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Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

282 points by lorepieri 3y ago

sidcool 3y ago
The article by Alan Turing is remarkable. He was so ahead of his time!
- dellorter 3y ago
  [flagged]
mz00 3y ago
How do we know which institutions to trust in safely deploying AGI? From my POV some kind of autonomous and generalized intelligence is inevitable and imminent - but who can be trusted to deliver something that works for the majority? Or is that a pipe dream?
- eimrine 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - luc_ 3y ago
    :eyes:
  - weego 3y ago
    ChatGPT, is that you?
    - eimrine 3y ago
      I hate post-2022 internet discussions because one is really common nowadays - talk about statements you don't like that they were written by bot. This accusation takes ridiculously low number of symbols, so it is impossible even to react to this kind of assumption because answering to troll using significantly more symbols is the definition of troll feeding. By the way, the message you are referring to consist of more than one statement and I can not even guess which one is bothering you.
      - boredumb 3y ago
        Don't worry, it's been happening to people since 2017 as a way to disregard real people disagreeing with their horrible political fads - now it's just 2022 and everything is a bot. Let's not forget on the the internet no one knows you're a dog.
      - dwighttk 3y ago
        even your reply sounds like it coulda been generated
        eimrine 3y ago
        Any possible params ending up with something like that? What layer of PG's "pyramid of disagree" is your answer? What about weego's one?
        asah 3y ago
        LOL, what GPT4 actually says: It's clear that we've reached a point in online discussions where the lines between human and machine are blurred, especially when conversing on complex topics like AI and blockchain. My comment wasn't intended to reduce your argument's credibility but rather to highlight this fascinating phenomenon. That said, returning to the original topic, I believe that trust in government is multifaceted and not easily boiled down to "good guys" versus "bad guys." Furthermore, while blockchain-based systems are designed to resist central control, it's a mistake to think that governments are incapable of influencing or regulating these technologies. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can strike a balance between technological advancement and responsible governance.
        eimrine 3y ago
        I am in a funny situation because of arguing to a really bot. But wait a minute. The lines between human and machine might be blurred when you are talking to some Customer Support specialist, but it is never blurred when discussing any sciences (Math, Physics, Programming and of course Blockchain). What about good guys vs bad guys issue from comment, your GPT4 has correctly discovered sarcasm which has happened before human actor did it which tells to me that the lines between human and machine is somewhat blurred indeed. > I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can strike a balance between technological advancement and responsible governance. I'd love the same, that's why I threw the "good guys" point. Also I really believe that some kind of Blockchain-powered AI actor will be a game changer with totally unpredictably outcomes because it will be a biggest revolution in power balance since nuclear bombs.
- weego 3y ago
  It's not a concern for any current living generations, so any answers are moot because the landscape of the entire friction between corporations, governments and the people will likely have shifted dramatically to where our opinions today have no relevance to their issues.
  - FartyMcFarter 3y ago
    > It's not a concern for any current living generations How much would you be willing to bet? I understand the skepticism, but to assign 0% probability to it happening in our lifetimes seems excessively low.
    - mrob 3y ago
      Betting against business as normal is a lose-lose scenario. AGI never exceeds humans: You lose the bet. AGI exceeds humans, but recursive self-improvement is impossible: Authoritarian dystopia. Your winnings belong to whoever controls the AGI. AGI exceeds humans, and recursive self-improvement is possible: Extinction of all biological life. There are no winnings.
      - SanderNL 3y ago
        AGI slightly exceeds humans, but they are actually kind of shitty in all sorts of annoying and hard to predict ways. They turn out to be fantastic slackers and liars. Your voters, to put it mildly, don't like them. It's hard to monetize them and we all agree we should focus our efforts on something else.
    - nobody9999 3y ago
      >How much would you be willing to bet? I understand the skepticism, but to assign 0% probability to it happening in our lifetimes seems excessively low. Not GP, but how much you got? AGI (or hard AI, or whatever you want to call it) strongly implies not just reasoning and interaction with the environment, but self awareness. Something which is conveniently ignored by folks who claim that AGI is just around the corner, and welcome their new 'grey goo' overlords. As Heinlein (it's fiction of course, but the principle that self awareness is necessary for AGI -- not (just) numbers of neurons/data points -- holds IMHO) put it[0]: "Am not going to argue whether a machine can 'really' be alive, 'really' be self-aware. Is a virus self-aware? Nyet. How about oyster? I doubt it. A cat? Almost certainly. A human? Don't know about you, tovarishch, but I am. Somewhere along evolutionary chain from macromolecule to human brain self-awareness crept in. Psychologists assert it happens automatically whenever a brain acquires certain very high number of associational paths. Can't see it matters whether paths are protein or platinum. ('Soul?' Does a dog have a soul? How about cockroach?)" As we've seen[1], a variety of meat machines (i.e., animals like us) have varying levels of self awareness. Without that trait, AGI won't be achievable. Without the ability to recognize and incorporate the concept that one is an entity with existence separate from the rest of the world, there is no real awareness or consciousness. I'd even go so far to posit that until human children are able to understand object permanence and that their mental states aren't globally available to everyone, they don't meet the standard of "self-awareness." That's a hard problem, and while we have some conceptual ideas about how that might arise, we have no mechanism or even a foundation for inculcating such a trait into the algorithms folks call "AI". Until that problem is solved, there will be no AGI. Full stop. And I find it unlikely in the extreme that we will gain the scientific/engineering know how to make that happen in our lifetimes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness Edit: Finished my thought.
- weberer 3y ago
  I don't really understand the question. Its like saying "who can be trusted to deploy computers?". Everyone with the resources is going to do so, whether you "trust" them or not.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  The real danger in the next few years will be the extreme operating speed of the types of fairly general purpose AIs that we already have such as GPT. This will increase to be dozens of times faster than what humans are capable of. That creates a very strong type of leverage for operators and an incentive to remove slow humans from the loop. Overall transfer of control to these types of systems may lead to a precarious lack of real agency and capability to adapt fast enough for humans. As well as danger from things like smart computer viruses taking over the systems. I think the only way to be relatively safe from those issues is to limit the hardware performance.
