Conversation

AGI is the eschatological leap of faith that a series of mottes will converge to a bailey. The big achievement of the AGI thought-experiment crowd (not AI practice) is to label their motte-and-bailey fallacy as a “moving the goalposts” lack of vision on the part of skeptics.
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It’s roughly like believing that building better and better airplanes will converge to a time machine or hyperspace drive. The adjective “general” does way too much work in a context where “generality” is a fraught matter. I should add: I don’t believe humans are AGIs either.
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In fact, I don’t think “AGI” is a well-posed concept at all. There are approximately turing complete systems, but assuming the generality of a UTM relative to the clean notion of computability is the same thing as generality of “intelligence” is invalid.
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At least the really silly foundation on IQ and psychometrics is withering away. I think the Bostrom style simulationist foundation is at least fun to think about though even sillier taken literally. But it highlights the connection to the hard problem of consciousness.
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I’ve been following this conversation since the beginning about 15 years ago, and I feel I need to re-declare my skepticism every few years, since it’s such a powerful attractor around these parts. Like periodically letting my extended religious family know I’m not religious.
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