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174 points Philpax | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.437s | source
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stared ◴[] No.43722458[source]
My pet peeve: talking about AGI without defining it. There’s no consistent, universally accepted definition. Without that, the discussion may be intellectually entertaining—but ultimately moot.

And we run into the motte-and-bailey fallacy: at one moment, AGI refers to something known to be mathematically impossible (e.g., due to the No Free Lunch theorem); the next, it’s something we already have with GPT-4 (which, while clearly not superintelligent, is general enough to approach novel problems beyond simple image classification).

There are two reasonable approaches in such cases. One is to clearly define what we mean by the term. The second (IMHO, much more fruitful) is to taboo your words (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBdvyyHLdxZSAMmoz/taboo-your...)—that is, avoid vague terms like AGI (or even AI!) and instead use something more concrete. For example: “When will it outperform 90% of software engineers at writing code?” or “When will all AI development be in hands on AI?”.

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biophysboy ◴[] No.43723139[source]
I like chollet's definition: something that can quickly learn any skill without any innate prior knowledge or training.
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kenjackson ◴[] No.43723263[source]
That seems to rule out most humans. I still can’t cook despite being in the kitchen for thousands of hours.
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biophysboy ◴[] No.43724048[source]
Then you're not intelligent at cooking (haha!). Maybe my definition is better for "superintelligent" since it seems to imply boundless competence. I think humans are intelligent in that we can rapidly learn a surprising number of things (talk, walk, arithmetic)
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1. 9rx ◴[] No.43728287[source]
> I think humans are intelligent in that we can rapidly learn a surprising number of things (talk, walk, arithmetic)

Rapid is relative, I suppose. On average, it takes tens of thousands of hours before the human is able to walk in a primitive way and even longer to gain competence. That is an excruciatingly long time compared to, say, a bovine calf, which can start walking within minutes after birth.

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2. pdimitar ◴[] No.43730835[source]
You are of course correct but let's not forget that humans get out of the woman's womb underdeveloped because a little more growth and the baby can't get out through the vagina. So it's a biological tradeoff.

Working on artificial organisms, we should be able to have them almost fully developed by the time we "free" or "unleash" them (or whatever other dramatic term we can think of).

At the very least we should have a number of basic components installed in this artificial brain, very similar to what humans are born with, so then the organism can navigate its reality by itself and optimize its place in it.

Whether we the humans are desired in that optimized reality is of course the really thorny question. To which I don't have an answer.