  - SanderNL 3y ago
    I don't want be too human-centric, but to be completely honest we haven't seen the slightest proof that human intelligence is not something special. I know lots of animals are pretty clever, none approach us in any practical sense. While it looks like an evolutionairy fluke that can be approached or even exceeded by other species - either on this or another planet - in the blink of an eye, I think that's actually more speculative than we would care to admit. We don't know. Maybe human intelligence is a very close approximation of cognition's equivalent of physic's light speed. Increasing it may turn out to be prohibitively expensive. There's lots of precedence for animals having acquired features close at or actually at the physical maximum of whatever it is they are optimizing for. To be clear, I'm not convinced of anything either way but I'd think it would as fantastic as it would be slightly depressing to find out human intelligence actually is some kind of global maximum with some exceptions like machines using energy harvested from black hole systems or something.
    - eimrine 3y ago
      > we haven't seen the slightest proof that human intelligence is not something special. Have we seen the slightest proof of opposite? > I know lots of animals are pretty clever, none approach us in any practical sense. What senses might you consider as enough practical? Have you heard about Koko? What do you think about corvidae?
      - 3y ago
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  If an AGI is possible at all, it's not going to be something that you control. The issue isn't whether someone trustworthy creates it. The issue is, no matter who creates it, it will decide what it's going to do. Its creator will not have real control. So having it "work for the majority" isn't so much a pipe dream, it's more of a roll of the dice, with completely unknown odds.
  - suby 3y ago
    It's hard to talk about this and clearly convey all meaning. If you're saying that it will decide because neural nets are black boxes which we don't have a complete understanding of, and we're without a clear way to analyze their behavior, I can see where you're coming from. But these things will not be beyond our influence. They're going to be slaves to the computations encoded in the neural net connections / weights. We're going to shape / mold them through a process akin to natural selection. We're going to select for intelligences that want to help humanity. It's not going to be a roll of a normal dice, it'll be more like the roll of a weighted dice. And we're going to, I believe, get better tools / theories for understanding the output of these neural nets so we will be able to conduct this selection with some confidence. Humans can be said to decide what we're going to do thanks to an uncaring, unconscious, and brutal evolutionary process that prioritized self-interest, survival, and reproduction. It's all about the selection process, and this time around we have a hand in guiding it. Just my two cents anyway.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Will an AGI have the ability to decide for itself? If so, then how can you make it what you want it to be (with any certainty)? And if not, then how is it "general"? To me, it's kind of like raising kids. You try to train their neural nets to bias them toward doing what you think is good and right. And that sometimes works. Yes, I think it's fair to think of it as biasing the dice. But it's sure not 100%. They'll still decide which of your values they keep, and which ones they throw away as being stupid. And you can't stop them from doing that. I guess, to try to respond to your direct point, that if it's an AGI, then it's less deterministically driven by the training data than we might wish.
xvilka 3y ago
How is it possible to make an introduction to something that doesn't exist?
- luc_ 3y ago
  You need theory before you get implementation.
  - heyitsguay 3y ago
    Wager: None of the theory on this page will have any bearing on the implementation of a real world AI system that solves any problem of interest. Not that there aren't problems to solve regarding AI, just that this line of inquiry won't be relevant to solving them. It'll be complicated boring work dealing with power structures, economics, and social movements, not thought experiments about omnipotent Others.
    - mdp2021 3y ago
      You will have to be clearer, because I submitted here information about an «implementation of a real world AI system that solves [a] problem of interest» through some «theory on this page» only hours ago. It is not fully clear what you mean with "«this line of inquiry»", because the submission does not seem to deal with «omnipotent Others», and because the «boring work» will have no foundation without the actual product and its theoretical and technical enablers.
    - esafak 3y ago
      "In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." Eisenhower.
  - m463 3y ago
    I'm sure there are plenty of things we've implemented without theory, such as global warming or the economy.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Most of the history of technological development is the other way around. Theory-driven novel engineering is actually quite rare.
heyitsguay 3y ago
This is one of those conversations that happens so much here it's too exhausting to repeat in its entirety, but -- if you're looking to learn about the real questions and challenges faced by real modern AI in real world systems, this is not a good resource. It will leave you with the wrong impression of the issues faced in the field.
myguestacc 3y ago
"Some of the doubts about the possibility of AGI come from misconceptions on what AGI attempts to achieve or what computers can do. The previous subsection has clarified the former issue, while an analysis of the latter issue can be found here." Except for that the previous subsection didn't clarify that at all.
stareatgoats 3y ago
As a novice this looks to me like a solid resource for gaining an overview of the different academic traditions aiming at some sort of eventual AGI. I don't know the author but from the bio it seems he has been teaching AI at the university level since at least 2005. Which indicates reassuring insight into the field.
Ntuthuko_hlela 3y ago
Thank you!
SeanLuke 3y ago
