not for the turn of events that a human may be made upset by the assumptions, but the mockery test was stated as intended to «provoke an emotional response», and juicily the invented machine, having failed all "common sense" reactions, responds exactly like a proper human to that.
• mdp2021 4y ago
  > the aim of developing artificial intelligence that is in principle identical to human intelligence, called strong AI No. Intelligence is not «identical to human intelligence». This already reveals a very sloppy approach. > cannot be realized because computers are not in the world This just looks like a bad joke.
  • buildbot 4y ago
    Computers actually exist outside of spacetime! Didn’t you know? Reading the abstract made me very annoyed, there’s like 4 separate completely false claims.
    • ogogmad 4y ago
      > there’s like 4 separate completely false claims. If that's the case, can we just flag it for bullshit?
      • bryanrasmussen 4y ago
        not if you're an AI.
  • bena 4y ago
    I think the issue they're trying to articulate is that our intelligence isn't just contained in the brain. We have miles of nerves spread throughout our body. Each nerve is capable of sending a ton of data back to our central processor, the brain. We don't do that for computers. Part of it is cost. Imagine attaching millions of thermometers, barometers, wind gauges, etc all over a computer/robot. They also have very limited interaction with the physical world. Also partly by design. They exist solely as the hypothetical "brain in a jar". Now, whether or not you need that to have human-level intelligence/consciousness/sentience/whatever, that's a different story. But that's the gist I get. "The constant feed of stimulus is somehow integral to achieving intelligence."
    • SoftTalker 4y ago
• demarq 4y ago
  On a Meta note, what if we don't have general intelligence. What if the variety of problems we are able to solve are finite, and that we have evolved to be able to solve each one of them. We therefore have this illusion that our intelligence can be applied to "new" situations, when in fact the situation was never that new to begin with?
  • mdp2021 4y ago
    That would not change the fact that humanity an be collectively weak (or individually costly) in solving known problems, hence a need for Intelligence development.
  • zmgsabst 4y ago
    Isn’t that what complexity theory is about? …how similar classes of problems are to things we know how to do?
  • wizofaus 4y ago
    There's certainly no reason to suppose that natural selection could be capable of producing truly general intelligence. And I'm a fan of the theory that says our brains are too simple to be able to truly understand how our own brains work. And no matter how increasingly complex our brains became, that would probably always be true. But it is remarkable how much we do seem to be capable of - certainly far more than was ever necessary for us to compete against other species for survival.
  • mindcrime 4y ago
    This is another one of those things that I would argue is a continuum, not a binary dichotomy. I think it's totally reasonable to posit that human intelligence is not "fully general". But I would have a hard time with suggesting that we don't possess a certain measure of "generality" in our intelligence. I mean, humans have dealt with new situations before and apparently thrived despite that. Imagine the first human to live in an environment near an active volcano and who witnessed a volcanic eruption. Or just think in terms of new technological innovations - our intelligence is "general enough" to learn to use telephones, drive cars, do abstract math, etc. All things that the stereotypical "caveman proto-human" did not have to deal with and which would have been new to somebody at some point.
• ogogmad 4y ago
  These articles keep showing up here. This debate has been rehashed over and over again. These articles are never particularly well-argued or interesting. I've flagged it.
  • krisoft 4y ago
    I think the interesting question here is how did this get published? It is so badly argued, so wishy-washy I would mark it down even as a high-school report. (Like have the author heard about robots? Did they read anything written about embodiment?) The other question would be: When I say the above, do the author of the article and the people who supported its publication see that as a sign that the AI field doesn’t want to hear their “truth”?
• alanbernstein 4y ago
  The paper seems to depend on this claim: > One of the leading critics was the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, who argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all. So, I don't understand how the argument is at all credible. We have computers that do this. They are called robots. It may be the case that the best route to AGI is to put a robot through childhood. It would need an advanced enough learning framework first. All ML research is currently hashing out what that might be.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    Can you show me a robot that grows incrementally?
    • brianwawok 4y ago
      AlphaGo?
      • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        Not a robot.
    • l33t2328 4y ago
      Do you mean in size? Surely you don’t think changing size has much to do with what makes humans intelligent.
      • wizofaus 4y ago
        Actually that's pretty much exactly the theory I've seen suggested a few times, Harold Klawans is a big believer for a start. He makes a good case in his books that human intelligence is very much the result of the fact that much of our brain growth occurs post-birth as our bodies increase in size, which makes us quite different from most other species. It's not just that our brains absorb knowledge as we grow into adults, but transform themselves radically in order to gain particular skills (particularly language processing).
