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Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

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Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#51

Post by glial »

dragonwriter wrote: post #48
minroot wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does AGI must needs to be brain-like?

The human brain is the only thing we can conclusively say does run a general intelligence, so, its the level of complexity at which we can say confidently that its just a software/architecture problem. There may be (almost certainly is) a more optimized way a general intelligence could be implemented, but we can't confidentally say what that requires.

> The human brain is the only thing we can conclusively say does run a general intelligence

That's because we define "general intelligence" circularly as "something the human brain does."

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#52

Post by mtdefelice »

I seriously feel crazy when reading stuff like this. At best this seems to describe the statistics of the consensus of the researchers - lacking any of the social, legal, political, and economic drivers of progress for each prediction. Also, how are these "tasks" or "jobs" actually defined (and how is the believability of each respondent considered when aggregating predictions as it relates to each)? What am I missing?

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#53

Post by paxys »

endisneigh wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I doubt we will have AGI by even 2100. I define AGI as the ability for an intelligence that is not human to do anything any human has ever done or will do with technology that does not include itself* (AGI). * It also goes without saying that by this definition I mean to say that humanity will no longer be able to meaningfully help in any qualitative way with respect to intellectual tas…

AGI doesn't have to mean superintelligence/singularity (which seems to be what you are describing).

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#54

Post by golol »

endisneigh wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I doubt we will have AGI by even 2100. I define AGI as the ability for an intelligence that is not human to do anything any human has ever done or will do with technology that does not include itself* (AGI). * It also goes without saying that by this definition I mean to say that humanity will no longer be able to meaningfully help in any qualitative way with respect to intellectual tas…

Why define AGI like that? General intelligence is supposed to be something like human intelligence. You are talking about ASI.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#55

Post by HPMOR »

lainga wrote: post #4
bbor wrote: post #2

Very interesting, especially the huge jump forward in the first figure and a possible majority of AI researchers giving >10% to the Human Extinction outcome. To AI skeptics bristling at these numbers, I’ve got a potentially controversial question: what’s the difference between this and the scientific consensus on Climate Change? Why heed the latter and not the former?

A climate forcing has a physical effect on the Earth system that you can model with primitive equations. It is not a social or economic problem (although removing the forcing is). You might as well roll a ball down an incline and then ask me whether Keynes was right.

Wait I gotta defend my boy Keynes here. His predictions have been as nearly as well validated as predicting the outcome of a ball rolling down a plank. Just reading the first part of the General Theory correctly predicted the labor strikes in 2023. Keynes’ very clear predictions continue to hold up under empirical observation.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#56

Post by BlarfMcFlarf »

consumer451 wrote: post #44
shpongled wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be pedantic, I would argue that we aren't even close to being able to simulate the full brain of a flatworm on a supercomputer at anything deeper than a simple representation of neurons. We can't even simulate all of the chemical processes inside a single cell. We don't even know all of the chemical processes. We don't know the function of most proteins.

> We can't even simulate all of the chemical processes inside a single cell. We don't even know all of the chemical processes. We don't know the function of most proteins. Brain > Cell > Molecules(DNA and otherwise) > Atoms > Sub-atomic particles... Potentially dumb question, but how deeply do we need to understand the underlying components to simulate a flatworm brain?

While I believe there are some biological processes that rely on engagement and such, they haven’t been found in the brain. So likely somewhere just above the molecule level (chemical gradients and diffusion timings in cells certainly have an effect).

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#57

Post by chasd00 »

bbor wrote: post #2

Very interesting, especially the huge jump forward in the first figure and a possible majority of AI researchers giving >10% to the Human Extinction outcome. To AI skeptics bristling at these numbers, I’ve got a potentially controversial question: what’s the difference between this and the scientific consensus on Climate Change? Why heed the latter and not the former?

There's also the possibility of a AGI being benevolent or, what i find more likely, suicidal.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#58

Post by gary_0 »

shpongled wrote: post #35
jjcm wrote: post #19

A really simple approach we took while I was working on a research team at Microsoft for predicting when AGI would land was simply estimating at what point can we run a full simulation of all of the chemical processes and synapses inside a human brain. The approach was tremendously simple and totally naive, but it was still interesting. At the time a supercomputer could simulate the full brain of a flatworm. We then…

To be pedantic, I would argue that we aren't even close to being able to simulate the full brain of a flatworm on a supercomputer at anything deeper than a simple representation of neurons. We can't even simulate all of the chemical processes inside a single cell. We don't even know all of the chemical processes. We don't know the function of most proteins.

It depends on what kind of simulation you're trying to run, though. You don't need to perfectly model the physically moving heads and magnetic oscillations of a hard drive to emulate an old PC; it may be enough to just store the bytes.

I suspect if you just want an automaton that provides the utility of a human brain, we'll be fine just using statistical approximations based on what we see biological neurons doing. The utility of LLMs so far has moved the needle in that direction for sure, although there's still enough we don't know about cognition that we could still hit a surprise brick wall when we start trying to build GPT-6 or whatever. But even so, a prediction of 2047 for that kind of AGI is plausible (ironically, any semblance of Moore's Law probably won't last until then).

On the other hand, if you want to model a particular human brain... well, then things get extremely hairy scientifically, philosophically, and ethically.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#59

Post by jjcm »

shpongled wrote: post #35
jjcm wrote: post #19

A really simple approach we took while I was working on a research team at Microsoft for predicting when AGI would land was simply estimating at what point can we run a full simulation of all of the chemical processes and synapses inside a human brain. The approach was tremendously simple and totally naive, but it was still interesting. At the time a supercomputer could simulate the full brain of a flatworm. We then…

To be pedantic, I would argue that we aren't even close to being able to simulate the full brain of a flatworm on a supercomputer at anything deeper than a simple representation of neurons. We can't even simulate all of the chemical processes inside a single cell. We don't even know all of the chemical processes. We don't know the function of most proteins.

I very likely was incorrect about the chemical processes, so thank you for clarifying. This is remembering work for a decade ago, so I'm almost certainly wrong about some of the details.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#60

Post by daveguy »

jjcm wrote: post #19

A really simple approach we took while I was working on a research team at Microsoft for predicting when AGI would land was simply estimating at what point can we run a full simulation of all of the chemical processes and synapses inside a human brain. The approach was tremendously simple and totally naive, but it was still interesting. At the time a supercomputer could simulate the full brain of a flatworm. We then…

I assume simulation capacity takes into account the data bandwidth of the processing systems. It seems we are always an orders of magnitude or two behind in bytes/words per second to feed simulations compared to raw flops. When you consider there are multiple orders of magnitude more synapses between neurons than neurons (not to mention other cell types we are only beginning to understand) -- bandwidth limitations seem to put estimates about 10-15 years past computation estimates. By my napkin math, accounting for bandwidth limitations, we will get single-human-intelligence hardware capabilities 2053-2063. Whether or not we've figured out the algorithms by then is any guess. Maybe algorithm advances will reduce hardware needs, but I doubt it because computational complexity to solve hard problems is often a matter of getting all the bits to the processor to perform all the comparisons necessary. However, the massive parallelism of the brain is a point of optimism.
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