Submitted 2 months ago by JRepin@lemmy.ml to technology@beehaw.org
https://www.ru.nl/en/research/research-news/dont-believe-the-hype-agi-is-far-from-inevitable
cross-posted from: 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.
Sounds really counterintuitive to say that it’s impossible.
The article says that we would run out of computing power, and that’s definitely true for current hardware and software. It’s just that they are being developed all the time, so I think we need to leave that door open. Who knows how efficient things can get within the next decade or century. The article didn’t even mention any fundamental obstacle that would AGI completely impossible.
Whenever I hear someone say that something is impossible with current technology, I think about my grandma. When she was a kid, only some important people had telephones. Doctors, police, etc.
In her lifetime we went from that to today, and, since she’s still alive, even further into the future.
Whenever someone calls something impossible, I think about how far technology will progress in my own lifetime and I know that they’ve got no idea what they’re talking about. (Unless, like you said, it’s against the laws of physics. But sometimes even then I’m not so sure, cause it’s not like we understand those entirely. )
The thing is, we have no idea where technological progress is taking us. So far, most predictions have been wrong. 50 to 60 years ago, people thought we would already be colonizing other planets by now. Barely anyone was able to predict the Internet, smartphones, social media, etc. - the kind of technology that is actually shaping our civilization’s future right now.
Another aspect that I feel is often neglected is the assumption that technological progress will continue forever or at least continue at this current rapid pace. This wasn’t true in the past and we might simply be experiencing a historical anomaly right now, one that could correct itself very soon in the future, either towards stagnation or even regression.
That’s not an apt comparison.
More like “we’ll have flying cars 50 years from now.”
Could take a while, but how long? Progress tends to be non-linear, so things can slow down and speed up suddenly. I’m pretty sure we’ll get there sooner or later unless we nuke ourselves to oblivion before that. If AI development isn’t prioritized, it could take centuries. Maybe we’re still missing some crucial corner stores we haven’t even thought of yet. Just imagine what it was like to build an airplane in an aged when the internal combustion engine hadn’t been invented yet.
Actually, we do already know that we’re close to a theoretical limit of increasing computing power as we currently know it. The transistor can’t really get that much smaller, before it stops working.
Also, if you’re talking about the article as linked, that is a mere introduction to a much longer paper.
The article did mention a fundamental obstacle. It said quite clearly that we would run out of resources before we had enough computing power. I suppose you could counter that by arguing that we could discover magic, or magical technology, or a lot of new resources through space exploration.
Of course things get more efficient. But in the past few decades they’ve gotten efficient in predictable, and mostly predicted, ways. It’s certainly possible that totally unexpected things can happen. I could win the lottery next week. Is that the standard? Are you pushing the stance that says AGI is somewhat less likely than winning the lottery or getting struck by lightning, but by golly it’s more than zero, how dare you suggest that it’s anywhere close to zero?
It really depends on your assumptions. If you assume that software and hardware will stay at the current level, then the article does present a valid point. I would argue that those assumptions are only reasonable in the short term. AGI development does depend on some big technological changes we haven’t seen yet, so it could take decades or even a century, but I wouldn’t call it impossible.
If you assumed that 1950s style vacuum tube computers were the best thing ever, you could safely say that playing a game like fortnite with your buddies living in different countries is completely impossible. Modern semiconductors and integrated circuits would have seemed pretty magical in that context.
If we assume that we’re going to be stuck with silicon, you can safely say that AGI just isn’t going to happen with these tools and methods. Since quantum computers aren’t quite useful just yet and optical computers aren’t even in the news in any meaningful way, it seems that we will be stuck with silicon for quite some time. However, in the long term, you can’t really say that for sure. Technological developments have taken sudden and unpredictable jumps from time to time.
The fact that human brain is capable of general intelligence tells us everything we need to know about the processing power needed to run one.
Well it sets an upper bound on compute requirements at ‘simulate 10^27 atoms for thirty years’ remains to be seen if what we can optimize away ever converges with what’s feasible to build.
AGI is inevitable unless:
General intelligence is substrait independent and what the brain does cannot be replicated in silica. However since both are made of matter and matter obeys the laws of physics, I see no reason to assume this.
We destroy ourselves before we reach AGI.
Other than that, we will keep incrementally improving our technology and it’s only a matter of time untill we get there. May take 5 years, 50 or 500 but it seems pretty inevitable to me.
incremental improvements on a dead end, still gets you to the dead end.
Then you need to give me an explanation for why it’s a dead end
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.
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.
Will AI soon surpass the human brain?
If you ask employees at OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other large tech companies, it is inevitable.
That doesn’t answer the question.
If it will happen is unrelated to When it will happen.
I’d expect we’ll see AGI some time between the next 20 and 200 years. I think that’s pretty soon. You may not.