• labrador 4y ago
  The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules (Crick, 1994, p. 3) I'd be astonished if that statement were correct. For it to be a viable hypothesis it must at least begin to explain how the memories of my school graduation and the joy I felt are stored in the brain. But scientists like John Searle are dismissive of "wild ideas" and say consciousness is just a biological process in the brain, as he does at the beginning of this lecture [1]. Ok, I guess that settles it. I'm going to assume AGI means human-like general intelligence, but emotional intelligence plays a large role in human intelligence. I'm surprised this isn't talked about more since we were all raised on Star Trek's Spock emotionless self and especially Data, trying to find the emotion chip so he can finally be human. [1] Consciousness as a Problem in Philosophy & Neurobiology (John Searle) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot4z1UrPvZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot4z1UrPvZY
  • TheDudeMan 4y ago
    > I'd be astonished if that statement were correct. What is the alternative to that statement?
    • labrador 4y ago
      Nikola Tesla said it best: "My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration" Our consciousness could be "in the cloud" On several occasions I've had people say they can prove consciousness is in the brain by saying that removing such and such part of the brain changes a person's emotions and thoughts. My reply is always the same "If I removed parts from a radio receiver it wouldn't be able to pick up the signal as well" The notion that consciousness is in the cloud is at least as plausible that consciousness resides wholly in the brain
      • highspeedbus 4y ago
        Does changing a resistor value alters what words the speaker is saying?
• psyc 4y ago
  "Forever. Ha. In my experience it's a little bit longer than most people expect." Westworld
• tasuki 4y ago
  > one chief characteristics of human intelligence is its generality Citation needed. This sounds exactly like something a human would claim! Our intelligence is very much tailored to the environment we find ourselves in. The specific/general intelligence dichotomy is false.
• baal80spam 4y ago
  Is this about AGI? Carmack is on it, so I would bet he succeeds. He speaks of this quite a lot in the last Lex Fridman podcast (linked on HN yesterday).
  • bena 4y ago
    He speaks quite a lot in general in that podcast (5 hours).
• mindcrime 4y ago
  Pretty sure I read this same article a while back, and came away thinking it was pretty crap, and presented no substantive arguments. I can't be bothered to re-read the whole thing right now, but it seems to jump right out of the gate with what I would consider some shaky assumptions, like the idea that AGI is necessarily "human like". I know I've beat this dead horse numerous times, but I do think it's critical to make the distinction between "human level" intelligence and "human like" intelligence. And I think we can have intelligence that is "human level", even in its generality, without necessarily being exactly "human like". Or perhaps without even particularly "human like" at all, much less exactly so.
  • andsoitis 4y ago
    > "human level", even in its generality, without necessarily being exactly "human like" In what ways do you think it would be human-level, but without sharing characteristics ("human-like")?
    • kitd 4y ago
      Not OP, but real human intelligence is far more emotional than we rational people would like to admit to. Our reasoning is guided (for better and worse) by a constant stream of subconscious biases, rising out of our desires and fears. No one is immune. Note that this is not necessarily a bad thing as in many (most?) cases, it allows us to short-circuit much mental effort. Nevertheless, those same biases can mislead us too. A human-like artificial intelligence would need a sense of value, or at least self-worth and aspiration, to mimic those biases to be fully human-like.
      • mindcrime 4y ago
        A human-like artificial intelligence would need a sense of value, or at least self-worth and aspiration, to mimic those biases to be fully human-like. Agreed. That said, I think the degree to which a given AI is "human like" is a value drawn from a continuum, not a binary "yes/no" dichotomy. Some AI's could be more or less "human like" than others, depending on how they are built / trained / etc. At least that's my position at the moment. I freely admit I can't prove it currently, and I'm not totally convinced anyone ever will. But maybe. Anyway, if you take that as a given for the sake of argument, I consider an interesting question to be "just how 'human like' do we actually want/need our AI's to be?"
• debatem1 4y ago
  I only made it a few paragraphs into this dumpster fire of an article and if it were a begging-the-question drinking game I'd already be dead. Who reviewed this disasterpiece?
• wellbehaved 4y ago
  Most people lack the philosophical chops to opine on this subject. Not that that stops them from doing so.
  • mdp2021 4y ago
    First of all, some do not lack them. Secondly, this would be more of a technical problem, not really "philosophical". Thirdly, there exist disciplines which suffer from a tendency towards sophism - "persuasion", not "heuristic" -, as well noted in their history. Edit: Fourth, sophism gives an illusion of "understanding" that has real world practice as a cruel challenger and cure.