> Partly due to the recognized difficulty of the problem, in the 1970s-1980s mainstream AI gradually moved away from general-purpose intelligent systems, and turned to domain-specific problems and special-purpose solutions... I think there's little evidence for this. What happened in the 1980s was the introduction of and overselling of expert systems. These systems applied AI techniques to specific problems: but those techniques themselves were still pretty foundational. This is like saying that because electricity was used for custom things, we started inventing custom electricity. > Consequently, the field currently called "AI" consists of many loosely related subfields without a common foundation or framework, and suffers from an identity crisis: Nonsense. AI of course consists of loosely related subfields with no common foundation. But even back in the 1960s, when a fair chunk of (Soft) AI had something approaching a foundation (search), the identity of the field was not defined by this but rather by a common goal: to create algorithms which, generally speaking, can perform tasks that we as humans believe we alone are capable of doing because we possess Big Brains. This identity-by-common-goal hasn't changed. So this web page has a fair bit of apologetics and mild shade applied to soft AI. What it doesn't do is provide any real criticism of the AGI field. And there's a lot to offer. AGI has a reasonable number of serious researchers. But it is also replete with snake oil, armchair philosophers, and fanboy hobbyists. Indeed the very name (AGI) is a rebranding. The original, long accepted term was Hard AI, but it accumulated so much contempt that the word itself was changed by its practitioners. This isn't uncommon for ultrasoft areas of AI: ALife has long had this issue (minus the snake oil). But at least they're honest about it.
mwlp 3y ago
I'm glad to see Dr. Wang is still doing well. I had the pleasure of interviewing him for my high school journalism class back in 2015. Cool to see how far we've come since then.
plamic 3y ago
bravo!
danbruc 3y ago
Build and train something to the point that it can read books, watch lectures and gain new knowledge by itself. When it has never heard about calculus and you give some calculus books and lectures to it and after that it can solve calculus problems, declare victory.
- justanotherjoe 3y ago
  thats what i thought as well. There should be another way to learn aside from / on top of backprop. How can you learn quickly with backprop? And what is thinking but real time learning.
- skepticATX 3y ago
  Right. I think one reason that the definition of AGI is so contentious is that we're not that close to it. All of the current benchmarks are interesting but I don't see how we ever use those to declare that AGI has been reached. And quite frankly, I don't think we'd even care about most of them if we had a truly intelligent system. For me, if hook up an AI with no training to a vehicle and it drives at a human level in arbitrary scenarios, I'd consider it to be AGI. It seems obvious to me that we're not very close to this.
  - famouswaffles 3y ago
    >For me, if hook up an AI with no training to a vehicle and it drives at a human level in arbitrary scenarios Lol what human with no training is going to succeed at driving ?
    - skepticATX 3y ago
      Most teenagers are at least somewhat competent from the very beginning. The rest of the time is spent becoming confident.
      - famouswaffles 3y ago
        I really beg to differ lol and I imagine many instructors would say the same. Humans who have never driven before are not capable of driving unsupervised and there are a lot of laws in place to make sure they don't get the chance to.
YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
>> In the past, there were some ambitious projects aiming at this goal, though they all failed. So some people like to repeat. Yet, outside of the hand-picked examples in the article (the 5th generation computer project? Blast from the past!) there are a whole bunch of classic AI domains where real progress has been achieved in the last few decades. Here's a few: * Game-playing and adversarial search: from Deep Blue to AlphaGo and muZero, minimax-like search has continued to dominate. * Automated planning and schdeduling: e.g. used by NASA in automated navigation systems on its spaceships and Mars rovers (e.g. Perserverance) [1] * Automated theorem proving: probably the clearest, most comprehensible success of classical AI. Proof assitants are most popular today. * Boolean satisfiability solving (SAT): SAT solvers based on the Conflict Driver Clause Learning algorithm can now solve many instances of traditionally hard SAT problems [2]. * Program verification and model checking: model checking is a staple in the semiconductor industry [3] and in software engineering fields like security. Of course, none of all that is considered Artificial Intelligence anymore: because they work very well [4]. _____________ [1] https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/technology-onepagers/automated_planning_scheduling.html https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/technology-onepag... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-driven_clause_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-driven_clause_learnin... [3] https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/7/253448-program-verification/fulltext https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/7/253448-program-verif... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- mdp2021 3y ago
  > considered Artificial Intelligence anymore That is just the confusion between AI and AGI - which may seem to be peaking for some reason (in the past few days it seemed like a zombie apocalypse). The so-called "AI effect" is said by some to originate from some "Ah but this is not intelligent" - but there where we wanted to solve a problem of replacing intelligent action, not of implementing it. Be contented with the rough discriminator "I would have had to pay an intelligent professional otherwise". To speak about «powerful AI, with broad capabilities at the human level and beyond» Ben Goertzel adopted and popularized 'AGI': https://goertzel.org/who-coined-the-term-agi/ https://goertzel.org/who-coined-the-term-agi/ Edit, update: this confusion is like having robotics and some people rising a "Ah but this is not Artificial General Ability".
tpoacher 3y ago
AGI is not a difficult "problem". It's a difficult "definition". Given very specific, practical, functional definitions, AGI is a breeze.
- trabant00 3y ago
  I keep hearing this argument that we already have AI, it's just the naysayers move the definition. Level 5 autonomous driving is specific, practical, functionally defined. Where's the breeze implementation?
  - tpoacher 3y ago
    GTA San Andreas /s
  - gondolgames 3y ago
    Are you sure level 5 autonomous driving is specific? What would be the exact goal behind decisions in such a system? Not even talking about the trolley problem, would the software optimize for speed or not harming people, for example? Obviously we would want a combination of both, otherwise people can either get harmed or not get anywhere in time. But then, how fast should it take a corner? How much chance of human harm should it allow to get somewhere fast? Furthermore, what do we mean by human harm? The system would obviously need to know what human harm is, to be able to avoid it. Which requires defining human and defining harm, both of which are incredibly difficult to do specifically - more on this by Rob Miles here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PKx3kS7f4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PKx3kS7f4A I don't think level 5 autonomous driving is specifically defined. We just don't have systems intelligent enough for this to be a problem yet.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  > Given very specific, practical, functional definitions, AGI is a breeze We have a few, but the difficulty is getting to a model that is portable to higher functions. ("Here is a feedback over the details of a world model ... Now understand that book")
- romesc 3y ago
amelius 3y ago
Better title: "Artificial General Intelligence – We don't know the heck where this is going but here are some thoughts"
- stuckinhell 3y ago
