I know there’s other plausible reasons, but thought I’d use this juicy title.
What does everyone think? As someone who works outside of tech I’m curious to hear the collective thoughts of the tech minds on Lemmy.
I know there’s other plausible reasons, but thought I’d use this juicy title.
What does everyone think? As someone who works outside of tech I’m curious to hear the collective thoughts of the tech minds on Lemmy.
I’m very doubtful that an AGI is possible with our current understanding of technology.
Current models have the appearance of intelligence because they’ve been trained on the entire Internet (which also has the appearance of intelligence), but it’s still at its core a predictive pattern matcher; a pile of linear algebra that can be stirred around to get an output. Useful. But if eight billion people all wrote down their answer to a question and we averaged them all out, we’d get a pretty good answer that appeared to be intelligent as well; and the human race as a whole isn’t a distinct intelligence.
Data manipulated on a large scale, especially when it’s bounded with rules and perturbed with random noise, yields surprising and often even poignant results. That’s all AI is right now; a more-or-less average of the internet. Your prompt just points it toward a particular corner of the internet.
I don’t know it’s quite that simple, (some) cognitive scientists and Marvin Minsky might disagree too. Pedantic asshattery aside, AGI might be an intelligence that’s so fundamentally different from our own ego/narrative/1-person perspective intelligence that we have trouble recognizing it as such.
Well the big thing is that, right now, the “intelligence” doesn’t exist without a prompt. It has no agency or continuity outside of our requests. It also has no reasoning or thought process that we can distinguish, just an algorithm. It’s fundamentally not distinct from basic computers, which means that if it is intelligence, so are our servers and smartwatches and satellite phones and Switch OLEDs.
After a lifetime in software development, I’m more doubtful than that.
Yeah. I mean, quantum computing might upend some of my assumptions, but in the long run we’re probably going to have nailed down a decent definition of sentience before we have to wonder if computers have it.