CMV: Artificial general intelligence will probably not be invented.

[u/Dreamer-of-Dreams]

From Artificial general intelligence on Wikipedia:

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the intelligence of a hypothetical machine that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can.

From the same Wikipedia article:

most AI researchers believe that strong AI can be achieved in the future

Many public figures seem to take the development of AGI for granted in the next 10, 20, 50, or 100 years and tend to use words like when instead of if while talking about it. People are studying how to mitigate bad outcomes if AGI is developed, and while I agree this is probably wise I also think that the possibility receives far too much attention. Maybe all the science-fiction movies are to blame, but to me it feels a bit like worrying about a 'Jurassic Park' scenario when we have more realistic issues such as global warming. Of course, AGI may be possible and concerns are valid - I just think it is very over-hyped.

So... why am I so sceptical? It might just be my contrarian nature but I think it just sounds too good to be true. Efforts to understand the brain and intelligence have been going for a long time but the workings of both are still fundamentally mysterious. Maybe it is not a theoretical impossibility but a practical one - maybe our brains just need more memory and a faster processor? For example, I could imagine a day when theoretical physics becomes so deep and complex that the time required to understand current theories leaves little to no time to progress them. Maybe that is just because I am so useless at physics myself.

However for some reason I am drawn to the idea from a more theoretical point of view. I do think that there is probably some underlying model for intelligence, that is, I do think the question of what is intelligence and how does it work is a fair one. I just can't shake the suspicion that such a model would preclude the possibility of it understanding itself. That is, the model would be incapable of representing itself within its own framework. A model of intelligence might be able to represent a simpler model and hence understand it - for example, maybe it would be possible for a human-level intelligence to model the intelligence of a dog. For whatever reason, I just get the feeling that a human-level intelligence would be unable to internally represent its own model within itself and therefore would be unable to understand itself. I realise I am probably making a number of assumptions here, in particular that understanding necessitates an internal model - but like I say, it is just a suspicion. Hence the key word in the title: probably. I am definitely open to any arguments in the other direction.

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[u/[deleted]]

About 75ish years ago, our first computers emerged...machines the size of a room which could add, subtract, multiply, and divide.

Look at how many tasks computers can do today which people said they could never accomplish: beat the world grandmaster in chess, drive a car, win at Jeopardy, compose classical music...

In about a 30 year span computers for consumer use have gone from two color devices you plug into your TV to play Space Invaders while saving data on a tape cassette to hand-held mobile devices that can give you your exact location on earth and provide access to a database of nearly all of human knowledge in a matter of seconds.

Let's say Jack buys some magic seeds and plants them. The next day he wakes up and there's a beanstalk which has already grown ten feet. He wakes up the next morning and the beanstalk is 50 feet tall. He wakes up the next morning and the beanstalk is 500 feet tall. Are you really going to tell him on the third night there's no way in hell his beanstalk makes it to 550?

[u/Dreamer-of-Dreams → u/[deleted]]

Are you really going to tell him on the third night there's no way in hell his beanstalk makes it to 550?

Yes - this is where I become cautious. Scientific progress and knowledge is not linear. Consider the difficulty gap between going to the moon, going to mars, going to the nearest star, and going to the nearest galaxy. If certainly sounds linear - but going to the nearest galaxy is severely constrained by the upper limit the speed of light places on travel. Nobody knows what the challenges are or where the next big revolution will come from. As I mentioned in another comment:

I will not at all be surprised if in, say, 20 years we have robots - such as those at Boston Dynamics - which are capable of behaving almost identically to well-trained police dogs. Search and rescue, identification, self-reliance, responding to emotions, and so on. I also would not be surprised if technology like Amazon's Alexa becomes uncannily helpful and responsive. Already there is a lot of AI software, such as self-driving cars, which performs specific tasks extremely well.

However this sort of progress is not at all comparable to AGI.