  I've been forced to work with a team of very very smart Phds from ivy league universities to help put together an explanation deck for the c-suite. They've informally told me, the neural nets AI tech is beyond human understanding. Everybody can only explain very small pieces of it,and no one knows how the pieces work together.
  - layer8 3y ago
    Yes. In a recent HN submission, ChatGPT was listed as a “scientific advance” of the past year. While it’s certainly some kind of advance, to me it seems to be more on the engineering side than on the scientific understanding side.
    - Sharlin 3y ago
      Definitely engineering. It’s not entirely wrong to say that the two reasons it took us until 2022 to make a ChatGPT are 1) the computing power needed and 2) the size of the training corpus needed. The same goes for other generative AI – it took a corpus of a couple billion images to train a Stable Diffusion model.
      - amelius 3y ago
        You may argue that it took a leap of insight to get to transformer models, though.
        charcircuit 3y ago
        That was not an innovation of ChatGPT.
stanfordkid 3y ago
It's fairly clear to me that there is no such thing as AGI. Intelligence is a process of integrating sensory input with action and reward mechanisms -- nothing more, nothing less. Are there specific structures and architectures that have evolved that are very unique which give humans, say, language ability or visual processing? Certainly. Perhaps by gods spark or some random chance on the board game of life human beings developed examples of very particular structures. Perhaps there are undiscovered ones lying within the minds of peregrine falcons, tree roots or deep sea squid. We don't even know how to look for them because we don't even know such perception and intelligence exists. The point I'm trying to make is that there is no "goal post" of AGI, there is no quantification of intelligence yet. We don't even know what sorts of intelligence exist out there because we haven't even begun to fully characterize what it is. It seems foolish to me to search for something when we can't even define it. It's like trying to find "the ultimate general animal" when what you really have is a phylogenetic tree of huge diversity.
- photon_lines 3y ago
  Sorry, but I completely disagree with your general take. An AGI is a generalized agent which is able to perform extreme information compression on any available set of inputs. Think Force = m*a and coming up with the laws of the universe. You can store each possible action in memory of all available results OR -- a generalized agent will find the most succinct and least complex form of modelling the state of a system. An AGI to me in other words is a form of intelligence which is able to extract information and compress it such a way to not allow the lossy compression or storage to hinder its ability to predict real outputs from a set of training data fed into it. By the way, I have some ideas on how to create one and I'll be sharing some of the key algorithms and data structures that I'll be using here for anyone interested: https://github.com/photonlines/AGI-Algorithms-and-Prototypes/ https://github.com/photonlines/AGI-Algorithms-and-Prototypes...
  - esafak 3y ago
    Intelligence as compression is a well-established notion. An earlier debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24395822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24395822
wslh 3y ago
> ...though they all failed. I know these words are in the introduction but until now ALL projects failed. Not logical pedantry intended. A little bit offtopic but I think currently the greatest superintelligence observed is the Universe or G‑d for believers.
Joeri 3y ago
I find it telling that the section on ethics has nothing on the rights of AGI. If we create true AGI it will likely be a digital person, and digital people should have rights. All talk of ethics seems to be focused on alignment of AI rules to human needs, not alignment of human rules to AI needs. This makes me think the first true AGI systems will end up as digital slaves. And yes, I know the very idea of AI rights offends those who think AI can’t be a person because it’s just an algorithm. Well, so are humans, just a DNA program executing massively parallel. The implementation does not determine personhood, only the behavior.
- esafak 3y ago
  What is the basis of an AI's rights? Why do you believe they exist? If an AI's state (essence) can be perfectly persisted and replicated, as it can due to their digital nature, there is nothing to be lost if an AI ceases to exist and is rebooted in another AI. If the Star Trek transporter could replicate you would you care if it killed your existing copy in the process?
  - kaibee 3y ago
    > If the Star Trek transporter could replicate you would you care if it killed your existing copy in the process? Uh, obviously?
    - esafak 3y ago
      It's not obvious to me. Why is transporter death bad if you are identically replicated ?
      - xcv123 3y ago
        Because the transporter replica is not you. That is a separate person with their own separate consciousness. You are murdered and someone else is born.
        janalsncm 3y ago
d_burfoot 3y ago
It's strange to write a history of AI research without talking about the three big epochs: - logical/symbolic AI, aka GOFAI, which led to work like SAT solvers and STRIPS planners - classical label-based Machine Learning. Here the Perceptron was the starting point and the Support Vector Machine was the paradigmatic result. - modern self-supervised raw-data ML, of which GPT is the pinnacle result. It's very interesting to think about what motivated each era, what their blind spots were, and why people who worked in that timeframe couldn't see why the successor era was obviously (in retrospect) superior.
- visarga 3y ago
  I’d split modern ML era in pre and post gpt3 (2020)
- AareyBaba 3y ago
  You omitted the 90's when artificial life, genetic algorithms, subsumption architecture were the research topics.
aaroninsf 3y ago
AFAICT this is an incomplete first draft? As others have said, skipping over the entire era of classic AI in the LISP/Prolog era from SHRDLU to Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding, is an egregious ommission. Also,I don't immediately find a discussion of either multi-agent coordination or multi-modal ML models.
mbgerring 3y ago
Not asked: “Why do this?” So much of the literature takes the idea that this is something that should be built for granted, and only asks whether it should be done. I literally do not understand why anyone wants to build this in the first place.
- criddell 3y ago
  I think the why is obvious — to make money. I think a lot of this discussion is around human-level AGI. Does it have to be human-level for it to be an AGI? What would a minimally intelligent AGI be like?
janalsncm 3y ago
I’m still skeptical that AGI is a coherent concept, mostly because I am skeptical that general intelligence is one thing rather than a cluster of capabilities, and I am skeptical than humans are even the most “generally intelligent” species on the planet. https://youtu.be/zsXP8qeFF6A https://youtu.be/zsXP8qeFF6A Here is a video demonstrating the working memory of a chimpanzee. It is obviously considerably better than a human’s. Given this information we must accept one of the following are true: - humans do not have the highest general intelligence of all animals - working memory is not a necessary component of general intelligence - other human capabilities (communication for example) can make up for our working memory deficiencies
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

