Abstraction is not simple. AGI is not simple. I realize that most of the interest in AGI on this list is out of scientific curiosity. But AGI is expensive so anyone funding your research is going to be looking at practical applications like automating human labor or extending life. We are already making progress on both fronts, which means that the easy parts have already been solved. Automating labor has a ROI of world GDP divided by interest rates, or $1 quadrillion. Extending life has a ROI of world GDP times life expectancy, or $5 quadrillion. Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook have a combined market cap of $3 trillion, so they have a long way to go.
Automating labor and extending life through uploading both require models of the human mind, which includes stuff like vision, language, robotics, and art. Basically it is a function that takes sensory input and returns a prediction of what a human would do. It is required for effective communication between AGI and its human masters so that it knows what you want. If you or your loved ones decides to upload you after you die, then a model of your mind becomes a component of a program for a robot that carries out its predictions of your actions. The rest is engineering. We already know that the best vision and language models are neural. A human brain sized neural network with 10^14 synapses and 10 ms response times requires 10 petaflops and 1 petabyte. Computers with this capacity require 1 MW of electricity costing $100 per hour, which is not competitive with human labor. A human body averages 100 watts (of which 20% powers the brain). You cannot get there with transistors because they are already not much larger than atoms. Computing AGI will require moving atoms or ions, not electrons. Is anyone working on that? No. Everyone is working on the software, as if they expect it to run on their laptop. Sorry. Even if you did have appropriate hardware, humans are complex. Your DNA compresses to the size of 300 million lines of code. If there was a simple formula for intelligence, we would have evolved a lot faster or we would see it in insects and bacteria. Legg proved that powerful predictors are necessarily complex. Every example of AI supports that proof with more evidence that you aren't going to find a simple equation for intelligence. Watson was a 30 person-year effort. Google has written 2 billion lines of code. Human evolution took 10^48 DNA base copy operations over 3 billion years. So exactly what do you hope to accomplish? -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T586df509299da774-M927ed53e9336d40abec40f3c Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
