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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#351

Post by jimbokun »

sota_pop wrote: post #46
geerlingguy wrote: post #8

I like the conclusion; like for me, Whisper has radically improved CC on my video content. I used to spend a few hours translating my scripts into CCs, and tooling was poor. Now I run it through whisper in a couple minutes, give one quick pass to correct a few small hallucinations and misspellings, and I'm done. There are big wins in AI. But those don't pump the bubble once they're solved. And the thing that made Whi…

Not only whispr, so much of the computer vision area is not as in vogue. I suspect because the truly monumental solutions unlocked are not that accessible to the average person; i.e. industrial manufacturing and robotics at scale.

That's because industrial manufacturing and robotics are failing to bring down costs and make people's lives more affordable.

That's really the only value those technologies provide, so if people aren't seeing costs come down there really is zero value coming from those technologies.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#352

Post by jimbokun »

mikemarsh wrote: post #149

The idea of replicating a consciousness/intelligence in a computer seems to fall apart even under materialist/atheist assumptions: what we experience as consciousness is a product of a vast number of biological systems, not just neurons firing or words spoken/thought. Even considering something as basic as how fundamental bodily movement is to mental development, or how hormones influence mood ultimately influencing…

AGI won't replicate our experience.

But it could be more powerful than us.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#353

Post by jimbokun »

danielbln wrote: post #188
mikemarsh wrote: post #149

The idea of replicating a consciousness/intelligence in a computer seems to fall apart even under materialist/atheist assumptions: what we experience as consciousness is a product of a vast number of biological systems, not just neurons firing or words spoken/thought. Even considering something as basic as how fundamental bodily movement is to mental development, or how hormones influence mood ultimately influencing…

I don't see a strong argument here. Are you saying there is a level of complexity involved in biological systems that can not be simulated? And if so, who says sufficient approximations and abstractions aren't enough to simulate the emergent behavior of said systems? We can simulate weather (poorly) without modeling every hydrogen atom interaction.

If you simulate rainy weather, does anything get wet?

(Not my original quote, but can't remember right now where I read it.)

It's similar asking about whether silicon computers performing intelligent tasks is "conscious".

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#354

Post by seemaze »

simonw wrote: post #12

Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…

On the water front, in my area agriculture flood irrigates with pristine aquifer water, while surface water gets treated and dumped into the drinking supply. This is due to the economics of historic water rights.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#355

Post by dwohnitmok »

miltonlost wrote: post #64
dwohnitmok wrote: post #13

> And this is all fine, because they’re going to make AGI and the expected value (EV) of it will be huge! (Briefly, the argument goes that if there is a 0.001% chance of AGI delivering an extremely large amount of value, and 99.999% chance of much less or zero value, then the EV is still extremely large because (0.001% * very_large_value) + (99.999% * small_value) = very_large_value). This is a strawman. The big AI n…

That's still Pascal's Wager but with different (better) probabilities.

Pascal's Wager is based essentially on low probabilities. You can't really say something with different probabilities is Pascal's Wager.

"Probability of X > 90%. Therefore I act as if X will happen." is not Pascal's Wager. That's a bog-standard reiteration of any belief.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#356

Post by jimbokun »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #60

We should do things because they are hard, not because they are cheap and easy. AGI might be a fantasy but there are lots of interesting problems that block the path to AGI that might get solved anyway. The past three years we've seen enormous progress with AI. Including a lot of progress in making this stuff a lot less expensive, more efficient, etc. You can now run some of this stuff on a phone and it isn't terribl…

In addition to being hard, we should ask if something is useful or if the benefits outweigh the harms.

It's hard to see benefits from AI systems, AGI or otherwise. It doesn't seem to produce anything that improves human happiness or general well being.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#357

Post by tim333 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #21

It is ultimately a hardware problem. To simplify it greatly, an LLM neuron is a single input single output function. A human brain neuron takes in thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs, to the point that some inputs start being processed before they even get inside the cell by structures on the outside of it. An LLM neuron is an approximation of this. We cannot manufacture a human level neuron to be s…

>It is ultimately a hardware problem.

I think it's more an algorithm problem. I've been reading how LLMs work and the brain does nothing like matrix multiplication over billions of entities. It seems a very inefficient way to do it in terms of compute use, although efficient in terms of not many lines of code. I think the example of the brain shows one could do far better.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#358

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

belter wrote: post #115
simonw wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/03/inside-the-dat... > I asked the farmer if he had noticed any environmental effects from living next to the data centers. The impact on the water supply, he told me, was negligible. "Honestly, we probably use more water than they do," he said. (Training a state-of-the-art A.I. requires less water than is used on a square mile of farmland in a year.) Power is a differe…

> The water issue really is a distraction which harms the credibility of people who lean on it Is that really the case? - "Data Centers and Water Consumption" - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co... "...Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people..." "I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption…

Humans don’t consume much water used by humans. Cows do.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#359

Post by jimbokun »

VerminOctopus1 wrote: post #39
killerstorm wrote: post #32

On the other hand we have DeepMind / Demis Hassabis, delivering: * AlphaFold - SotA protein folding * AlphaEvolve + other stuff accelerating research mathematics: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02864 * "An AI system to help scientists write expert-level empirical software" - demonstrating SotA results for many kinds of scientific software So what's the "fantasy" here, the actual lab delivering results or a sob story abou…

I’m not sure you understand what AGI is given the citations you’ve provided.

Isn't the point that DeepMind is producing products providing value to humanity, where AGI looks like something that will produce mainly harm?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#360

Post by _jab »

One symptom of AGI fantasy that I particularly hate is the dismissal of applied AI companies as "wrappers" - as if they're not offering any real technical add on top of the models themselves.

This seems to be a problem specific to AI. No one casts startups that build off of blockchains as thin, nor the many companies that were enabled by cloud computing and mobile computing as recklessly endangered by competition from the maintainers of those platforms.

The reality is that applying AI to real challenges is an important and distinct problem space from just building AI models in the first place. And in my view, AI is in dire need of more investment in this space - a recent MIT study found that 95% of AI pilots at major organizations are ending in failure.

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