> To the relief of some ethicists, we're a long way from AGI, [...]
I often hear statements of this kind, but do they have basis? While there's not much to suggest that AGI will be developed soon, it doesn't seem sensible to me to say it's a long way away, as we still don't understand how difficult the problem is, nor do we have a clear path toward its development. It may be that it is achievable straightforwardly, with a breakthrough cognitive architecture.
Also, regarding ethical concerns, I don't think AGI is the problem, but rather the broader domain of super-intelligence. Plausibly, super-intelligence could result from the combination of the human mind with non-generally intelligent machinery, resulting in the same dangers.
I am convinced that we have the hardware already for AGI. Can an exaFLOPS scale Google datacenter with millions of TPUs really be less capable than the 20 watt ball of jelly we all carry around?
The barriers to AGI are in the algorithms. Nobody knows how long it will take to achieve unsupervised learning that is as general as the human brain. It might take 200 years of slow but steady progress or alternatively somebody could publish a breakthrough in a paper tomorrow and we could have parity by the end of the year.
Faithfully simulating the human brain requires much more processing power than presently available, so potentially yes. That said, we don't know how much of this complexity is actually vital to the functioning of intelligence and consciousness. Similarly, it would take a huge amount of processing to simulate a CPU at the electronic level, but our functional understanding allows us to build emulators at a high level of abstraction. The brain may be an immensely powerful computer running a simple program.
The brain is very complex, but it's not well understood how well that complexity contributes to its computation. Observable phenomena may contribute to the computational capacity of the brain, or may just introduce noise which impairs it.
Do you know of any tasks where the brain has demonstrated better performance than a computer, where the hardware is known to be limiting? I.e. where there can not be an unknown better program the computer could run.
I often hear statements of this kind, but do they have basis? While there's not much to suggest that AGI will be developed soon, it doesn't seem sensible to me to say it's a long way away, as we still don't understand how difficult the problem is, nor do we have a clear path toward its development. It may be that it is achievable straightforwardly, with a breakthrough cognitive architecture.
Also, regarding ethical concerns, I don't think AGI is the problem, but rather the broader domain of super-intelligence. Plausibly, super-intelligence could result from the combination of the human mind with non-generally intelligent machinery, resulting in the same dangers.
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