Maybe our first AGI is just a Petri dish brain with a half-decent python API. Maybe it’s more sand-based, though.
https://www.oddee.com/australian-company-launches-worlds-fir...
the entire idea feels rather immoral to me, but it does exist.
Immoral by slippery slope is not a reasonable or rational argument. You're acting like nobody would have any qualms with it being a full sized human brain instead of a thousand neurons on a tiny plate.
It's an emotional reaction to an impression of these scientists that strips them of human decency or agency. There's nothing inevitable about this abusive idea you've concocted, and the only inevitability would come if each of the hundreds of scientists involved were some sort of psychopathic sadists with no regard for _any_ human life.
There's nothing immoral about cells in a petri dish, and there's absolutely no reason to assume that it directly leads to a fully enslaved in-vitro human.
Sort of. The main issue is the energy requirements. We could theoretically reproduce a human brain in SW today, it's just that it would be a really big energy hog and run very slowly and probably become insane quickly like any person trapped in a sensory deprived tank.
The real key development for AI and AGI is down at the metal level of computers- the memristor.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
The synapse in a brain is essentially a memristive element, and it's a very taxing one on the neuron. The equations is (change in charge)/(change in flux). Yes, a flux capacitor, sorta. It's the missing piece in fundamental electronics.
Making simple 2 element memristors is somewhat possible these days, though I've not really been in the space recently. Please, if anyone knows where to buy them, a real one not a claimed to be one, let me know. I'm willing to pay good money.
In Terms of AI, a memristor would require a total redesign of how we architect computers ( goodbye busses and physically separate memory, for one). But, you'd get a huge energy and time savings benefit. As in, you can run an LLM on a watch battery or small solar cell and let the environment train them to a degree.
Hopefully AI will accelerate their discovery and facilitate their introduction into cheap processing and construction of chips.
Isn't AGI defined to mean "matches humans in virtually all fields"? I don't think there is a single human capable of this.
“What we don’t yet understand” is just a horizon.
This reminds me of The Thought Emporium's project of teaching rat brain cells to play doom
It’s called a soul for the believers.
I call this the 'Cardinality Barrier'
Infinite and “finite but very very big” seem like a meaningful distinction here.
I once wondered if digital intelligences might be possible but would require an entire planet’s precious metals and require whole stars to power. That is: the “finite but very very big” case.
But I think your idea is constrained to if we wanted a digital computer, is it not? Humans can make intelligent life by accident. Surely we could hypothetically construct our own biological computer (or borrow one…) and make it more ideal for digital interface?
But since we don’t have a working theory of quantum gravity at such energies, the final verdict remains open.
But biological brain have significantly greater state space than conventional silicon computers because they're analog. The voltage across a transistor varies approximately continuously, but we only measure a single bit from that (or occasionally 2 for nand).
Everything in our universe is countable, which naturally includes biology. A bunch of physical laws are predicated on the universe being a countable substrate.
As far as possible reasons that a computer can’t achieve AGI go, this seems like the best one (assuming computer means digital computer of course).
But in a philosophical sense, a computer obeys the same laws of physics that a brain does, and the transistors are analog devices that are being used to create a digital architecture. So whatever makes you brain have uncountable states would also make a real digital computer have uncountable states. Of course we can claim that only the digital layer on top matters, but why?
As far as physicists believe at the moment, there's no way to ever observe a difference below the Planck level. Energy/distance/time/whatever. They all have a lower boundary of measurability. That's not as a practical issue, it's a theoretical one. According to the best models we currently have, there's literally no way to ever observe a difference below those levels.
If a difference smaller than that is relevant to brain function, then brains have a way to observe the difference. So I'm sure the field of physics eagerly awaits your explanation. They would love to see an experiment thoroughly disagree with a current model. That's the sort of thing scientists live for.
Swipes like this are against the HN guidelines. Please take a moment to read them and make an effort to observe them when commenting here.
I can't see how anything you said is a response to anything I said. My statement was very simple: if two models predict the same result, you can use either of them. As far as we have worked out so far, continuous and discrete spacetime give the same results for every experiment we can run. If you have an experiment where they don't, physicists would really love to see it.
My problem is with the interpretation of Planck units; they really do not appear in current theories as signifying any theoretical lower limit to measurability, as I must interpret that you claim by saying:
> As far as physicists believe at the moment, there's no way to ever observe a difference below the Planck level. Energy/distance/time/whatever. They all have a lower boundary of measurability. That's not as a practical issue, it's a theoretical one. According to the best models we currently have, there's literally no way to ever observe a difference below those levels.
For example, the Planck energy is a nice macroscopic quantity of approximately 2 gigajoules. For the Planck quantities that are more extreme, the measurement is not hampered by the theory but by practical issues.
Sure, we don't expect our theories to hold at Planck length, but this is not due to something that's baked into the Standard Model or general relativity.
And then you need to show how the same logic cannot apply to non-biological systems.