  • tim333 4y ago
    I'm not sure you need much philosophy to see the article is rubbish.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• globalise83 4y ago
  I do find it remarkable that someone like my wife can spend 4 years doing long hours in a lab performing scientific experiments to achieve one small but conclusive scientific result, yet someone else can publish an article like this in a seemingly legitimate academic journal, which buzzes from anecdote to anecdote like a bee with ADHD and doesn't appear to add more than an opinion to the sum of human knowledge.
  • scottLobster 4y ago
    The more I look at the world the more I see how the establishment, in virtually every field of endeavor, has spent decades insulating itself from any real meritocratic consequences. Businesses and institutions don't want to compete, because competition is hard and they might lose. So we get shit like this, and any good work that makes it through is a lucky side effect. Doing a good job is often not a competitive edge.
    • BoiledCabbage 4y ago
      > The more I look at the world the more I see how the establishment, in virtually every field of endeavor, has spent decades insulating itself from any real meritocratic consequences. In just about any field or area, if someone is trying to tell you it's meritocracy, they're just pulling the wool over your (or their own) eyes. The estabilishment/incumbent does not like competetion in any area. And the default mantra is claiming it's actually a meritocracy. Which usually translates to "we like the existing structure because it keeps us and our friends in power".
      • scottLobster 4y ago
        Yep, and to be fair it's always been that way to some degree. The most recent generations just happened to live in an economic golden age where there was so much economic opportunity there actually was more competition and meritocracy than the world had ever seen. Now we're receding back to something more resembling the mid-late 1800s, where aristocracy was a big deal and you had situations like the Imperial British military, where the enlisted soldiers were impeccable, but the blue-blood officers did things like carry pianos into combat zones, and caring about things like self-improvement was a sign of weakness socially.
• giardini 4y ago
  Although written in 2020 (it says), the content is very dated. References "Big Data" from 2014 heavily. Don't waste your time, this is blogspam.
• mdp2021 4y ago
  Incidentally, there is a "great" blatant paradox here: > Finally, I will argue that the belief that AGI can be realized is harmful. If the power of technology is overestimated and human skills are underestimated, the result will in many cases be that we replace something that works well with something that is inferior That "«something that works well»" would be the mis-estimating thing. (I am checking if I have missed some more sophisticated justification for the statement - or a development out of such non trivial paradox -, but for now I am not seeing it.)
• TheDudeMan 4y ago
  "If Harari and Crick are right, then the quotations are “nothing but” the result of chemical algorithms and “no more than” the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells. How can they then be true?" Lol, what?
• wdabney 4y ago
  This article fails the standard of rigor I would expect from a good scientific blog post. They don't define their terms, unsupported claims, relying on an appeal to authority, informal language, and absurd straw-man versions of others' work.
• JonyEpsilon 4y ago
  One of my favourite contributions to this debate: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.10987 https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.10987 "On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines In recent years, a number of prominent computer scientists, along with academics in fields such as philosophy and physics, have lent credence to the notion that machines may one day become as large as humans. Many have further argued that machines could even come to exceed human size by a significant margin. However, there are at least seven distinct arguments that preclude this outcome. We show that it is not only implausible that machines will ever exceed human size, but in fact impossible."
• 8bitsrule 4y ago
  Article states: "In his book, Personal Knowledge Polanyi introduced the expression tacit knowledge. Most of the knowledge we apply in everyday life is tacit. In fact, we do not know which rules we apply when we perform a task." This is an essential realization. The author's examples (swimming, bicycle-riding) are instructive. Also consider that each of us learned to understand a human language - an extremely complex task - with little explicit teaching. Our minds somehow learn to decode the complex patterns in language. Also languages often often refer to a very complex natural environment we must also perceive and comprehend. That amazing capability was not constructed. For a shorter intro to Polanyi's thoughts, try 1964 book The Tacit Dimension. Not ruling out AGI as possible. The question is whether we will be able to communicate with it if its referents are very different from ours. And then there's the question: why would it cooperate rather than compete?
• Leary 4y ago
  "causal knowledge is an important part of humanlike intelligence, and that computers cannot handle causality because they cannot intervene in the world" wait until the author discovers robots
• htk 4y ago
  "Descartes made an exception for the human soul, which is not a part of the material world, and therefore is not governed by laws of nature. The immaterial soul accounts for man’s free will. However, most advocates of AGI (and advocates of strong AI) will today exclude Descartes’ immaterial soul, and follow the arguments of Yuval Harari." What are we doing here? If we bring "immaterial soul" to the argument as a requirement than the author is right, AGI is unrealizable. ps. I flagged the article, not up to HN's standard IMHO.