
Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized - banjo_milkman
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0494-4
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golem14
It's an interesting article. I'm not sure I agree with it 100% - I would say a
lot depends on the larger picture and incentives.

Right now, there is a huge incentives to create "narrow AIs" because they help
improve productivity and get rid of tedious labor, from facial recognition to
harvesting machines. So, none of those AIs has 'skin in the game' or as the
paper calls is 'are in this world'.

However, if there were a concerted push to give AIs 'skin in the game' and try
to solve more general problems (the poker AIs look interesting, for instance),
the situation might be different.

I'm thinking along the lines of the essay "Golem XIV" or the TV show "person
of interest". In these SciFi scenarios, governments give machines very high
level objectives ("protect the country!") and skin in the game, which then
ultimately leads to reaching "consciousness".

I don't see how with current economic incentives, such efforts would be
fundable, the narrow AI field is sucking up all the talent and $$$. But if
someone were to massively fund efforts like this, I wouldn't rule out progress
in that direction. Spoken as someone with practically nil education in ML and
AI :)

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ksaj
There was a time people thought humans could never build a flying machine.
Then we invented helicopters, jets, rockets and airplanes - all flying
machines, none of which even attempt to emulate birds and bees.

As a person who's spent 3/4 of his life on subjects like Artificial Life,
synthetic psychology, etc, I believe we'll eventually reach _various_ types of
intelligence. But not until we figure out what exactly produces the effect
that we currently define as intelligence, and emulate those instead of trying
to build replicas of machines (brains, organs, etc) that already seem to
exhibit it.

Attempting to build brains is one of many paths to learning what that needed
extra spice is, but you can be pretty sure if/when we eventually do create an
artificial intelligence, it won't look or act much like our own, except for
the parts we choose to cosmetically appear that way.

