Hacker News Reader

Comment by tcdent | Hacker News Reader

Don't get me wrong, I am super excited about what AI is doing for technology. But this endless conversation about "what is AGI" is so boring.

It makes me think of every single public discussion that's ever been had about quantum, where you can't start the conversation unless you go through a quick 101 on what a qubit is.

As with any technology, there's not really a destination. There is only the process of improvement. The only real definitive point is when a technology becomes obsolete, though it is still kept alive through a celebration of its nostalgia.

AI will continue to improve. More workflows will become automated. And from our perception, no matter what the rapidness of advancement is, we're still frogs in water.

View on HN

I agree. It's an interesting discussion for those who have never taken college level philosophy classes I suppose. What consciousness/thought is is still a massively open question. Seeing people in the comments with what they think is their novel solution has already been posited like 400 years ago. Honestly it's kind of sad seeing this stuff on a forum like this. These posts are for sure the worst of Hackernews.

There are a bunch of these topics that everyone feels qualified to say something about. Consciousness, intelligence, education methods, nutrition, men vs women, economic systems etc.

It's a very emotional topic because people feel their self image threatened. It's a topic related to what is the meaning of being human. Yeah sure it should be a separate question, but emotionally it is connected to it in a deep level. The prospect of job replacement and social transformation is quite a threatening one.

So I'm somewhat understanding of this. It's not merely an academic topic, because these things will be adopted in the real world among real people. So you can't simply make everyone shut up who is an outsider or just heard about this stuff incidentally in the news and has superficial points to make.

I get it. It's just something we've thought about as long as we've been human, and still haven't figured out. It's frustrating when most of the people commenting don't know any of the source material. It's so arrogant.

>everyone feels qualified to say something about. Consciousness, intelligence, education methods, nutrition, men vs women, economic systems etc

Probably because everyone has first hand experience of the above. I'm not sure it's arrogant to talk about those, even without 'source material'.

Yes but bird aren't ornithologists. It's a bit like on Reddit, as a speaker of a language that's not so popular for learning, when there are some language learners asking questions, we get lots of confident but wrong answers about grammar or why something is said the way it is, or they confidently state its just an exception when there is actually a rule, or similar stuff. They often also confidently stick to false folk etymologies etc. Similarly people sometimes try to language-tutor their romantic partner and discover that it's actually not so easy. Just because you're a native speaker you are not good at explaining how the language works. Similarly even though you have a brain, you don't really know how it works.

> there's not really a destination. There is only the process of improvement

Surely you can appreciate that if the next stop on the journey of technology can take over the process of improvement itself that would make it an awfully notable stop? Maybe not "destination", but maybe worth the "endless conversation"?

I think it's not only the potential for self-improvement of AGI that is revolutionary. Even having an AGI that one could clone for a reasonable cost and have it work nonstop with its clones on any number of economically-valuable problems would be very revolutionary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com