Don’t believe the hype: AGI is far from inevitable | Radboud University
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Will AI soon surpass the human brain? If you ask employees at OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other large tech companies, it is inevitable. However, researchers at Radboud University and other institutes show new proof that those claims are overblown.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20858435

Will AI soon surpass the human brain? If you ask employees at OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other large tech companies, it is inevitable. However, researchers at Radboud University and other institutes show new proof that those claims are overblown and unlikely to ever come to fruition. Their findings are published in Computational Brain & Behavior today.

  • zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev
    3·
    7 hours ago

    Another possibility is that humans just aren’t smart enough to figure out AGI. While I’m sure that we will continue incrementally improving technology in some form, it’s not at all self-evident that these improvements will eventually add up to AGI.

    • ContrarianTrail@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      7 hours ago

      I get what you’re saying but to me, that still just sounds like a timescale issue. I can’t think of a scenario where we’ve improved something so much that there’s just absolutely nothing we could improve on further. With AI we only need to reach the point of making it have human-level cognitive capabilities and from there on it can improve itself.

      • zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev
        2·
        6 hours ago

        There are a couple of reasons that might not work:

        • Maybe we’ll asymptotically approach a point that is lower than human-level cognitive capabilities
        • Gradual improvements are susceptible to getting stuck in a local maxima. This is a problem in evolution as well. A lot of animals could in theory evolve, say, human level intelligence in principle, but to reach that point they’d have to go through a bunch of intermediate steps that lead to worse fitness. Gradual scientific improvements are a bit like evolution in this way.
        • We also lose knowledge over time. Something as dramatic as a nuclear war would significantly set back the progress in developing AGI, but something less dramatic might also lead to us forgetting things that we’ve already learned.

        To be clear, most of the arguments I’m making aren’t really about AGI specifically but about humanities capability to develop arbitrary in principle feasible technologies in general.