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174 points Philpax | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.232s | source
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dmwilcox ◴[] No.43722753[source]
I've been saying this for a decade already but I guess it is worth saying here. I'm not afraid AI or a hammer is going to become intelligent (or jump up and hit me in the head either).

It is science fiction to think that a system like a computer can behave at all like a brain. Computers are incredibly rigid systems with only the limited variance we permit. "Software" is flexible in comparison to creating dedicated circuits for our computations but is nothing by comparison to our minds.

Ask yourself, why is it so hard to get a cryptographically secure random number? Because computers are pure unadulterated determinism -- put the same random seed value in your code and get the same "random numbers" every time in the same order. Computers need to be like this to be good tools.

Assuming that AGI is possible in the kinds of computers we know how to build means that we think a mind can be reduced to a probabilistic or deterministic system. And from my brief experience on this planet I don't believe that premise. Your experience may differ and it might be fun to talk about.

In Aristotle's ethics he talks a lot about ergon (purpose) -- hammers are different than people, computers are different than people, they have an obvious purpose (because they are tools made with an end in mind). Minds strive -- we have desires, wants and needs -- even if it is simply to survive or better yet thrive (eudaimonia).

An attempt to create a mind is another thing entirely and not something we know how to start. Rolling dice hasn't gotten anywhere. So I'd wager AGI somewhere in the realm of 30 years to never.

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throwaway150 ◴[] No.43722938[source]
> And from my brief experience on this planet I don't believe that premise.

A lot of things that humans believed were true due to their brief experience on this planet ended up being false: earth is the center of the universe, heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, time ticked the same everywhere, species are fixed and unchanging.

So what your brief experience on this planet makes you believe has no bearing on what is correct. It might very well be that our mind can be reduced to a probabilistic and deterministic system. It might also be that our mind is a non-deterministic system that can be modeled in a computer.

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slavik81 ◴[] No.43725533[source]
What is the distance from the Earth to the center of the universe?
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1. gls2ro ◴[] No.43725600[source]
The universe does not have a center but has a beginning in time and the beginning of space.

The distance to that beginning in time is approx 13 billion years. There is no approximation of distance to the beginning because the space is created at that point and continues to be created.

Imagine the Earth being on the surface of a sphere and so asking what is the center of the surface of a sphere? The sphere has a center but on the surface there is no center.

At least this is my understanding of how to approach these kind of questions.