282 points by lorepieri 3y ago

sidcool 3y ago

The article by Alan Turing is remarkable. He was so ahead of his time!

dellorter 3y ago
[flagged]

mz00 3y ago

How do we know which institutions to trust in safely deploying AGI? From my POV some kind of autonomous and generalized intelligence is inevitable and imminent - but who can be trusted to deliver something that works for the majority? Or is that a pipe dream?

eimrine 3y ago
[flagged]
- luc_ 3y ago
  :eyes:
- weego 3y ago
  ChatGPT, is that you?
  - eimrine 3y ago
    I hate post-2022 internet discussions because one is really common nowadays - talk about statements you don't like that they were written by bot. This accusation takes ridiculously low number of symbols, so it is impossible even to react to this kind of assumption because answering to troll using significantly more symbols is the definition of troll feeding. By the way, the message you are referring to consist of more than one statement and I can not even guess which one is bothering you.
    - boredumb 3y ago
      Don't worry, it's been happening to people since 2017 as a way to disregard real people disagreeing with their horrible political fads - now it's just 2022 and everything is a bot. Let's not forget on the the internet no one knows you're a dog.
    - dwighttk 3y ago
      even your reply sounds like it coulda been generated
      - eimrine 3y ago
        Any possible params ending up with something like that? What layer of PG's "pyramid of disagree" is your answer? What about weego's one?
        asah 3y ago
        LOL, what GPT4 actually says: It's clear that we've reached a point in online discussions where the lines between human and machine are blurred, especially when conversing on complex topics like AI and blockchain. My comment wasn't intended to reduce your argument's credibility but rather to highlight this fascinating phenomenon. That said, returning to the original topic, I believe that trust in government is multifaceted and not easily boiled down to "good guys" versus "bad guys." Furthermore, while blockchain-based systems are designed to resist central control, it's a mistake to think that governments are incapable of influencing or regulating these technologies. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can strike a balance between technological advancement and responsible governance.
        eimrine 3y ago
        I am in a funny situation because of arguing to a really bot. But wait a minute. The lines between human and machine might be blurred when you are talking to some Customer Support specialist, but it is never blurred when discussing any sciences (Math, Physics, Programming and of course Blockchain). What about good guys vs bad guys issue from comment, your GPT4 has correctly discovered sarcasm which has happened before human actor did it which tells to me that the lines between human and machine is somewhat blurred indeed. > I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can strike a balance between technological advancement and responsible governance. I'd love the same, that's why I threw the "good guys" point. Also I really believe that some kind of Blockchain-powered AI actor will be a game changer with totally unpredictably outcomes because it will be a biggest revolution in power balance since nuclear bombs.
weego 3y ago
It's not a concern for any current living generations, so any answers are moot because the landscape of the entire friction between corporations, governments and the people will likely have shifted dramatically to where our opinions today have no relevance to their issues.
- FartyMcFarter 3y ago
  > It's not a concern for any current living generations How much would you be willing to bet? I understand the skepticism, but to assign 0% probability to it happening in our lifetimes seems excessively low.
  - mrob 3y ago
    Betting against business as normal is a lose-lose scenario. AGI never exceeds humans: You lose the bet. AGI exceeds humans, but recursive self-improvement is impossible: Authoritarian dystopia. Your winnings belong to whoever controls the AGI. AGI exceeds humans, and recursive self-improvement is possible: Extinction of all biological life. There are no winnings.
    - SanderNL 3y ago
      AGI slightly exceeds humans, but they are actually kind of shitty in all sorts of annoying and hard to predict ways. They turn out to be fantastic slackers and liars. Your voters, to put it mildly, don't like them. It's hard to monetize them and we all agree we should focus our efforts on something else.
  - nobody9999 3y ago
    >How much would you be willing to bet? I understand the skepticism, but to assign 0% probability to it happening in our lifetimes seems excessively low. Not GP, but how much you got? AGI (or hard AI, or whatever you want to call it) strongly implies not just reasoning and interaction with the environment, but self awareness. Something which is conveniently ignored by folks who claim that AGI is just around the corner, and welcome their new 'grey goo' overlords. As Heinlein (it's fiction of course, but the principle that self awareness is necessary for AGI -- not (just) numbers of neurons/data points -- holds IMHO) put it[0]: "Am not going to argue whether a machine can 'really' be alive, 'really' be self-aware. Is a virus self-aware? Nyet. How about oyster? I doubt it. A cat? Almost certainly. A human? Don't know about you, tovarishch, but I am. Somewhere along evolutionary chain from macromolecule to human brain self-awareness crept in. Psychologists assert it happens automatically whenever a brain acquires certain very high number of associational paths. Can't see it matters whether paths are protein or platinum. ('Soul?' Does a dog have a soul? How about cockroach?)" As we've seen[1], a variety of meat machines (i.e., animals like us) have varying levels of self awareness. Without that trait, AGI won't be achievable. Without the ability to recognize and incorporate the concept that one is an entity with existence separate from the rest of the world, there is no real awareness or consciousness. I'd even go so far to posit that until human children are able to understand object permanence and that their mental states aren't globally available to everyone, they don't meet the standard of "self-awareness." That's a hard problem, and while we have some conceptual ideas about how that might arise, we have no mechanism or even a foundation for inculcating such a trait into the algorithms folks call "AI". Until that problem is solved, there will be no AGI. Full stop. And I find it unlikely in the extreme that we will gain the scientific/engineering know how to make that happen in our lifetimes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness Edit: Finished my thought.
weberer 3y ago
I don't really understand the question. Its like saying "who can be trusted to deploy computers?". Everyone with the resources is going to do so, whether you "trust" them or not.
ilaksh 3y ago
The real danger in the next few years will be the extreme operating speed of the types of fairly general purpose AIs that we already have such as GPT. This will increase to be dozens of times faster than what humans are capable of. That creates a very strong type of leverage for operators and an incentive to remove slow humans from the loop. Overall transfer of control to these types of systems may lead to a precarious lack of real agency and capability to adapt fast enough for humans. As well as danger from things like smart computer viruses taking over the systems. I think the only way to be relatively safe from those issues is to limit the hardware performance.
- SanderNL 3y ago
  I don't want be too human-centric, but to be completely honest we haven't seen the slightest proof that human intelligence is not something special. I know lots of animals are pretty clever, none approach us in any practical sense. While it looks like an evolutionairy fluke that can be approached or even exceeded by other species - either on this or another planet - in the blink of an eye, I think that's actually more speculative than we would care to admit. We don't know. Maybe human intelligence is a very close approximation of cognition's equivalent of physic's light speed. Increasing it may turn out to be prohibitively expensive. There's lots of precedence for animals having acquired features close at or actually at the physical maximum of whatever it is they are optimizing for. To be clear, I'm not convinced of anything either way but I'd think it would as fantastic as it would be slightly depressing to find out human intelligence actually is some kind of global maximum with some exceptions like machines using energy harvested from black hole systems or something.
  - eimrine 3y ago
    > we haven't seen the slightest proof that human intelligence is not something special. Have we seen the slightest proof of opposite? > I know lots of animals are pretty clever, none approach us in any practical sense. What senses might you consider as enough practical? Have you heard about Koko? What do you think about corvidae?
    - 3y ago
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
If an AGI is possible at all, it's not going to be something that you control. The issue isn't whether someone trustworthy creates it. The issue is, no matter who creates it, it will decide what it's going to do. Its creator will not have real control. So having it "work for the majority" isn't so much a pipe dream, it's more of a roll of the dice, with completely unknown odds.
- suby 3y ago
  It's hard to talk about this and clearly convey all meaning. If you're saying that it will decide because neural nets are black boxes which we don't have a complete understanding of, and we're without a clear way to analyze their behavior, I can see where you're coming from. But these things will not be beyond our influence. They're going to be slaves to the computations encoded in the neural net connections / weights. We're going to shape / mold them through a process akin to natural selection. We're going to select for intelligences that want to help humanity. It's not going to be a roll of a normal dice, it'll be more like the roll of a weighted dice. And we're going to, I believe, get better tools / theories for understanding the output of these neural nets so we will be able to conduct this selection with some confidence. Humans can be said to decide what we're going to do thanks to an uncaring, unconscious, and brutal evolutionary process that prioritized self-interest, survival, and reproduction. It's all about the selection process, and this time around we have a hand in guiding it. Just my two cents anyway.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Will an AGI have the ability to decide for itself? If so, then how can you make it what you want it to be (with any certainty)? And if not, then how is it "general"? To me, it's kind of like raising kids. You try to train their neural nets to bias them toward doing what you think is good and right. And that sometimes works. Yes, I think it's fair to think of it as biasing the dice. But it's sure not 100%. They'll still decide which of your values they keep, and which ones they throw away as being stupid. And you can't stop them from doing that. I guess, to try to respond to your direct point, that if it's an AGI, then it's less deterministically driven by the training data than we might wish.

