Comment by myrmidon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by myrmidon | Hacker News Reader

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Do you agree that AGI can emerge from a bunch of haphazardly connected Neurons, using about 700MiB of procedurally generated initialization data (human DNA) and employing 1-2 decades of low-bandwidth, low-power (~25W) training?

You might even agree that not a single directed thought went into the design of that whole system.

Having established that, it seems laughable to me that it would be an "impossible fantasy" to replicate this with purpose-built silicon.

Sure, our current whole-system understanding could still be drastically improved, and the sheer scale of the reference implementation (human connectome) is still intimidating even compared to our most advanced chips, but I have absolutely zero doubt that AGI is just a matter of time (and continuous gradual progress).

If a lack of understanding did not stop nature, why should it stop us? :P

To me, all the arguments against AGI appear unconvincing, motivated by religion/faith, or based on definitional sophistry.

But I'm very open to have that view changed...

To me, all the arguments against AGI appear unconvincing, motivated by religion/faith, or based on definitional sophistry.

Religion is belief in the unknown without reason or logic.

Do you know of any inanimate object that is truly "intelligent"?

Without ever knowing or seeing a single, real working example, you "believe" and have "faith" that it is possible. By so doing, you are practicing religion --- not science.

That's like complaining about artificial, non-organic flight being a fantasy before the wright brothers. Which would not have been entirely wrong, but hardly a knockout argument as we now know with certainty.

There is a vast difference between "engineering challenges have not yet been proven moot by a working prototype" and "precluded by physics or mathematics".

The (in)animate distinction is more akin to net-positive fusion in a man-made vessel vs. in a gravity well rather than obeys the 2nd law of thermodynamics vs. perpetuum mobile.

That's like complaining about artificial, non-organic flight being a fantasy before the wright brothers.

Nope.

Before the Wright brothers, we knew it was scientifically possible to suspend objects heaver than air in an air current. For example, kites and balloons.

The only examples we have of "intelligence" are organic in nature.

Since we have no examples to the contrary; for all we know, "life" and "intelligence" could be somehow inter-related. And we don't currently fully understand or know how to engineer either one.

Yet people have "faith" --- just like the alchemists. "Believe" what you want --- but it's not science.

> The only examples we have of "intelligence" are organic in nature.

High-abstraction category-words such as "intelligence" are not fundamental properties of nature. They're made by man. Which means we currently happen to define intelligence in a way that we primarily observe in organic objects. So there's some circular reasoning in your argument. If we look at all the more fundamental building blocks such as information-processing, memory, adaptive algorithms, manipulating environments then we know all of them already are implementable in non-organic systems.

It is not a blind belief decoupled from reality. It is an argument based on the observation that the building-blocks we know about are there and they have not been put together yet due to complexity. There also is the observation that the "putting together" process has been following a trajectory that results in more and more capabilities (chess, go, partial information games, simulated environments, vision, language, art, programming, ...), i.e. there's extrapolation based on things that are already observable. Unless you can point at some lower-level piece that is only available in organic systems. Or why only organic systems should be capable of composing the pieces into a larger whole. I am not aware of any such limiting factor.

Just like "suspending" objects in air was possible and self-propelled machines were possible, even if not self-propelled flight had not yet been done at that time.

This is very nonconvincing to me, because you dance around the core of your own argument, refusing to state it plainly: Why would it be necessary for everything intelligent to consist of animated matter? You don't even offer a plausible hypothesis.

To me the null hypothesis is that non-organic intelligence is possible --at worst (!!)-- simply by emulating exactly what an intelligent organic entity does (but it seems obvious to me that this approach is likely to be wasteful and inefficient).

Why would it be necessary for everything intelligent to consist of animated matter?

It may not be necessary --- but at this point in time, we really don't know enough to state this as a fact.

What we do know is that our only working examples of "intelligence" are all organic and mostly analog --- not digital. Suggesting that real "intelligence" is possible without "life" --- is unsupported by any evidence and is a pure leap of faith at this time.

First, "It doesn't exist already" is an extremely poor argument against the technical feasibility of really anything :P

> Suggesting that real "intelligence" is possible without "life" --- is unsupported by any evidence and is a pure leap of faith at this time.

