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On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

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Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#21

Post by hooande »

ethanbond wrote: post #16
hooande wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI is currently as likely as teleportation, time travel or warp drives. You can write a computer program to do just about anything. Artificial "General" intelligence is simply not a thing. We're not even making progress toward it.

We have natural “general” intelligence which appears to be generated by boring old chemical/thermal/electrical interactions. Why wouldn’t we be able to recreate that at some (IMO very far) point?

A warp drive is theoretically possible, and also driven by boring chemical/thermal/electrical interactions. humans may create one of those at some very far point in the future, too

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#22

Post by mlyle »

Causality1 wrote: post #18
scubakid wrote: post #8

Makes me wonder: how's the HN community feeling these days about the actual plausibility / timeline of humans developing true AGI? Personally the more I learn about the current state of AI, and in comparison the way the human brain works, the more skeptical (and slightly disappointed) I tend to get.

Personally I think we're going to need a revolution in the fundamental physics of computation. The example I like to use is that a dragonfly brain uses just sixteen neurons to take input from thousands of ommatidia and track prey in 3D space, plot intercept vectors, and send that data to the motor centers of the brain. Calculate how many transistors and watts of power you'd need to replicate that functionality. Now m…

> Calculate how many transistors and watts of power you'd need to replicate that functionality.

I'm curious as to your answer. Because if one's building a purpose-built analog computer for the task, my estimate is a few hundred transistors, a few thousand passives, and ... an absolutely trivial amount of power on modern process.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#23

Post by mlyle »

hooande wrote: post #21
ethanbond wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have natural “general” intelligence which appears to be generated by boring old chemical/thermal/electrical interactions. Why wouldn’t we be able to recreate that at some (IMO very far) point?

A warp drive is theoretically possible, and also driven by boring chemical/thermal/electrical interactions. humans may create one of those at some very far point in the future, too

> A warp drive is theoretically possible,

Dubious

> and also driven by boring chemical/thermal/electrical interactions.

Implausible exotic matter, negative energy, etc, are usually prerequisites.

Just like the existence of flying birds were a hint that flying machines might be possible, the existence of thinking creatures is a hint that thinking machines might be possible.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#24

Post by umvi »

exo-pla-net wrote: post #5
et2o wrote: post #3

I don’t find this April Fool’s joke (2017) very funny. What are they parodying exactly?

They're parodying those who claim that AGI will never exceed human intelligence.

IMO AGI will never exist period let alone exceed human intelligence. Sure we'll have increasingly powerful pattern recognition, but that's all it will ever be

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#25

Post by jcims »

Causality1 wrote: post #18
scubakid wrote: post #8

Makes me wonder: how's the HN community feeling these days about the actual plausibility / timeline of humans developing true AGI? Personally the more I learn about the current state of AI, and in comparison the way the human brain works, the more skeptical (and slightly disappointed) I tend to get.

Personally I think we're going to need a revolution in the fundamental physics of computation. The example I like to use is that a dragonfly brain uses just sixteen neurons to take input from thousands of ommatidia and track prey in 3D space, plot intercept vectors, and send that data to the motor centers of the brain. Calculate how many transistors and watts of power you'd need to replicate that functionality. Now m…

Feels like we're handicapping ourselves, at least in this specific domain, with digital computing.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#26

Post by joe_the_user »

scubakid wrote: post #8

Makes me wonder: how's the HN community feeling these days about the actual plausibility / timeline of humans developing true AGI? Personally the more I learn about the current state of AI, and in comparison the way the human brain works, the more skeptical (and slightly disappointed) I tend to get.

The thing about these arguments for the impossibility of AI/AGI is that they inherently rest on the idea that they know what "human intelligence". So they have the same weaknesses as arguments project a set timeline for AGI.

We won't build a duplicate of the human brain - unless we have AGI first to tell us how. But we really don't know what portions of the human brain are needed for useful AGI.

