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88 comments
  • AGI requires a few key components that no LLM is even close to.

    First, it must be able to discern truth based on evidence, rather than guessing it. Can’t just throw more data at it, especially with the garbage being pumped out these days.

    Second, it must ask questions in the pursuit of knowledge, especially when truth is ambiguous. Once that knowledge is found, it needs to improve itself, pruning outdated and erroneous information.

    Third, it would need free will. And that’s the one it will never get, I hope. Free will is a necessary part of intelligent consciousness. I know there are some who argue it does not exist but they’re wrong.

  • That might speed it up, but that certainly is not a prerequisite.

  • What a brilliant suggestion, no way an AI could have come up with that, executive jobs are safe forever!

  • What is the point, though?

    If you made AGI, you'd have a computer that thinks like a person. Okay? We already have minds that think like a person: they're called people!

    I get that there is some belief that if you can make a digital consciousness, you can make a digital super-conciousness, but genuinely stop and ask what the utility is, and it's equal parts useless and evil.

    First, this premise is totally unexamined. Maybe it can think faster or hold more information in mind at one moment, but what basis is there for such a creation actually exceeding the ingenuity of a group of humans working together? What problem is this going to solve? A "cure for cancer"? The bottleneck to cutting cancer isn't ideas, it's that cell research takes actual time and money. You need it synthesize molecules and watch cells grow, and pay for lab infrastructure. "Intelligence" isn't the limiting element!

    The primary purpose is just to crater the value of human labor, by replacing human workers with workers with godlike powers of reasoning. Good luck with that. I'm sure they won't come to the exact reasoning as any exploited worker in 120 nano-seconds.

    It's like Jason's problem-solving advice in "The Good Place":

    “Any time I had a problem, and I threw a Molotov cocktail… Boom, right away, I had a different problem.”

    Sure. Let's work ourselves to death forTHIS.

88 comments