- Ist getting likelier by the decade.
Comment on What If There’s No AGI?
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
I can think of only two ways that we don’t reach AGI eventually.
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General intelligence is substrate dependent, meaning that it’s inherently tied to biological wetware and cannot be replicated in silicon.
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We destroy ourselves before we get there.
Other than that, we’ll keep incrementally improving our technology and we’ll get there eventually. Might take us 5 years or 200 but it’s coming.
RedPandaRaider@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
voronaam@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This is a funny graph. What’s the Y-axis? Why the hell DVDs are a bigger innovation than a Steam Engine or a Light Bulb? It has a way bigger increase on the Y-axis.
In fact, the top 3 innovations since 1400 according to the chart are
- Microprocessors
- Man on Moon
- DVDs
And I find it funny that in the year 2025 there are no people on the Moon and most people do not use DVDs anymore.
And speaking of Microprocessors, why the hell Transistors and not on the chart? Or even Computers in general? Where did the humanity placed their Microprocessors before Apple Macintosh was designed (this is an innovation? IBM PC was way more impactful…)
Such a funny chart you shared. Great joke!
hark@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Also “3D Movies” is a whole joke on its own.
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
The chart is just for illustration purposes to make a point. I don’t see why you need to be such a dick about it. Feel free to reference any other chat that you like better which displays the progress of technological advancements thorough human history - they all look the same; for most of history nothing happened and then everything happened. If you don’t think that this progress has been increasing at explosive speed over the past few hundreds of years then I don’t know what to tell you. People 10k years ago had basically the same technology as people 30k years ago. Now compare that with what has happened even during your lifetime.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
If we make this graph in 100 years almost nothing modern like hybrid cars, dvds, etc. will be in it.
Just like this graph excludes a ton of improvements in metallurgy that enabled the steam engine.
anomnom@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
There’s also no reason for it to be a smooth curve, it looks more like a series if steps with varying flat spots between them in my head.
And we are terrible at predicting how long a flat spot will be between improvements.
lime@feddit.nu 3 weeks ago
ah yes, selection bias
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Exactly. Quantifying technological growth is incredibly difficult.
Valmond@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think you might mix up AGI and consciousness?
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think first we have to figure out if there is even a difference.
Valmond@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Well of course there is? I mean that’s like not even up for debate?
Consciousness is that we “experience” the things that happens around us, AGI is a higher intelligence. If AGI “needs” consciousness then we can just simulate it (so no real consciousness).
Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Of course that’s up for debate; we’re not even sure what consciousness really is. That is a whole philosophical debate on it’s own.
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Same argument applies for consciousness as well, but I’m talking about general intelligence now.
Valmond@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Well I’m curious then, because I have never seen or heard or read that general intelligence would be needing some kind of wetware anywhere. Why would it? It’s just computations.
I do have heard and read about consciousness potentially having that barrier though, but only as a potential problem, and if you want conscious robots ofc.
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
I don’t think it does, but it seems conceivable that it potentially could. Maybe there’s more to intelligence than just information processing - or maybe it’s tied to consciousness itself. I can’t imagine the added ability to have subjective experiences would hurt anyone’s intelligence, at least.
Chozo@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
General intelligence is substrate dependent, meaning that it's inherently tied to biological wetware and cannot be replicated in silicon.
We're already growing meat in labs. I honestly don't think lab-grown brains are as far off as people are expecting.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s so hard to keep up these days.
BBC: Lab-grown brain cells play video game Pong
Full paper(2022): In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world
wirehead@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Well, think about it this way…
You could hit AGI by fastidiously simulating the biological wetware.
Except that each atom in the wetware is going to require n atoms worth of silicon to simulate. Simulating 10^26 atoms or so seems like a very very large computer, maybe planet-sized? It’s beyond the amount of memory you can address with 64 bit pointers.
General computer research (e.g. smaller feature size) reduces n, but eventually we reach the physical limits of computing. We might be getting uncomfortably close right now, barring fundamental developments in physics or electronics.
