Perspectivist

It's Finnish

I haven’t claimed that it is. The point is, the only two plausible scenarios I can think of where we don’t eventually reach AGI are: either we destroy ourselves before we get there, or there’s something fundamentally mysterious about the biological computer that is the human brain - something that allows it to process information in a way we simply can’t replicate any other way.

I don’t think that’s the case, since both the brain and computers are made of matter, and matter obeys the laws of physics. But it’s at least conceivable that there could be more to it.

Finland recently passed a law prohibiting under 15 year olds from riding electric scooters and similar vehicles. Up untill now, the average age of the people hospitalized for accidents with these has been 12 years.

Did you genuinely not understand the point I was making, or are you just being pedantic? "Silicon" obviously refers to current computing substrates, not a literal constraint on all future hardware. If you’d prefer I rewrite it as "in non-biological substrates," I’m happy to oblige - but I have a feeling you already knew that.

Älä välitä, ei se villekään välittänyt, vaikka sen väliaikaiset välihousut jäi väliaikaisen välitystoimiston väliaikaisen välioven väliin.

Rough translation: Don’t worry about it - Ville didn’t worry either when his temporary long johns got caught in the temporary side door of the temporary temp agency.

Don't confuse AGI with LLMs. Both being AI systems is the only thing they have in common. They couldn't be further apart when it comes to cognitive capabilities.

The path to AGI seems inevitable - not because it’s around the corner, but because of the nature of technological progress itself. Unless one of two things stops us, we’ll get there eventually:

1. Either there’s something fundamentally unique about how the biological brain processes information - something that cannot, even in principle, be replicated in silicon,

2. Or we wipe ourselves out before we get the chance.

Barring those, the outcome is just a matter of time. This argument makes no claim about timelines - only trajectory. Even if we stopped AI research for a thousand years, it’s hard to imagine a future where we wouldn’t eventually resume it. That's what humans do; improve our technology.

The article points to cloning as a counterexample but that’s not a technological dead end, that’s a moral boundary. If one thinks we’ll hold that line forever, I’d call that naïve. When it comes to AGI, there’s no moral firewall strong enough to hold back the drive toward it. Not permanently.

What's doubling down called when you're doing the same mistake for 3rd or 4th time?

They're generally just referred to as "deep learning" or "machine learning". The models themselves usually have names of their own, such as AlphaFold, PathAI and Enlitic.

The term AGI was first used in 1997 by Mark Avrum Gubrud in an article named ‘Nanotechnology and international security’

By advanced artificial general intelligence, I mean AI systems that rival or surpass the human brain in complexity and speed, that can acquire, manipulate and reason with general knowledge, and that are usable in essentially any phase of industrial or military operations where a human intelligence would otherwise be needed. Such systems may be modeled on the human brain, but they do not necessarily have to be, and they do not have to be “conscious” or possess any other competence that is not strictly relevant to their application. What matters is that such systems can be used to replace human brains in tasks ranging from organizing and running a mine or a factory to piloting an airplane, analyzing intelligence data or planning a battle.

You’re moving the goalposts. First you claimed understanding requires awareness, now you’re asking whether an AI knows what a molecule is - as if that’s even the standard for functional intelligence.

No, AI doesn’t “know” things the way a human does. But it can still reliably identify ungrammatical sentences or predict molecular interactions based on training data. If your definition of “understanding” requires some kind of inner experience or conscious grasp of meaning, then fine. But that’s a philosophical stance, not a technical one.

The point is: you don’t need subjective awareness to model relationships in data and produce useful results. That’s what modern AI does, and that's enough to call it intelligent in the functional sense - whether or not it “knows” anything in the way you'd like it to.

Most definitions are imperfect - that’s why I said the term AI, at its simplest, refers to a system capable of performing any cognitive task typically done by humans. Doing things faster, or even doing things humans can’t do at all, doesn’t conflict with that definition.

Humans are unarguably generally intelligent, so it’s only natural that we use “human-level intelligence” as the benchmark when talking about general intelligence. But personally, I think that benchmark is a red herring. Even if an AI system isn’t any smarter than we are, its memory and processing capabilities would still be vastly superior. That alone would allow it to immediately surpass the “human-level” threshold and enter the realm of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI).

As for something like making a sandwich - that’s a task for robotics, not AI. We’re talking about cognitive capabilities here.