If there were a giant asteroid hurling toward Earth, set to impact sometime in the next 20 to 200 years, I’d say there’s definitely a need for urgency. A true AGI is somewhat of an asteroidal impact in itself.
A single AGI would not be to different from a human. But it may not take long for AGI to develop ASI, superior to human intelligence.
Thats not an astronaut impact but alien contact
None of those companies are suggesting 20 years. They’re suggesting much less than 10, and selling investors on that promise.
Possible or not I don’t think we’ll get to the point of AGI. I’m pretty sure at some point someone will do something monumentally stupid with AI that will wipe out humanity.
Like wrecking the biosphere in its persuit.
Maybe. But I have a feeling it’ll be a dumb single mistake that’ll make someone say “ah, shit” just before we’re wiped out.
When the Soviets trained anti-tank dogs in WW2 they did so on tanks that weren’t running to save fuel: “Their deployment revealed some serious problems… In the field, the dogs refused to dive under moving tanks.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog
History is littered with these kinds of mistakes. It would only take one military AI with access to autonomous weapons to have a similar issue in it’s training data to potentially kill us all.
I like SCUMM but AGI is okay I just don’t like typing commands
The steam engine won’t replace John Henry!!!
Not really a good comparison. The steam engine was an extant technology at that point. AGI is not, and we really no idea if/when it will be. One thing is clear though, it is not as close on the horizon as tech bros want us to think it is.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 2 months ago
The actual paper is an interesting read. They present an actual computational proof, stating that even if you have essentially infinite memory, a computer that’s a billion times faster than what we have now, perfect training data that you can sample without bias and you’re only aiming for an AGI that performs slightly better than chance, it’s still completely infeasible to do within the next few millenia. Ergo, it’s definitely not “right around the corner”. We’re lightyears off still.
They prove this by proving that if you could train an AI in a tractable amount of time, you would have proven P=NP. And thus, training an AI is NP-hard. Given the minimum data that needs to be learned to be better than chance, this results in a ridiculously long training time well beyond the realm of what’s even remotely feasible. And that’s provided you don’t even have to deal with all the constraints that exist in the real world.
We perhaps need some breakthrough in quantum computing in order to get closer. That is not to say that AI won’t improve or anything, it’ll get a bit better. But there is a computationally proven ceiling here, and breaking through that is exceptionally hard.
It also raises (imo) the question of whether or not we can truly consider humans to have general intelligence or not. Perhaps we’re not as smart as we think we are either.
BarryZuckerkorn@beehaw.org 2 months ago
The paper’s scope is to prove that AI cannot feasibly be trained, using training data and learning algorithms, into something that approximates human cognition.
The limits of that finding are important here: it’s not that creating an AGI is impossible, it’s just that however it will be made, it will need to be made some other way, not by training alone.
Our squishy brains (or perhaps more accurately, our nervous systems contained within a biochemical organism influenced by a microbiome) arose out of evolutionary selection algorithms, so general intelligence is clearly possible.
So it may still be the case that AGI via computation alone is possible, and that creating such an AGI will not require solution of an NP-hard problem. But this paper closes one potential pathway that many believe is a viable pathway (if the paper’s proof is actually correct, I definitely am not the person to make that evaluation). That doesn’t mean they’ve proven there’s no pathway at all.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 2 months ago
That’s assuming that we are a general intelligence. I’m actually unsure if that’s even true.
True, they’ve only calculated it’d take perhaps millions of years. Which might be accurate, I’m not sure to what kind of computer global evolution over trillions of organisms over millions of years adds up to. And yes, perhaps some breakthrough happens, but it’s still very unlikely and definitely not “right around the corner” as the AI-bros claim (and that near-future thing is what the paper set out to disprove).
zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev 2 months ago
A breakthrough in quantum computing wouldn’t necessarily help. QC isn’t faster than classical computing in the general case, it just happens to be for a few specific algorithms (e.g. factoring numbers). It’s not impossible that a QC breakthrough might speed up training AI models (although to my knowledge we don’t have any reason to believe that it would) and maybe that’s what you’re referring to, but there’s a widespread misconception that Quantum computers are essentially non-deterministic turing machines that “evaluate all possible states at the same time” which isn’t the case.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 2 months ago
I was more hinting at that through conventional computational means we’re just not getting there, and that some completely hypothetical breakthrough somewhere is required. QC is the best guess I have for where it might be but it’s still far-fetched.
But yes, you’re absolutely right that QC in general isn’t a magic bullet here.
Azzk1kr@feddit.nl 2 months ago
Nitpick: a lightyear is a measure of distance, not of time :)
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 2 months ago
Yes, hence we’re not “right around the corner”, it’s a figure of speech that uses spatial distance to metaphorically show we’re very far away from something.