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Comment by izzydata | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see any evidence that suggests AGI is even possible before I care about it wiping out humanity.

I feel like there's a lot of evidence, for example, the existence of natural general intelligence and the rapidly expanding capacities of modern ANNs. What makes you believe it's not possible? Or what kind of evidence would convince you that it's possible?

I believe that it would be possible to make artificial biological intelligence, but that is a whole different can of worms.

I don't think neural networks, language models, machine learning etc.. are even close to a general intelligence. Maybe there is some way to combine the two. I have seen some demonstrations of very primitive clusters of brain cells being connected to a computer and used to control a small machines direction.

If there is going to be an AGI I would predict this is how it will happen. While this would be very spectacular and impressive I'm still not worried about it because it would require existing in the physical world and not just some software that can run on any conventional computer.

Even if what you say is true (e.g. that the current ANN approach won't lead to AGI), isn't it the case that we can simulate biological cells on computers? Of course, it would push back the AGI timeline by quite a bit, since practically no one is working on this approach right now, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible in principle.

For the most part you get people thinking AGI isn't possible because of souls/ethereal magic. If pressed on this, they'll tend to deflect to "um quantum physics".

I'm of the mind is there is likely many was of simulating/emulating/creating intelligence. It would be highly surprising if there was only one way, and the universe happened to achieve this by the random walk of evolution. The only question for me is how much work is required to discover these other methods.

I would be curious to know exactly what is meant by simulating a biological cell on a computer. I don't believe in anything mystical such as a soul and think intelligence could be an emergent property of complexity. Maybe with enough processing power to simulate trillions of cells together something could emerge from it.

My thought process on why it might not be possible in principle with conventional computer hardware is how perfect its computations are. I could be completely wrong here, but if you can with perfect accuracy fast forward and rewind the state of the simulation then is it actually intelligent? With enough time you could reduce the whole thing to a computable problem.

Then again maybe you could do the same thing with a human mind. This seems like a kind of pointless philosophical perspective in my opinion until there is some way to test things like this.

I would love to know one way or the other on the feasibility of AGI on a silicon CPU. Maybe the results would determine that the human mind is actually as pre-determinable as a CPU and there is no such thing as genral intelligence at all.

>Maybe the results would determine that the human mind is actually as pre-determinable as a CPU and there is no such thing as genral intelligence at all.

I don't see how the conclusion follows from the premise.

Welcome to hard determinism

Many of the AGI worriers believe that a fast takeoff will mean the first time we know it's possible will be after the last chance to stop human extinction. I don't buy that myself, but for people who believe that, it's reasonable to want to avoid finding out if it's possible.

You see it every day -- in the mirror. It shows that a kilogram of matter can be arranged into a generally intelligent configuration. Assuming that there's nothing fundamentally special about the physics of the human brain, I see no reason why a functionally similar arrangement cannot be made out of silicon and software.

Unless you're a dualist the evidence staring right at you in the bathroom mirror.

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