The goal if AGI research is to give you a better improvement of n than mere hardware improvements. My personal concern is that that LLM’s are actually getting us much of an improvement on the AGI value of n. Likewise, LLM’s are still many order of magnitude less parameters than the human brain simulation so many of the advantages that let us train a singular LLM model might not hold for an AGI model.
Coming up with an AGI system that uses most of the energy and data center space of a continent that manages to be about as smart as a very dumb human or maybe even just a smart monkey is an achievement in AGI but doesn’t really get you anywhere compared to the competition that is accidentally making another human amidst a drunken one-night stand and feeding them an infinitesimal equivalent to the energy and data center space of a continent.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
I see this line of thinking as more useful as a thought experiment than as something we should actually do. Yes, we can theoretically map out a human brain and simulate it in extremely high detail. That’s probably both inefficient and unnecessary. What it does do is get us past the idea that it’s impossible to make a computer that can think like a human. Without relying on some kind of supernatural soul, there must be some theoretical way we could do this. We just need to know how without simulating individual atoms.
kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
It might be helpful to make one full brain simulation, so that we can start removing parts and seeing what needs to stay. I definitely don’t think that we should be mass-producing then, though.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I don’t think our current LLM approach is it, but I doing think intelligence is unique to humans at all.
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The only reason we wouldn’t get to AGI is point number two.
Point number one doesn’t make much sense given that all we are are bags of small complex molecular machines that operate synergistically with each other under extremely delicate balance. Which if humanity does not kill ourselves first, we will eventually be able to create small molecular machines that work together synergistically. Which is really all that life is.
It seems quite likely that we will be able to synthesize AGI far before we will be able to synthesize life. As the conditions for intelligence by all accounts seem to be simpler than the conditions for the living creature that maintains the delicate ecosystem of molecular machines necessary for that intelligence to exist.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
For 1, we can grow neurons and use them for computation, so not actually an issue if it were true (which it almost certainly isn’t because it isn’t magic).
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah, it most definitely is not magic given our growing knowledge of the molecular machines that make life possible.
The mysticism of how life works has long been dispelled. Now it’s just a matter of understanding the insane complexity of it.
Sure we can grow neurons but ultimately neurons are just molecular machines with a bunch of complications surrounding them.
It stands to reason that we can develop and grow molecular machines that achieve the same outcomes with fewer complexities.
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 3 weeks ago
You’re talking about consciousness, not AGI. We will never be able to tell if AI has “real” consciousness or not. The goal is really to create an AI that acts intelligent enough to convince people that it may be conscious.
Basically, we will “hit” AGI when enough people will start treating it like it’s AGI, not when we achieve some magical technological breakthrough and say “this is AGI”.
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Same argument applies for consciousness as well, but I’m talking about general intelligence now.
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 3 weeks ago
I don’t think you can define AGI in a way that would make it substrate dependent. It’s simply about behaving in a certain way. Sufficiently complex set of ‘if -> then’ statements could pass as AGI. The limitation is computation power and practicality of creating the rules. We already have supercomputers that could easily emulate AGI but we don’t have a practical way of writing all the ‘if -> then’ rules and I don’t see how creating the rules could be substrate dependent.
realitista@piefed.world 3 weeks ago
Well it could also just depend on some mechanism that we haven't discovered yet. Even if we could technically reproduce it, we don't understand it and haven't managed to just stumble into it and may not for a very long time.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
If it's substrate dependent then that just means we'll build new kinds of hardware that includes whatever mysterious function biological wetware is performing.
Discovering that this is indeed required would involve some world-shaking discoveries about information theory, though, that are not currently in line with what's thought to be true. And yes, I'm aware of Roger Penrose's theories about non-computability and microtubules and whatnot. I attended a lecture he gave on the subject once. I get the vibe of Nobel disease from his work in that field, frankly.
If it really turns out to be the case though, microtubules can be laid out on a chip.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I could see us gluing third world fetuses to chips and saying not to question it before reproducing it.
pilferjinx@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Imagine that we just end up creating humans the hard, and less fun, way.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Penrose has always had a fertile imagination, and not all his hypotheses have panned out. But he does have the gift that, even when wrong, he’s generally interestingly wrong.