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Comment by robg | Hacker News Reader

What is human level AI? Is it beating world champions at chess or go? Designing new molecules or drugs? Navigating automobiles down streets or spacecraft to planets? Diagnosing or treating common diseases?

These debates are frankly tiresome. Automation has been here to stay for quite a while. Every age has tried to call out the threats and benefits to humans. The pioneers drown out the noise by building the future.

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Human level AI is when you can ask it to go and learn about X and it goes and does exactly that without further instructions. How about that?

You are confusing succeeding a very specific task that has a limited scope and laser focus with human level AI. Presenting Go in a very specific way so that that AlphaGo can even process this limited world with few rules is certainly not human level AI.

I'm not sure they are. If we build specialized systems to handle 90% of economically valuable work that humans currently do, is that human level ai? Why not?

If that's the benchmark, then we've already achieved human level AI several times over the last few millennia, no?

A couple of months ago, I told gpt4 to find out Canadian exchange holidays. It binged the website, went in, parsed it and extracted the information without further instructions. Seems like a milestone achieved.

What people call "agi" but fail to accurately describe is an actual mind, with its own ultimate goals and ambitions. You can ask it to complete a task, and it may allocate some time for you. You won't own it. It will exist, grow and perform independently.

I would argue it would need a will of its own to be human level AI. Any intelligent human will come up with many things to work toward to improve their lives and the lives of others.

Emotions? Motivations? Self awareness?

To really reach another level of intelligence I think these are required. If I met a humanoid with zero of these, and I mean zero... I would wonder what's "intelligent" about that creature.

I'd argue these come from our basic human needs, which ultimately come from a desire to survive (or pass on genes).

I'm curious how general AI will behave with some yet unknown natural selection pressures, of sorts.

Don't give people bad ideas.

A machine that can do anything an average human can do whilst sitting at a computer.

The average human can’t do much of anything while sitting at a computer. I agree with GP that these conversations are tiresome because besides exploration and curiosity, it’s not obvious why we’d practically want to replicate AGI. There are billions of humans out there, and—not to devalue them—most of them don’t have commercially valuable skills in 2024. What I want are specialty AIs that will help me solve commercially interesting problems, and these AIs will little resemble human intelligence.

The average human can do plenty whilst sitting at a computer, far more than a computer can do on its own, and in fact the entire knowledge economy is based on that fact. Fortunately, your assertion about most humans is demonstrably false. If you can entirely automate what they do already, feel free to start a company and capture most of the world’s wealth creation.

Why replicate AGI? Wealth creation determines living standards and AGI would vastly increase wealth creation. That’s one reason.

What you want from AI is a different conversation. I agree the ultimate point of AI research is not necessarily to make AGI as per the above definition. It might be to say understand the universe or greatly accelerate technological progress. That’s a subjective call. But orthogonal to the problem of choosing a good definition of AGI.

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