Strongly disagree on this; If you accept that brains effect intelligence by selfinteraction accoring to physical laws, then "computability" directly and inevitably follows. And that implies artificial brains are feasible...

And that implies artificial brains are feasible...

Given enough time, money, effort and energy, anything is *feasible* --- even converting lead into gold.

Expecting it to just *emerge* somehow on it's own without any real design or plan or understanding of the scope involved --- that goes way beyond *feasible* or *practical* and heads straight for *magical thinking*.

Is anyone expecting it to "just emerge somehow"?

This seems strawmanny. There has been an absolute ton of research into figuring out what kind of design/scope is necessary. More planning and research is happening all the time, and architecture is specifically being changed with a mind towards specific new functionalities. It's not haphazard; it's planned. Yes, there is some room for 'emergence' or learning, but that doesn't mean there isn't also a lot of structure and planning.

The picture you present of NN research is so far off from what I see actually being done in this field that I'm a little boggled. Are you sure you're in touch with what's actually happening in the field?

> Do you know of any inanimate object that is truly "intelligent"?

So, your argument is that by making something intelligent we would necessarily also make it animate?

That's reasonable, but doesn't impact the plausibility of AGI. “Artificial” is not “inanimate”.

Well put. I’ve wonder if some of those on the other side of the argument are actually, perhaps on some subconscious level, proponents of mind-body dualism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism

> To me, all the arguments against AGI appear unconvincing, motivated by religion/faith, or based on definitional sophistry.

Correction. I'm atheist. I don't see AGI for the future. Same reasons as the poster who responded to you below: evolution may not have had a design, but we know it works well on animated creatures.

We have yet to see any examples of inanimate objects exhibiting any sign of intelligence, or even instinct.

What we do know is that, even after billions of years of evolution, not a single rock has evolved to exhibit a sign of intelligence.

You're saying that with an intelligent hand directing the process, we can do better. I understand the argument, and I concede that it is a reasonable argument to make, I'm just unconvinced by it.

> We have yet to see any examples of inanimate objects exhibiting any sign of intelligence, or even instinct.

Can you give me a clear, minimal definition for both "intelligence" and "instinct"?

Because to me, instinct seems to be already achieved by existing inanimate control systems for decades now, and "decent understanding of natural human language" (as achieved by todays LLMs) is more than enough to count as intelligent for me.

If we just started simulating neurons in a brain exactly, what would prevent us from achieving inorganic intelligence in your view?

I don't really want to get involved in a discussion on where the fine dividing line is between intelligence and non-intelligence. We are fine determining intelligence at the extremes, but not in the large shades of grey in-between.

Most people (say, 999999 out of every 1000000) will consider a rock unintelligent and Stephen hawking to be intelligent. You can't call them wrong because "they cannot define intelligence".

> If we just started simulating neurons in a brain exactly, what would prevent us from achieving inorganic intelligence in your view?

Nothing. But the word "If" is doing all the heavy lifting in that argument. I mean, we aren't doing that at the moment, are we? It's not clear that we might ever discover exactly how the collection of neurons we call a brain "exactly works".

IOW, if the human brain was simpler, we'd be too simple to understand it: this may already be the case!

And the evidence for "we may not figure out how the brain works exactly enough to clone the mechanism it uses" is a lot larger than "we might figure out how the brain works well enough to clone the mechanism it uses."

This is why I remain unconvinced. Even though I think your position is a reasonable one to hold, the opposite position is, IMHO, just as reasonable. It's got nothing to do with religion or superstition.

"What we do know is that, even after billions of years of evolution, not a single rock has evolved to exhibit a sign of intelligence."

Is it even appropriate to apply "after billions of years of evolution" to rocks? Rocks don't evolve. Evolution can't act on them.

And, we aren't generally looking to "evolve" AI, so it's kinda a moot point there, too.

What is it about animation that, to you, is important for intelligence? Presumably it's the training data + agency, but.. are these not possible without physical-world "animation"?

But also: how come AI can't be animated?

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