You can look at GPT-3. On the one hand, never being reliable puts a crimp on practical applications. One the other hand, it does a lot of amazing things that seem human. I'd say that since we don't know where we're going in a profound way, we don't know how far we have to go.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#27

Post by simonh »

umvi wrote: post #24
exo-pla-net wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're parodying those who claim that AGI will never exceed human intelligence.

IMO AGI will never exist period let alone exceed human intelligence. Sure we'll have increasingly powerful pattern recognition, but that's all it will ever be

And that’s fine, you might even be right. It’s not the opinion they are parodying, it’s the foolish arguments often used to “prove” it.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#28

Post by abetusk »

scubakid wrote: post #8

Makes me wonder: how's the HN community feeling these days about the actual plausibility / timeline of humans developing true AGI? Personally the more I learn about the current state of AI, and in comparison the way the human brain works, the more skeptical (and slightly disappointed) I tend to get.

The human brain is estimated at 2.5 Pb of storage [0]. Assuming a "Moore's Law" like behavior of storage price, so that price halves every 2-3 years and assuming we use storage as a proxy for the space, access speed and computational power, the time it will take to have a $1000 computer that has the storage capacity of the brain will be in the 10-16 year time horizon.

This puts the timeline to about 2029-2035.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memor...

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#29

Post by Causality1 »

mlyle wrote: post #22
Causality1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think we're going to need a revolution in the fundamental physics of computation. The example I like to use is that a dragonfly brain uses just sixteen neurons to take input from thousands of ommatidia and track prey in 3D space, plot intercept vectors, and send that data to the motor centers of the brain. Calculate how many transistors and watts of power you'd need to replicate that functionality. Now m…

> Calculate how many transistors and watts of power you'd need to replicate that functionality. I'm curious as to your answer. Because if one's building a purpose-built analog computer for the task, my estimate is a few hundred transistors, a few thousand passives, and ... an absolutely trivial amount of power on modern process.

I'm curious how we're even going to manage 420,000 pixels' worth (60,000 ommatidia, approximately 7 pixels each) of input with only a few hundred transistors, let alone do vector analysis on it.

But let's say we can. Let's say we need 320 transistors, which would be 20 transistors per pixel. That's pretending 99.7% of the seven thousand synapses each neuron has are useless for our purpose, but we'll do it. A chimp brain runs all the autonomous physical processes of a humanoid body while only having 22 billion neurons. We'll also pretend, wrongly, that chimps have no mind or emotions at all and that we only need the extra human neurons to make a sapient mind.

Humans have 86 billion neurons. Subtracting 22 gives us 64 billion, times 20 transistors per neuron gives us 1.28 trillion transistors.

1.28 trillion transistors, even with a bunch of handwaving to make it easier, and even pretending we exactly understood how sapience worked in the first place.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#30

Post by simonh »

scubakid wrote: post #8

Makes me wonder: how's the HN community feeling these days about the actual plausibility / timeline of humans developing true AGI? Personally the more I learn about the current state of AI, and in comparison the way the human brain works, the more skeptical (and slightly disappointed) I tend to get.

We’re currently in the very early phase of our understanding of what intelligence is. The more we learn about it, the more we appreciate the staggering scale and complexity of the problem. So at the moment yes, it seems like the objective is receding into the distance faster than our progress towards it can keep up.

1960s - Herbert Simmons predicts "Machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do."

1993 - Vernor Vinge predicts super-intelligent AIs 'within 30 years'.

2011 - Ray Kurzweil predicts the singularity (enabled by super-intelligent AIs) will occur by 2045, 34 years after the prediction was made.

So the distance into the future before we achieve strong AI and hence the singularity has been, according to it's most optimistic proponents, receding by more than 1 year per year.

Eventually I believe we will get a good enough understanding of the subject that we can map out a route to implementing AGI, and then our progress will accelerate towards a known and understood goal.

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