xvilka 3y ago

How is it possible to make an introduction to something that doesn't exist?

luc_ 3y ago
You need theory before you get implementation.
- heyitsguay 3y ago
  Wager: None of the theory on this page will have any bearing on the implementation of a real world AI system that solves any problem of interest. Not that there aren't problems to solve regarding AI, just that this line of inquiry won't be relevant to solving them. It'll be complicated boring work dealing with power structures, economics, and social movements, not thought experiments about omnipotent Others.
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    You will have to be clearer, because I submitted here information about an «implementation of a real world AI system that solves [a] problem of interest» through some «theory on this page» only hours ago. It is not fully clear what you mean with "«this line of inquiry»", because the submission does not seem to deal with «omnipotent Others», and because the «boring work» will have no foundation without the actual product and its theoretical and technical enablers.
  - esafak 3y ago
    "In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." Eisenhower.
- m463 3y ago
  I'm sure there are plenty of things we've implemented without theory, such as global warming or the economy.
- adastra22 3y ago
  Most of the history of technological development is the other way around. Theory-driven novel engineering is actually quite rare.

heyitsguay 3y ago

This is one of those conversations that happens so much here it's too exhausting to repeat in its entirety, but -- if you're looking to learn about the real questions and challenges faced by real modern AI in real world systems, this is not a good resource. It will leave you with the wrong impression of the issues faced in the field.

myguestacc 3y ago

"Some of the doubts about the possibility of AGI come from misconceptions on what AGI attempts to achieve or what computers can do. The previous subsection has clarified the former issue, while an analysis of the latter issue can be found here." Except for that the previous subsection didn't clarify that at all.

stareatgoats 3y ago

As a novice this looks to me like a solid resource for gaining an overview of the different academic traditions aiming at some sort of eventual AGI. I don't know the author but from the bio it seems he has been teaching AI at the university level since at least 2005. Which indicates reassuring insight into the field.

Ntuthuko_hlela 3y ago

Thank you!

