Artificial general intelligence is here, and it's useless (2019)

cerebralab.com

1 point·tmfi··3 comments

The author, confusingly, is using the term AGI to refer to human intelligence.

Main points from the article:

"Artificial general intelligence is something we have plenty of here on Earth, most of it goes to waste, so I'm not sure designing AGI based on a human model would help us much."

"Superhuman artificial general intelligence is not something that we can define, since nobody has come up with a comprehensive definition of intelligence that is self-sufficient, rather than requiring real world trial and error."

"Superhuman artificial general intelligence is not something we can test, since we can't gather statistically valid training datasets for complex problem and we can't afford to test via trial and error in the real world."

"Even if superhuman artificial intelligence was somehow created, there's no way of knowing that they'd be of much use to us. It may be that intelligence is not the biggest bottleneck to our current problems, but rather time and resources."

If it's there, show me. It's absolutely not useless to me, I will pay many hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly for it. But my gut tells me it's just a sensational headline.

The author is using the term AGI to refer to human intelligence to make their point that "we have to stop romanticizing or fear-mongering about the pointless concept of a human-like intelligence being produced by software."

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