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> unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence I

> unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent.

trinsic2 7mo ago
Yeah I was thinking this to, but he did say "Indistinguishable". I guess if you are a intellectual you can buy into that. Fortunately, consciousness and intelligence is much bigger than we can comprehend as human beings. We want to break everything down into understandable bites, but the truth is we are barley scratching the surface of what the brain does and what constitutes as intelligence.
observationist 7mo ago
Hans Moravec introduced the idea of the "landscape of human competence" , a topology representing the peaks and valleys of human capabilities. Art, writing, coding, game playing. Elevation corresponds to cognitive difficulty, and the landscape maps to everything humans are capable of doing. AI is represented as the rising waterline - when Moravec created the idea, AI was more or less constrained to a few scattered lakes, with humans clearly demonstrating superiority nearly everywhere. After transformers, the waterline began to rise, and today we no longer have a vast contiguous majority, but are left with a scattered handful of islands, and the waterline continues to rise. It's not arrogant or incurious to acknowledge the flood, but it might be to deny that flood is happening. If you think there are fundamental human qualities or capabilities that AI can't ever have, you might put in the work to articulate that, instead of projecting negativity onto people who have watched the vast majority of the human competencies landscape get completely submerged over the last 10 years. The islands we have remaining don't really suggest any unifying principle underlying things that AI is still bad at, but instead they highlight the lack of technical capabilities and various engineering tracks to solve for. Many of the problems are solved in principle, but are economically infeasible; for all intents and purposes, you might consider those islands completely submerged as well.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- rubenflamshep 7mo ago
  [dead]
- nsm 7mo ago
  Two counterpoints: 1. Implying that there are only "a few islands left" shoes a strong bias towards assuming that only thins humans do in the digital realm is relevant, when in fact, the vast majority of things humans do are not in the digital sphere at all. 2. It's pretty clear when most people say that machine intelligence is close, right now, they are alluding to LLM or Deep Learning based approaches. I don't think you should assume they mean machines will catch up in a 100 years. They seem to imply it will be by 2030 or sowmthing.
  - observationist 7mo ago
    To address both points - there appear to be no individual, well defined tasks that humans can do that you cannot train a machine to do. Some tasks are inefficient, uneconomical, and other impractical, but there appear to be no tasks that in principle machines cannot do. What is missing is broad generalization, human equivalent time horizons, continuous learning, and embodiment. Robotics has passed the point of superhuman performance for any given task. Software has passed the point of superhuman performance for any given task. Regardless of the particular technique or embodiment, the constraints aren't "is it possible in principle" but "is it too expensive" and "is this allowed by the pertinent principles and regulations and laws" We don't have AGI that learns and adapts in real time like humans. We do have incredibly powerful algorithms that can learn from whatever data we throw at them, but many domains where it's impractical, ruinously expensive, illegal, or otherwise not possible to use AI for some other good reasons. The few islands left to humanity are not fundamental barriers. We haven't solved intelligence, or achieved RSI or ASI or AGI yet; those were never the important thresholds. AI has always been a question about good enough, and it looks like we've gone solidly past the good enough line into "we can probably automate everything" even if we don't solve the big problems over 5 or 10 years or beyond. I think it's very unlikely we don't solve intelligence by 2030, but even if AI stalls out where it's at right now, and all we get is the incremental improvements and engineering optimizations on current SOTA, we have enough to automate anything humans do at levels exceeding human capabilities. What AGI and ASI do is make humans economically obsolete. Good enough AI means there might be some places where humans are needed for generalization and adaptability until the exhaustive tedious work gets done for a particular application that enables a robot or software system to be competent enough to handle the work.
pier25 7mo ago
In theory a computer should be able to model any physical process so I do agree it's only a matter of time. That said I don't think I will be alive to see it honestly. The current tech won't get us there just like the steam engine or the internal combustion engine didn't get us to the Moon. And getting to AGI is probably more like getting to Mars.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- datsci_est_2015 7mo ago
  I personally think we have some tremendous energy problems (and the negative externalities derived from “solutions”) to contend with before we even sniff AGI.
  - pier25 7mo ago
    Definitely. Comercial fusion is still decades away. Solar and lithium batteries are getting cheaper every year but unfortunately still lots of political issues in many countries.
- davemp 7mo ago
  Considering we can only approximate irrational numbers, I’m not sure that’s a given. Maybe we’ll have a breakthrough with some type of analog computing, but we could also just hit physical limits on energy or precision.
  - Verdex 7mo ago
    Yeah, church turing suggests that a computer can compute any computable function. Or the universality of computable substrate. Maybe there's a confusion that computation universality implies everything universality?
- Verdex 7mo ago
  > In theory a computer should be able to model any physical process Wait, which theory is that? In church turing theory the computer can compute any computable function. Why do we think that the computer can model any physical process? Or are we suggesting that you can build a computer out of whatever physical process you want to model?
logicchains 7mo ago
>I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent. There's absolutely nothing mysterious about human intelligence unless you refuse to give it a clear definition. All the people waffling on about AGI refuse to give a clear, measurable definition of intelligence, because if they defined it exactly then it's possible to clearly determine whether a given machine does or does not meet that criteria. It's just 21st century woo peddling.
- smokedetector1 7mo ago
  > There's absolutely nothing mysterious about human intelligence unless you refuse to give it a clear definition This begs the question[0] by assuming that it can be given a clear, measurable definition. A large part of the mystery of consciousness and intelligence is that it's hard to define, measure, or explain; the most characteristic aspects (i.e. those relating to a subjective experience) are, in principle, impossible to measure or verify[1]. To say that it's not mysterious once you give it a clear, measurable definition is basically saying "it's not mysterious once you remove all aspects that make it mysterious." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
- viftodi 7mo ago
  Until the hard problem of consciousness is solved, this is absolutely false
pegasus 7mo ago
Sure, but it's entirely possible this point lies way past the expiry date of the universe itself (if there is such a thing). Plus, I do believe in magic - the magic of Life, the Universe, and Everything. And "42" doesn't dispel it for me.

