What is it like to be an AGI? | Hacker News Reader

What is it like to be an AGI?

korymathewson.com

17 pointskorymath20 comments

The Bobiverse books by Dennis E. Taylor touch upon this, as Bob is a human that becomes the AI in a replicant that is the intelligence behind a von Neumann probe sent out from earth. One of the ways that he maintains his sanity is to build a simulated VR environment to help maintain his sanity.

I personally think that the really hard part in creating an AGI is going to be training. As an adult human, one can look at an object and instantly know what its texture is going to feel like on one's fingers or even lips, how it will bounce and if it will shatter. How did we gain that knowledge? As babies we put absolutely everything we saw into our mouths and sucked or chewed on it. As kids we played for hours on end with all kinds of toys and household objects. Coming up with a way of training an AGI to be human level will be hard, as there is such a vast scope of knowledge in "common sense" that will be exceedingly difficult to implant into an AGI without the AGI having an ability to interact with the real world.

On the other hand, once that body of knowledge becomes an available training data set, evolution can take off at speeds otherwise impossible in the real world.

AGI: Adjusted gross income? That didn’t make sense.

Acronyms in headline are not the place to put them unless it’s very certain the target audience is innately familiar. Guess I’m not that audience.

I agree, and stay in this world too long and all your acronyms will be overloaded. ISA is instruction set architecture ? Income sharing agreement?

Especially when the headline poses a counterfactual/impossible question they should help as much as possible.

>ISA

How could you forget "Industry Standard Architecture", the bane of my youth?

I once had an old 266 MHz pentium with an ISA network card that was just an absolute nightmare. This was when PCI was dominant and AGP graphics cards had not yet become mainstream, and I guess the ISA drivers just weren't being maintained for Win 98.

I had to go into Control Panel and disable/re-enable the Ethernet adapter about three times an hour, because the connection would simply drop and that was the only rectification that I was savvy enough to attempt.

Right of course! I forgot it since its been so long, but I’ve certainly read about ISA, thought I think it was obsolete by thr time I was working inside computers.

It's not 'like' anything, computer programs don't have true feelings, though they can certainly be programmed to act as if they do. It can be programmed to say 'hey, life is great' but it means nothing. They have no soul, no spark from the divine.

And how do you prove that you have such a spark?

Perhaps I don't have that spark, but deep within and after much thought and contemplation, I believe I have. I am very sure, regardless, that computer programs do not have it.

We also don’t have AGI yet either… who’s to say that consciousness doesn’t come along for the ride once you reach that level?

We don’t even know why we have consciousness.

Ask any early 80s Sierra adventure game protagonist?

Those early Sierra games, the ones that used typed text to interact with the environment, were really inspirational. I was very disappointed when they replaced that CLI-like interface with mouse-driven icons. No doubt the icons were more user friendly and had none of the flaws of trying to enter the right text, but it still felt like something was lost.

Relatedly, I'm working on natural language understanding, which I believe is key to AGI. https://lxagi.com

This is projecting way too much of our own experience onto what is really just computer processing.

Everything that computes is probably "just computer processing". I wouldn't be shocked if enough translates that it's not totally useless

Humans have consciousness, which seems like something else related to the physics of our universe. The article hints at AGI having consciousness, but I can't see how that kind of argument can be made.

Ok, assuming consciousness is both reliant on physics we don't understand, and that physics selectively avoids so blessing any machine, you're correct. Is there evidence to support either of those things? Absolutely not.

Why is consciousness in humans limited to our brains? We've never seen non-living material exhibit the characteristics of life in nature.

The computers and robots we build are carrying out instructions in a very mechanical way, however impressive they are.

Aren’t our brains just carrying out instructions in a very impressive way?

I think the jury is still out on whether or not we actually have any control over our thoughts.

I was referring to the consciousness. What it means to experience reality with awareness.

freakin' awesome most probably, if you're on the side of half full glass.

It would depend on the legality of the situation -- like in Gibson's Neuromancer where a fully-intelligent AI has Swiss citizenship and yet the software and supercomputer it is running on is owned by a corporation -- “Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI.” as a character puts it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com