diegocaleiro comments on The Growth of My Pessimism: Transhumanism, Immortalism, Effective Altruism. - Less Wrong

15 Post author: diegocaleiro 28 November 2015 11:07AM

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Comment author: diegocaleiro 29 November 2015 10:47:10AM *  0 points [-]

Not really. My understanding of AI is far from grandiose, I know less about it than about my fields (Philo, BioAnthro) - I've merely read all of FHI, most of MIRI, half of AIMA, Paul's blog, maybe 4 popular and two technical books on related issues, Max 60 papers on AGI per se, I don't code, and I only have the coarse grained understanding of it. - But in this little research and time I had to look into it, I saw no convincing evidence for a cap on the level of sophistication that a system's cognitive abilities can achieve. I have also not seen very robust evidence that would countenance the hypothesis of a fast takeoff.

The fact that we have not fully conceptually disentangled the dimensions of which intelligence is composed is mildly embarassing though, and it may be that AGI is a Deus ex-machina because actually, more as Minsky or Goertzel, less as MIRI or Lesswrong, General Intelligence will turn out to be a plethora of abilities that don't have a single denominator, ofter superimposed in a robust way.

But for now, nobody who is publishing seems to know for sure.

Comment author: V_V 29 November 2015 02:15:28PM *  3 points [-]

Not really. My understanding of AI is far from grandiose, I know less about it than about my fields (Philo, BioAnthro) - I've merely read all of FHI, most of MIRI, half of AIMA, Paul's blog, maybe 4 popular and two technical books on related issues, Max 60 papers on AGI per se, I don't code, and I only have the coarse grained understanding of it. - But in this little research and time I had to look into it, I saw no convincing evidence for a cap on the level of sophistication that a system's cognitive abilities can achieve. I have also not seen very robust evidence that would countenance the hypothesis of a fast takeoff.

Beware the Dunning–Kruger effect.

Looking at the big picture, you could also say that there convincing evidence for a cap on the lifespan of a biological organism. Heck, some trees have been alive for over 10,000 years! Yet, once you look at the nitty-gritty details of biomedical research, it becomes clear that even adding just a few decades to the human lifespan is a very hard problem and researchers still largely don't know how to solve it.

It's the same for AGI. Maybe truly super-human AGI is physically impossible due to complexity reasons, but even if it is possible, developing it is a very hard problem and researchers still largely don't know how to solve it.

Comment author: diegocaleiro 29 November 2015 10:23:45PM 0 points [-]

I think you misunderstood my claim for sarcasm. I actually think I don`t know much about AI (not nearly enough to make a robust assessment).