trinsic2 7mo ago

Yeah I was thinking this to, but he did say "Indistinguishable". I guess if you are a intellectual you can buy into that. Fortunately, consciousness and intelligence is much bigger than we can comprehend as human beings. We want to break everything down into understandable bites, but the truth is we are barley scratching the surface of what the brain does and what constitutes as intelligence.

observationist 7mo ago

Hans Moravec introduced the idea of the "landscape of human competence" , a topology representing the peaks and valleys of human capabilities. Art, writing, coding, game playing. Elevation corresponds to cognitive difficulty, and the landscape maps to everything humans are capable of doing. AI is represented as the rising waterline - when Moravec created the idea, AI was more or less constrained to a few scattered lakes, with humans clearly demonstrating superiority nearly everywhere. After transformers, the waterline began to rise, and today we no longer have a vast contiguous majority, but are left with a scattered handful of islands, and the waterline continues to rise. It's not arrogant or incurious to acknowledge the flood, but it might be to deny that flood is happening. If you think there are fundamental human qualities or capabilities that AI can't ever have, you might put in the work to articulate that, instead of projecting negativity onto people who have watched the vast majority of the human competencies landscape get completely submerged over the last 10 years. The islands we have remaining don't really suggest any unifying principle underlying things that AI is still bad at, but instead they highlight the lack of technical capabilities and various engineering tracks to solve for. Many of the problems are solved in principle, but are economically infeasible; for all intents and purposes, you might consider those islands completely submerged as well.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
rubenflamshep 7mo ago
[dead]
nsm 7mo ago
Two counterpoints: 1. Implying that there are only "a few islands left" shoes a strong bias towards assuming that only thins humans do in the digital realm is relevant, when in fact, the vast majority of things humans do are not in the digital sphere at all. 2. It's pretty clear when most people say that machine intelligence is close, right now, they are alluding to LLM or Deep Learning based approaches. I don't think you should assume they mean machines will catch up in a 100 years. They seem to imply it will be by 2030 or sowmthing.
- observationist 7mo ago
  To address both points - there appear to be no individual, well defined tasks that humans can do that you cannot train a machine to do. Some tasks are inefficient, uneconomical, and other impractical, but there appear to be no tasks that in principle machines cannot do. What is missing is broad generalization, human equivalent time horizons, continuous learning, and embodiment. Robotics has passed the point of superhuman performance for any given task. Software has passed the point of superhuman performance for any given task. Regardless of the particular technique or embodiment, the constraints aren't "is it possible in principle" but "is it too expensive" and "is this allowed by the pertinent principles and regulations and laws" We don't have AGI that learns and adapts in real time like humans. We do have incredibly powerful algorithms that can learn from whatever data we throw at them, but many domains where it's impractical, ruinously expensive, illegal, or otherwise not possible to use AI for some other good reasons. The few islands left to humanity are not fundamental barriers. We haven't solved intelligence, or achieved RSI or ASI or AGI yet; those were never the important thresholds. AI has always been a question about good enough, and it looks like we've gone solidly past the good enough line into "we can probably automate everything" even if we don't solve the big problems over 5 or 10 years or beyond. I think it's very unlikely we don't solve intelligence by 2030, but even if AI stalls out where it's at right now, and all we get is the incremental improvements and engineering optimizations on current SOTA, we have enough to automate anything humans do at levels exceeding human capabilities. What AGI and ASI do is make humans economically obsolete. Good enough AI means there might be some places where humans are needed for generalization and adaptability until the exhaustive tedious work gets done for a particular application that enables a robot or software system to be competent enough to handle the work.