SeanLuke 3y ago

> Partly due to the recognized difficulty of the problem, in the 1970s-1980s mainstream AI gradually moved away from general-purpose intelligent systems, and turned to domain-specific problems and special-purpose solutions... I think there's little evidence for this. What happened in the 1980s was the introduction of and overselling of expert systems. These systems applied AI techniques to specific problems: but those techniques themselves were still pretty foundational. This is like saying that because electricity was used for custom things, we started inventing custom electricity. > Consequently, the field currently called "AI" consists of many loosely related subfields without a common foundation or framework, and suffers from an identity crisis: Nonsense. AI of course consists of loosely related subfields with no common foundation. But even back in the 1960s, when a fair chunk of (Soft) AI had something approaching a foundation (search), the identity of the field was not defined by this but rather by a common goal: to create algorithms which, generally speaking, can perform tasks that we as humans believe we alone are capable of doing because we possess Big Brains. This identity-by-common-goal hasn't changed. So this web page has a fair bit of apologetics and mild shade applied to soft AI. What it doesn't do is provide any real criticism of the AGI field. And there's a lot to offer. AGI has a reasonable number of serious researchers. But it is also replete with snake oil, armchair philosophers, and fanboy hobbyists. Indeed the very name (AGI) is a rebranding. The original, long accepted term was Hard AI, but it accumulated so much contempt that the word itself was changed by its practitioners. This isn't uncommon for ultrasoft areas of AI: ALife has long had this issue (minus the snake oil). But at least they're honest about it.

mwlp 3y ago

I'm glad to see Dr. Wang is still doing well. I had the pleasure of interviewing him for my high school journalism class back in 2015. Cool to see how far we've come since then.

plamic 3y ago

bravo!

danbruc 3y ago

Build and train something to the point that it can read books, watch lectures and gain new knowledge by itself. When it has never heard about calculus and you give some calculus books and lectures to it and after that it can solve calculus problems, declare victory.

justanotherjoe 3y ago
thats what i thought as well. There should be another way to learn aside from / on top of backprop. How can you learn quickly with backprop? And what is thinking but real time learning.
skepticATX 3y ago
Right. I think one reason that the definition of AGI is so contentious is that we're not that close to it. All of the current benchmarks are interesting but I don't see how we ever use those to declare that AGI has been reached. And quite frankly, I don't think we'd even care about most of them if we had a truly intelligent system. For me, if hook up an AI with no training to a vehicle and it drives at a human level in arbitrary scenarios, I'd consider it to be AGI. It seems obvious to me that we're not very close to this.
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  >For me, if hook up an AI with no training to a vehicle and it drives at a human level in arbitrary scenarios Lol what human with no training is going to succeed at driving ?
  - skepticATX 3y ago
    Most teenagers are at least somewhat competent from the very beginning. The rest of the time is spent becoming confident.
    - famouswaffles 3y ago
      I really beg to differ lol and I imagine many instructors would say the same. Humans who have never driven before are not capable of driving unsupervised and there are a lot of laws in place to make sure they don't get the chance to.

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago

>> In the past, there were some ambitious projects aiming at this goal, though they all failed. So some people like to repeat. Yet, outside of the hand-picked examples in the article (the 5th generation computer project? Blast from the past!) there are a whole bunch of classic AI domains where real progress has been achieved in the last few decades. Here's a few: * Game-playing and adversarial search: from Deep Blue to AlphaGo and muZero, minimax-like search has continued to dominate. * Automated planning and schdeduling: e.g. used by NASA in automated navigation systems on its spaceships and Mars rovers (e.g. Perserverance) [1] * Automated theorem proving: probably the clearest, most comprehensible success of classical AI. Proof assitants are most popular today. * Boolean satisfiability solving (SAT): SAT solvers based on the Conflict Driver Clause Learning algorithm can now solve many instances of traditionally hard SAT problems [2]. * Program verification and model checking: model checking is a staple in the semiconductor industry [3] and in software engineering fields like security. Of course, none of all that is considered Artificial Intelligence anymore: because they work very well [4]. _____________ [1] https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/technology-onepagers/automated_planning_scheduling.html https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/technology-onepag... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-driven_clause_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-driven_clause_learnin... [3] https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/7/253448-program-verification/fulltext https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/7/253448-program-verif... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

mdp2021 3y ago
> considered Artificial Intelligence anymore That is just the confusion between AI and AGI - which may seem to be peaking for some reason (in the past few days it seemed like a zombie apocalypse). The so-called "AI effect" is said by some to originate from some "Ah but this is not intelligent" - but there where we wanted to solve a problem of replacing intelligent action, not of implementing it. Be contented with the rough discriminator "I would have had to pay an intelligent professional otherwise". To speak about «powerful AI, with broad capabilities at the human level and beyond» Ben Goertzel adopted and popularized 'AGI': https://goertzel.org/who-coined-the-term-agi/ https://goertzel.org/who-coined-the-term-agi/ Edit, update: this confusion is like having robotics and some people rising a "Ah but this is not Artificial General Ability".

tpoacher 3y ago

AGI is not a difficult "problem". It's a difficult "definition". Given very specific, practical, functional definitions, AGI is a breeze.

trabant00 3y ago
I keep hearing this argument that we already have AI, it's just the naysayers move the definition. Level 5 autonomous driving is specific, practical, functionally defined. Where's the breeze implementation?
- tpoacher 3y ago
  GTA San Andreas /s
- gondolgames 3y ago
  Are you sure level 5 autonomous driving is specific? What would be the exact goal behind decisions in such a system? Not even talking about the trolley problem, would the software optimize for speed or not harming people, for example? Obviously we would want a combination of both, otherwise people can either get harmed or not get anywhere in time. But then, how fast should it take a corner? How much chance of human harm should it allow to get somewhere fast? Furthermore, what do we mean by human harm? The system would obviously need to know what human harm is, to be able to avoid it. Which requires defining human and defining harm, both of which are incredibly difficult to do specifically - more on this by Rob Miles here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PKx3kS7f4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PKx3kS7f4A I don't think level 5 autonomous driving is specifically defined. We just don't have systems intelligent enough for this to be a problem yet.
mdp2021 3y ago
> Given very specific, practical, functional definitions, AGI is a breeze We have a few, but the difficulty is getting to a model that is portable to higher functions. ("Here is a feedback over the details of a world model ... Now understand that book")
romesc 3y ago

amelius 3y ago

Better title: "Artificial General Intelligence – We don't know the heck where this is going but here are some thoughts"

stuckinhell 3y ago
I've been forced to work with a team of very very smart Phds from ivy league universities to help put together an explanation deck for the c-suite. They've informally told me, the neural nets AI tech is beyond human understanding. Everybody can only explain very small pieces of it,and no one knows how the pieces work together.
- layer8 3y ago
  Yes. In a recent HN submission, ChatGPT was listed as a “scientific advance” of the past year. While it’s certainly some kind of advance, to me it seems to be more on the engineering side than on the scientific understanding side.
  - Sharlin 3y ago
    Definitely engineering. It’s not entirely wrong to say that the two reasons it took us until 2022 to make a ChatGPT are 1) the computing power needed and 2) the size of the training corpus needed. The same goes for other generative AI – it took a corpus of a couple billion images to train a Stable Diffusion model.
    - amelius 3y ago
      You may argue that it took a leap of insight to get to transformer models, though.
      - charcircuit 3y ago
        That was not an innovation of ChatGPT.

