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I'd put decent odds on a $1B research project developing time travel if time travel were an ability that every human child was innately born with. It's never ea
by mitthrowaway2 2y ago
I'd put decent odds on a $1B research project developing time travel if time travel were an ability that every human child was innately born with. It's never easy to recreate what biology has done, but nature providing an "existence proof" goes a long way towards removing doubt about it being fundamentally possible.
- zombiwoof 2y agoNature didn’t build intelligence with non biological activity. And we won’t either
- mitthrowaway2 2y agoThere's a big difference between "this project is like time travel or cold fusion; it's doubtful whether the laws of physics even permit it" and "this project is like heavier-than-air flight; we know birds do it somehow, but there's no way our crude metal machines will ever match them". I'm confident which of those problems will get solved given, say, a hundred years or so, once people roll up their sleeves and get working on it.
- vasco 2y ago"Biological activity" is just computation with different energy requirements. If science rules the universe we're complex automata, and biologic machines or non-biological machines are just different combinations of atoms that are computing around.
- vidarh 2y agoUnless you have any evidence suggesting that one or more of the variations of the Church-Turing thesis is false, this is closer to a statement of faith than science. Basically, unless you can show humans calculating a non-Turing computable function, the notion that intelligence requires a biological system is an absolutely extraordinary claim. If you were to argue about conscience or subjective experience or something equally woolly, you might have a stronger point, and this does not at all suggest that current-architecture LLMs will necessarily achieve it.