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Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

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Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#41

When people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable. That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as int…

> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge. Doubt. If we would teleport cavemen babies right out of the womb to our times, I don't think they'd turn into high IQ individuals. People knowledgeable on human history / human evolution might now the correct answer.

Its complicated. It depends.

A human being has the potential for intelligence. For that to get realized, you need circumstances, you need culture aka "societal" software and the resources to suspend the grind of work in formative years and allow for the speed-running of the process of knowledge preloading before the brain gets stable.

The parents then must support this endeavor under sacrifices.

There is also a ton of chicken-egg catch22s buried in this whole thing.

If the society is not rich then no school, instead childlabour. If child-labour society is pre-industrial ineffective and thus, no riches to support and redistribute.

Also is your societies culture root-hardened. Means - on a collapse of complexity in bad times, can it recover even powering through the usual "redistribute the nuts and bolts from the bakery" sentiments rampant in bad times. Can it stay organize and organize centralizing of funds for new endeavors. Organizing a sailing ship in a medieval society, means in every village 1 person starves to death. Can your society accomplish that without riots?

Thus.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#43
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge. Doubt. If we would teleport cavemen babies right out of the womb to our times, I don't think they'd turn into high IQ individuals. People knowledgeable on human history / human evolution might now the correct answer.

From what I understand, in terms of genetic changes to intellectual abilities, there's not much evidence to suggest we're so much smarter that your proposed teleported baby would be noticeably stupider - at best they'd be on the tail of the bell curve, well within a normal distribution. Maybe if we teleported ten thousand babies, their bell curve would be slightly behind ours. Take a look at "wild children" for the v…

That is exactly what civilization is about - for new generations to start not from scratch, but from some baseline their parents achieved (accumulated knowledge and culture). This allows new generations to push forward instead of retreading the same path.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge. Doubt. If we would teleport cavemen babies right out of the womb to our times, I don't think they'd turn into high IQ individuals. People knowledgeable on human history / human evolution might now the correct answer.

Can you articulate why you think so? This kind of response "I just don't agree" reads as zero useful information. At least to me.

Evolutionary brain development.

We all come from monke, monkey from 10 million years ago would definitely be unable to even learn spoken language at a basic level. Would he even have the anatomy to produce the required sounds? I don't think so.

What about monke from 1 million years ago? 200 thousand years ago?

ChatGpt says spoken language only emerged 50k - 200k years ago and that a cavemen baby from 200k years ago could learn spoken language if brought up by modern parents.

But I prefer human answers over AI slop.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#45

Social cognition: processing and interpreting social information and responding appropriately in social situations Is social cognition really a measure of intelligence for non-social entities?

An AI designed to interact with humans is a social entity. Its performance will depend on its ability to understand social information.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#46

When people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable. That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as int…

How do you arrive at the statement that a cavemen would have the same intelligence as a human today? Intelligence is surely not usually defined as the cognitive potential at birth but as the current capability. And the knowledge an average human has today through education surely factors into that.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#47
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge. Doubt. If we would teleport cavemen babies right out of the womb to our times, I don't think they'd turn into high IQ individuals. People knowledgeable on human history / human evolution might now the correct answer.

From what I understand, in terms of genetic changes to intellectual abilities, there's not much evidence to suggest we're so much smarter that your proposed teleported baby would be noticeably stupider - at best they'd be on the tail of the bell curve, well within a normal distribution. Maybe if we teleported ten thousand babies, their bell curve would be slightly behind ours. Take a look at "wild children" for the v…

it's impossible to prove the counterfactual (I guess, as I imagine we don't have enough gene information that far back). But I'd imagine that the high calorie food you can get starting with the advent of agriculture is exactly what could drive evolution in a certain direction that helps brains grow. We've had ~1000 generations since then, that should be enough for some change to happen. Our brains use up 20% of the body's energy. Do we know that this was already the case during the stone age?

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge. Doubt. If we would teleport cavemen babies right out of the womb to our times, I don't think they'd turn into high IQ individuals. People knowledgeable on human history / human evolution might now the correct answer.

Its complicated. It depends. A human being has the potential for intelligence. For that to get realized, you need circumstances, you need culture aka "societal" software and the resources to suspend the grind of work in formative years and allow for the speed-running of the process of knowledge preloading before the brain gets stable. The parents then must support this endeavor under sacrifices. There is also a ton o…

> A human being has the potential for intelligence.

Were we "human" 200.000 years ago the way we are now?

Was the required brain and vocal hardware present?

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#49

When people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable. That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as int…

The amount of things LLMs can do is insane. It's interesting to me how much effort the AI companies (and bloggers) put into claiming they can do things they can't, when there's almost an unlimited list of things they actually can do.

This reminds me of "Devin". You know, the first "AI software engineer", which had the hype of the day but turned into a huge flop.

They had ridiculous demos of Devin e.g. working as a freelancer and supposedly earning money from it.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#50
As an engineer who is also spiritual at the core, it seems obvious to me the missing piece: consciousness.

Hear me out.

I love AI and have been using it since ChatGPT 3.5. The obvious question when I first used it was "does this qualify as sentience?" The answer is less obvious. Over the next 3 years we saw EXPONENTIAL intelligence gains where intelligence has now become a commodity, yet we are still unable to determine what qualifies as "AGI".

My thoughts: As humans, we possess our own internal drive and our own perspective. Think of humans as distilled intelligence, we each have our own specialty and motivations. Einstein was a genius physicist but you wouldn't ask him for his expertise on medicine.

What people are describing as AGI is essentially a godlike human. What would make more sense is if the AGI spawned a "distilled" version with a focused agenda/motivation to behave autonomously. But even then, there are limitations. What is the solution? A trillion tokens of system prompt to act as the "soul"/consciousness of this AI agent?

This goes back to my original statement, what is missing is a level of consciousness. Unless this AGI can power itself and somehow the universe recognizes its complexity and existence and bestows it with consciousness I don't think this is phsyically attainable.

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