stanfordkid 3y ago

It's fairly clear to me that there is no such thing as AGI. Intelligence is a process of integrating sensory input with action and reward mechanisms -- nothing more, nothing less. Are there specific structures and architectures that have evolved that are very unique which give humans, say, language ability or visual processing? Certainly. Perhaps by gods spark or some random chance on the board game of life human beings developed examples of very particular structures. Perhaps there are undiscovered ones lying within the minds of peregrine falcons, tree roots or deep sea squid. We don't even know how to look for them because we don't even know such perception and intelligence exists. The point I'm trying to make is that there is no "goal post" of AGI, there is no quantification of intelligence yet. We don't even know what sorts of intelligence exist out there because we haven't even begun to fully characterize what it is. It seems foolish to me to search for something when we can't even define it. It's like trying to find "the ultimate general animal" when what you really have is a phylogenetic tree of huge diversity.

photon_lines 3y ago
Sorry, but I completely disagree with your general take. An AGI is a generalized agent which is able to perform extreme information compression on any available set of inputs. Think Force = m*a and coming up with the laws of the universe. You can store each possible action in memory of all available results OR -- a generalized agent will find the most succinct and least complex form of modelling the state of a system. An AGI to me in other words is a form of intelligence which is able to extract information and compress it such a way to not allow the lossy compression or storage to hinder its ability to predict real outputs from a set of training data fed into it. By the way, I have some ideas on how to create one and I'll be sharing some of the key algorithms and data structures that I'll be using here for anyone interested: https://github.com/photonlines/AGI-Algorithms-and-Prototypes/ https://github.com/photonlines/AGI-Algorithms-and-Prototypes...
- esafak 3y ago
  Intelligence as compression is a well-established notion. An earlier debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24395822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24395822

wslh 3y ago

> ...though they all failed. I know these words are in the introduction but until now ALL projects failed. Not logical pedantry intended. A little bit offtopic but I think currently the greatest superintelligence observed is the Universe or G‑d for believers.

Joeri 3y ago

I find it telling that the section on ethics has nothing on the rights of AGI. If we create true AGI it will likely be a digital person, and digital people should have rights. All talk of ethics seems to be focused on alignment of AI rules to human needs, not alignment of human rules to AI needs. This makes me think the first true AGI systems will end up as digital slaves. And yes, I know the very idea of AI rights offends those who think AI can’t be a person because it’s just an algorithm. Well, so are humans, just a DNA program executing massively parallel. The implementation does not determine personhood, only the behavior.

esafak 3y ago
What is the basis of an AI's rights? Why do you believe they exist? If an AI's state (essence) can be perfectly persisted and replicated, as it can due to their digital nature, there is nothing to be lost if an AI ceases to exist and is rebooted in another AI. If the Star Trek transporter could replicate you would you care if it killed your existing copy in the process?
- kaibee 3y ago
  > If the Star Trek transporter could replicate you would you care if it killed your existing copy in the process? Uh, obviously?
  - esafak 3y ago
    It's not obvious to me. Why is transporter death bad if you are identically replicated ?
    - xcv123 3y ago
      Because the transporter replica is not you. That is a separate person with their own separate consciousness. You are murdered and someone else is born.
      - janalsncm 3y ago

d_burfoot 3y ago

It's strange to write a history of AI research without talking about the three big epochs: - logical/symbolic AI, aka GOFAI, which led to work like SAT solvers and STRIPS planners - classical label-based Machine Learning. Here the Perceptron was the starting point and the Support Vector Machine was the paradigmatic result. - modern self-supervised raw-data ML, of which GPT is the pinnacle result. It's very interesting to think about what motivated each era, what their blind spots were, and why people who worked in that timeframe couldn't see why the successor era was obviously (in retrospect) superior.

visarga 3y ago
I’d split modern ML era in pre and post gpt3 (2020)
AareyBaba 3y ago
You omitted the 90's when artificial life, genetic algorithms, subsumption architecture were the research topics.

aaroninsf 3y ago

AFAICT this is an incomplete first draft? As others have said, skipping over the entire era of classic AI in the LISP/Prolog era from SHRDLU to Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding, is an egregious ommission. Also,I don't immediately find a discussion of either multi-agent coordination or multi-modal ML models.

mbgerring 3y ago

Not asked: “Why do this?” So much of the literature takes the idea that this is something that should be built for granted, and only asks whether it should be done. I literally do not understand why anyone wants to build this in the first place.

criddell 3y ago
I think the why is obvious — to make money. I think a lot of this discussion is around human-level AGI. Does it have to be human-level for it to be an AGI? What would a minimally intelligent AGI be like?

janalsncm 3y ago

I’m still skeptical that AGI is a coherent concept, mostly because I am skeptical that general intelligence is one thing rather than a cluster of capabilities, and I am skeptical than humans are even the most “generally intelligent” species on the planet. https://youtu.be/zsXP8qeFF6A https://youtu.be/zsXP8qeFF6A Here is a video demonstrating the working memory of a chimpanzee. It is obviously considerably better than a human’s. Given this information we must accept one of the following are true: - humans do not have the highest general intelligence of all animals - working memory is not a necessary component of general intelligence - other human capabilities (communication for example) can make up for our working memory deficiencies

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