Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

cis.temple.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 201 posts

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#151

Post by esafak »

kaibee wrote: post #144
esafak wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the basis of an AI's rights? Why do you believe they exist? If an AI's state (essence) can be perfectly persisted and replicated, as it can due to their digital nature, there is nothing to be lost if an AI ceases to exist and is rebooted in another AI. If the Star Trek transporter could replicate you would you care if it killed your existing copy in the process?

> If the Star Trek transporter could replicate you would you care if it killed your existing copy in the process? Uh, obviously?

It's not obvious to me. Why is transporter death bad if you are identically replicated ?

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#152

Post by wizofaus »

jeremyjh wrote: post #145
famouswaffles wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really beg to differ lol and I imagine many instructors would say the same. Humans who have never driven before are not capable of driving unsupervised and there are a lot of laws in place to make sure they don't get the chance to.

A teenager isn’t going to try to accelerate by turning up the volume on the radio or opening the window but an AI with no training would have to try those kind of things.

If they'd never been inside a car before or watched others drive on TV etc. I wouldn't be so sure - fiddling with the volume knob seems a likely enough experimental approach.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#153

Post by wizofaus »

famouswaffles wrote: post #91
skepticATX wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. I think one reason that the definition of AGI is so contentious is that we're not that close to it. All of the current benchmarks are interesting but I don't see how we ever use those to declare that AGI has been reached. And quite frankly, I don't think we'd even care about most of them if we had a truly intelligent system. For me, if hook up an AI with no training to a vehicle and it drives at a human level…

>For me, if hook up an AI with no training to a vehicle and it drives at a human level in arbitrary scenarios Lol what human with no training is going to succeed at driving ?

But you can't even train current any current AGI candidates to drive as well as a human... In fact arguably that's the biggest thing missing from current AI models - you can't readily/reliably teach them new skills just by demonstration and explanation, only by uploading new massive training datasets (for which there's no straightforward way of knowing whether they contain enough data for the skills/knowledge to be absorbed).

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#154

Post by joe_the_user »

stuckinhell wrote: post #60
amelius wrote: post #55

Better title: "Artificial General Intelligence – We don't know the heck where this is going but here are some thoughts"

I've been forced to work with a team of very very smart Phds from ivy league universities to help put together an explanation deck for the c-suite. They've informally told me, the neural nets AI tech is beyond human understanding. Everybody can only explain very small pieces of it,and no one knows how the pieces work together.

To explain thing: neural networks are referred to as AI today (while for a long time they were just "machine learning") but there's a substantial consensus they won't be AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, "human like intelligence" etc) and a nearly universal belief they aren't AGI now. That scientists don't understand their internal processes doesn't change this and isn't necessarily related, directly, to humans not knowing how to create AGI.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#155

Post by criddell »

mbgerring wrote: post #140

Not asked: “Why do this?” So much of the literature takes the idea that this is something that should be built for granted, and only asks whether it should be done. I literally do not understand why anyone wants to build this in the first place.

I think the why is obvious — to make money.

I think a lot of this discussion is around human-level AGI. Does it have to be human-level for it to be an AGI? What would a minimally intelligent AGI be like?

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#156

Post by xcv123 »

esafak wrote: post #151
kaibee wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the Star Trek transporter could replicate you would you care if it killed your existing copy in the process? Uh, obviously?

It's not obvious to me. Why is transporter death bad if you are identically replicated ?

Because the transporter replica is not you. That is a separate person with their own separate consciousness. You are murdered and someone else is born.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#157

Post by cubefox »

dron57 wrote: post #135
cubefox wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI us not a very useful term, because people use it often synonymous with "human level or higher ability". But the opposite of "general AI" is not "less intelligent than a human" but "narrow AI". The narrow/general distinction is orthogonal to the low/high ability ("intelligence") distinction. All animals are very general, as their domain of operation is the real world, not some narrow modality like strings of text…

That's a great way of looking at it in theory. But in practice how would we even know if we're looking at a cat-level AGI? For a human level AGI it's obvious, we would question and evaluate it. Is there a reasonable way of distinguishing narrow-AI ChatGPT from a hypothetical cat-level AGI? We can't even measure the intelligence level of real world cats.

A cat level AI would be able to use a robot body in the real world on the level of a cat.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#158

Post by Aerbil313 »

tpoacher wrote: post #49

AGI is not a difficult "problem". It's a difficult "definition". Given very specific, practical, functional definitions, AGI is a breeze.

Let me give you the definition most people think of today: A thing which can write any piece of software humans ever wrote given a specific goal.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#159

Post by janalsncm »

I’m still skeptical that AGI is a coherent concept, mostly because I am skeptical that general intelligence is one thing rather than a cluster of capabilities, and I am skeptical than humans are even the most “generally intelligent” species on the planet.

https://youtu.be/zsXP8qeFF6A

Here is a video demonstrating the working memory of a chimpanzee. It is obviously considerably better than a human’s. Given this information we must accept one of the following are true:

- humans do not have the highest general intelligence of all animals

- working memory is not a necessary component of general intelligence

- other human capabilities (communication for example) can make up for our working memory deficiencies

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#160

Post by amelius »

mannykannot wrote: post #107
layer8 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t follow. IMO coming up with a working explanation is a necessary part of scientific advance. And that’s what we’re currently missing with LLMs, and with your parrot example.

Case in point: when Zwicky discovered that galaxies were rotating faster than could be explained in terms of what we know, that was an advance - an increase in our scientific knowledge . when we come up with a satisfactory explanation of why that is the case, then we will also have an advance - an increase in our scientific understanding . You can't get to the latter until you have advanced to the former, and we will…

I get where you're coming from but we might also be like ants walking over an iPhone, wondering where the vibration is coming from. They might eventually figure it out, but if so it will be after an extremely long time, and they probably should better focus on other things at this very moment if they seek enlightenment.
Post reply on HN