<story><title>Ray Kurzweil: AI is still on course to outpace human intelligence</title><url>https://www.grayscott.com/seriouswonder-//ray-kurzweil-ai-is-still-on-course-to-outpace-human-intelligence</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ThomPete</author><text>I am seriously interested in understanding why a lot of people have no issue accepting the idea of humans evolving from simple immaterial matter into biological beings and all the way up to our current reality but have a hard time believing that can be done via computers.&lt;p&gt;I would at least put it in the very likely box that computers can learn to be the same kind of pattern recognizing feedback loops that we are even without humans understanding the brain completely just as we became conscious and self aware without any &amp;quot;programmer&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Computers&amp;quot; don&amp;#x27;t need to be like us to become intelligent, they don&amp;#x27;t actually need to reproduce the lungs and the intestine as we have it, they are in many ways free of those restrictions.&lt;p&gt;They might be &amp;quot;concerned&amp;quot; with very different things than we are and might even not really care about nature to survive. All they need is energy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>marmaduke</author><text>I don’t think anyone here disputes the logical possibility, but rather that such systems are still far off, not as near as the singulariati would have us believe.&lt;p&gt;From the perspective of embedded cognitive systems, intelligence is not an abstract property but a faculty derived from an agent embedded in a world with an ability to act upon that world in specific ways.  This is reiterated in cognitive linguistics by Lakoff’s metaphor work et al.  I take this to mean that the question of AGI itself is missing the point. To wit all recent provoking demos of AI (Alpha Go, DOTA) are embedded within specific environments and actions of a model-specified agent.  It is then extrapolated that AGI will appear automatically induced by a series of more and more competent AIs.&lt;p&gt;Incremental evolution as a means of indiction as we know from biology can take a long time, and the landscape is complex.  Hence the view that it might be coming but not soon and not with a roadmap.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ray Kurzweil: AI is still on course to outpace human intelligence</title><url>https://www.grayscott.com/seriouswonder-//ray-kurzweil-ai-is-still-on-course-to-outpace-human-intelligence</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ThomPete</author><text>I am seriously interested in understanding why a lot of people have no issue accepting the idea of humans evolving from simple immaterial matter into biological beings and all the way up to our current reality but have a hard time believing that can be done via computers.&lt;p&gt;I would at least put it in the very likely box that computers can learn to be the same kind of pattern recognizing feedback loops that we are even without humans understanding the brain completely just as we became conscious and self aware without any &amp;quot;programmer&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Computers&amp;quot; don&amp;#x27;t need to be like us to become intelligent, they don&amp;#x27;t actually need to reproduce the lungs and the intestine as we have it, they are in many ways free of those restrictions.&lt;p&gt;They might be &amp;quot;concerned&amp;quot; with very different things than we are and might even not really care about nature to survive. All they need is energy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonahx</author><text>&amp;gt; but have a hard time believing that can be done via computers.&lt;p&gt;Much of the skepticism isn&amp;#x27;t about whether this can be done in theory.  It&amp;#x27;s about &amp;quot;how close&amp;quot; we are given the current state of the art (beating Go, chess, deep NN, etc).&lt;p&gt;One can be (I am) simultaneously blown away by these accomplishments and believe that we have hardly scratched the surface of AGI.&lt;p&gt;And while this isn&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;necessarily&lt;/i&gt; a deal breaker for AGI, it&amp;#x27;s not encouraging that we still understand close to nothing about consciousness.</text></comment>