
Ask HN: What if all programmers in the world decided to contribute to build AI? - behnamoh
It&#x27;s a simple [hypothetical] question: what if instead of spending their time on side-projects and hobbies, all programmers in the world would decide to contribute to a global AI project? Would we achieve true AI then?
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kayza
I don’t think we need programmers. I think for this task we’d need
neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, mathematicians and engineers.
Also, I don’t think we need more developers working on that problem. We need
the right people with the right motivation and cognitive abilities to solve
the problem of Artificial General Intelligence.

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jascii
I think one of the major stumble blocks on achieving "true AI" is that there
is no consensus over what constitutes "true AI".

I suspect that --As long as AI can be perceived as a potential threat to the
human ego-- the goalpost will perpetually be moved to just outside of the
state of the art in AI research.

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h2odragon
Leaving aside the co-ordination problems of what needs to be done, and who
does it, imagine all the time that would be wasted on debates over which
environments, APIS, and formats to use...

Turn your question around. Hypothetical: at some point in the future, we'll be
able to say "AI emerged." At that point, will everyone who contributed to
internet architecture be partially responsible for that? Or did all human
coding efforts contribute?

If this has already happened, would we know?

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WheelsAtLarge
Coordinating work is hard. In addition to the programmers, you would need so
many more people to coordinate and plan. And doesn't even include how to
figure out what to produce in the 1st place.

Large projects are incredibly difficult. That's one reason why things like the
space program and its achievements are such a big deal. It wasn't just the
cost and knowledge but the coordination of 100's of thousands of people to get
the job done.

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jerome-jh
A number of programmers prefer writing programs they do understand, and still
these programs can do incredibly interesting and useful thinks: theorem
proving or verification, finding optimal solutions to all kind of problems,
...

AI as it is now is merely brute force: huge datasets, huge computers. Of
course it yields results: that would be a shame it would not using so many
resource.

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JohnFen
First, we need to define what "true AI" actually means. From all the
discussions I've taken part in, and everything I've read, we don't have such a
definition.

We don't even have a good definition for "intelligence", artificial or not.

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Aperocky
Scale doesn't always work, 10 women can't give birth to a baby in 1 month.