pier25 7mo ago

In theory a computer should be able to model any physical process so I do agree it's only a matter of time. That said I don't think I will be alive to see it honestly. The current tech won't get us there just like the steam engine or the internal combustion engine didn't get us to the Moon. And getting to AGI is probably more like getting to Mars.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
datsci_est_2015 7mo ago
I personally think we have some tremendous energy problems (and the negative externalities derived from “solutions”) to contend with before we even sniff AGI.
- pier25 7mo ago
  Definitely. Comercial fusion is still decades away. Solar and lithium batteries are getting cheaper every year but unfortunately still lots of political issues in many countries.
davemp 7mo ago
Considering we can only approximate irrational numbers, I’m not sure that’s a given. Maybe we’ll have a breakthrough with some type of analog computing, but we could also just hit physical limits on energy or precision.
- Verdex 7mo ago
  Yeah, church turing suggests that a computer can compute any computable function. Or the universality of computable substrate. Maybe there's a confusion that computation universality implies everything universality?
Verdex 7mo ago
> In theory a computer should be able to model any physical process Wait, which theory is that? In church turing theory the computer can compute any computable function. Why do we think that the computer can model any physical process? Or are we suggesting that you can build a computer out of whatever physical process you want to model?

logicchains 7mo ago

>I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent. There's absolutely nothing mysterious about human intelligence unless you refuse to give it a clear definition. All the people waffling on about AGI refuse to give a clear, measurable definition of intelligence, because if they defined it exactly then it's possible to clearly determine whether a given machine does or does not meet that criteria. It's just 21st century woo peddling.

smokedetector1 7mo ago
> There's absolutely nothing mysterious about human intelligence unless you refuse to give it a clear definition This begs the question[0] by assuming that it can be given a clear, measurable definition. A large part of the mystery of consciousness and intelligence is that it's hard to define, measure, or explain; the most characteristic aspects (i.e. those relating to a subjective experience) are, in principle, impossible to measure or verify[1]. To say that it's not mysterious once you give it a clear, measurable definition is basically saying "it's not mysterious once you remove all aspects that make it mysterious." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
viftodi 7mo ago
Until the hard problem of consciousness is solved, this is absolutely false

pegasus 7mo ago

Sure, but it's entirely possible this point lies way past the expiry date of the universe itself (if there is such a thing). Plus, I do believe in magic - the magic of Life, the Universe, and Everything. And "42" doesn't dispel it for me.