We already have an implementation of general AI in our brains that we should eventually be able to mimic.
Do you think it will take centuries to figure out how it works to understand its algorithm?
Do you think it will take centuries to figure out how it works to understand its algorithm?
There's no reason whatsoever to believe that the brain is an algorithm at all.
This is just you searching for something where it is easiest to look.
Note: not everything is an algorithm.
Even neuroscientists, who are more pessimistic about the prospect of AGI than anyone else, generally agree that the brain is ultimately not doing anything involving woo (with the exception of a few notably crazy religious ones), and is effectively just a computer. Neuroscientists think it's doing more involved computations than AI researchers hope, but it's still just crunching data.
> quantum idiocy like Penrose in his senility.
Whatever the case, we are still very very very far from understanding the brain when it comes to consciousness. There's room for people to explore possibilities.
Two points:
a) Not everything is explainable and predictable, and thus under the domain of science.
b) There's a huge (maybe infinite?) class of things that are explainable and predictable and yet aren't algorithms.
An 'algorithm' is a very specific mathematical concept with a very specific definition. It is quite possible that the brain is explainable and predictable and yet isn't an algorithm.
> ...but it's still just crunching data.
Only if you expand 'data' to mean every possible physical phenomenon under the sun, which is disingenuous. (Are hormones 'data'? Is electromagnetic radiation? Etc., etc.)
If your argument is that the brain leaps past normal computation into hypercomputation or something like that, then you're making an extremely bold claim that doesn't match what we know about the physical universe (there is a long history of arguments about the physical possibility of hypercomputation, and most people don't think it's possible even in theory).
I know it sounds expansive to say that everything in the physical world (at least the bits accessible to our experimentation) can be modeled by an algorithm, but that really is the mainstream scientific view, and the edges where people argue about the fringe possibilities most definitely do not apply to the energy/time scales involved with the brain.
it took the same amount of time to learn how to fly. (ie several millennia)
Yet, once we did, we broke the sound barrier and made it to the moon within 70 years.
If we look back 200 years to the 1820s, the world looked quite primitive. Railroads and steamships were exciting:
On top of that, the engineering to even capture data from a brain to begin with is pretty far off.
So what happens first, AGI or traveling at close to the speed of light?