Saying we don't have mouse level AGI is simply saying human AGI is greater than 5 years away, which isn't a remotely contentious statement.
The difference in intelligence between an amoeba and a mouse is enormous compared to a mouse and us. People greatly under appreciate how intelligent and close to human a mouse/bird/pig are in the grand scheme of things. Emotions, behaviors, motivations, goal setting, memory it's all there already. A flat worm, an ant, a fly - those are the large stepping stone accomplishments.
Think about rate of very long distance communication in humans. It took us tens of thousands of years to get to 2.4 kps dial up modems, and only few decades to get to common 300Mbps. The important signal is seeing a 100bps modem, not a 100Mbps connection.
So the real question is how long until we can replicate a worm's intelligence?
But how long did it take Nature to get from a mammal with mouse-level intelligence to a human-level brain. I think 200-ish million years [0].
You might be right that a mouse is a good indicator of high-level intelligence and that you don't need human-level intelligence to make a good AI, but there might still be some considerable way to go until we have an AI that can significantly outperform us.
[Edit - I agree that natural selection wasn't aiming or directed, and thus wasn't forced to be as fast as we could be. But a human's higher brain functions might not be simple incremental improvements over a mouse's, and there could still be a long way to go]
How long did it take nature to go from T-Rex to chickens?
There’s no reason to believe human level intelligence to be an inevitable result of evolution. It just happend.
Not that I agree with the sentiment in the GP, but it took a relatively short time from the first development of multicellular life until nervous systems developed and an even shorter amount of time to go from small mammal intelligence to human intelligence. However, evolution isn't about "progress" as we understand it. The most we can say with regards to intelligence and evolution is that human intelligence satisfied a niche that existed at a certain place and time.
So I think the estimate of 3-5 years might be realistic, but the artificial mouse is a long way away, IMO.
I'm not sure creating an intelligence that even supercedes our own will lead to anything good. If anything I'd expect things to get even more perverse.
Evolution took a billion years to evolve multi-cellular life, but the jump from apes to humans took far less than a million years.
And we can't reliably extrapolate growth in computing power more than a few years into the future. It's possible that the curve isn't really exponential, but rather an S-curve which will eventually flatten out.
I'm more comfortable predicting that computing power will continue to grow than to predict that it will peter out and everyone will simply sit back and be happy with what we've got.
I didn't say we're pushing up against the limits of processing power, I said that processing power is not growing exponentially, which is true, despite the gains that other advancements and innovation have provided.
We're moving faster than Moore's Law, see "Hyper Moore’s Law":
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/256558-nvidias-ceo-dec...
Why? What challenges?
Can you make a Turing Ant without a Turing Ant Colony?
Done.
For context, the worm (c. elegans, at least) has a very stereotyped nervous system with 302 neurons. The anatomy, down to the cellular level, is known incredibly well. Their behavioral repertoire is not huge and they're fairly easy to study. Nevertheless, we can't even simulate a worm very accurately. (There was a good twitter thread about why yesterday: https://twitter.com/OdedRechavi/status/1086992699528544256)
The human eyeball has about 120M rods, 6.5M cones, and projects to a brain containing ~86B neurons, which is about 8-9 orders of magnitude more cells. The number of possible interactions scales even faster. In summary, we're not close, not at all....
However I have to object in a way about the brain. To me, there's an unanswered question: Is the rest of the human brain as simple and "generic" as the convolutional neural networks we made inspired by the vision system? Or is each networks' architecture and "algorithms" developed specifically for a task? In the latter case we might still be a very long way from anything resembling AGI.
However my personal estimation is that most of the things we do can be modeled using existing tools when scaled and modified appropriately (ie RNNs). There's also the ugly job of stitching those systems together, but it's not that different from what happens in nature.
(parallel arguments but for human/mouse level complexity of bodies and stimuli responded to would suggest that whole brain emulation is going to be an incredibly painful way to attempt to achieve AGI)
It has those things[1]. There’s a video of its simulated body wiggling around on the project’s github repository.
[1] except possibly food, I was skimming the page.
In other words, the simulated worm brain is not yet even capable of causing the wiggling seen in the video. So the question remains, what can the simulated neurons do, f anything?
Plus, I think all the marketing use "AI" is giving a very distorted and inflated view to the average person of what software is actually doing, and what it's capable of.
It's a buzzword, full stop.
That doesn't make him wrong, but that's the personal bias he's operating under.
I view all the polititians who have the power of advancing healthcare research but not doing it stupid.
Just living longer doesn't mean that humans become any wiser on average. There will maybe be some benefits of longer-lasting first-hand experience of historical events (pushing the 'historical horizon' to more than 100 years) but to me it's like switching from a simulated annealing method (or stochastic gradient descent) to a simple local gradient descent in terms of getting society/culture/technology to adapt and find anything better than the status quo.
Worst case, such a technology serves to create an almost eternal ruling class. Best case, it results in societies with either two classes of people (those who may extend their lives longer and those who may not) or societies that tightly regulate who may have children.
Getting rid of suffering and cancer is one thing, getting rid of natural death carries a rat-tail of consequences.
You should read (or watch) Altered Carbon.
There's no solution to death. You can only put it off, but something will assuredly kill you in time. If it's not aging, then it will be cancer, heart disease, an accident, etc. Ultimately, entropy will get you one way or another.
As for cancer and heart disease, both are linked to aging or genetically inherited mutatations. Heart disease is a natural result of damages in the human body not being reversed.
And in the meantime he can sell his vitamins and supplements to "make people live longer" despite zero evidence. Good business both ways.
So strange, considering that non-existence is the one thing that every conscious being is guaranteed to never experience. Why run from something that can never catch you?
What a shit life must that be. And I say this in a very sympathetic way. However, feeling you are almost in reach of eternal life, but not being sure you'll make it in time, being constantly afraid of an accident, or illness, taking that away from you... It's a recipe for anguish and panic.
Dying is not that terrible when you know everybody else will too, sooner or later; but try accepting the idea of being among the last to die..
Wait but why had a nice article series digging a bit deeper into that https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...
Without the baggage of the limbic system and dopamine-seeking behaviors, it's quite easy to argue that an artificial intelligence is potentially capable of even greater degrees of agency than humans.
Agency in the context of a machine seems purposefully impossible to reach - its decisions are always somehow tied back to how it was programmed to react.
I don't see much difference between that and Open AI's engine: https://openai.com/five/. Watch some of those games and you definitely see the same dynamic formulation and complex decision-making, none of which was directly programmed.
I'm not trying to make a Chinese room argument (which I don't buy), implying there's some hidden "spark" needed. I'm just saying that currently existing "AI" programs are pretty far from mouse brain, both in individual capabilities and the way they're deployed together (i.e. they're not). For instance, deep learning is to mice brains what a sensor/DSP stack is to a processor. We seem to be making progress in higher-level processing of inputs, but what's lacking is the "meat" that would turn it into a set of behaviors giving rise to a thinking entity.
Ultimately it just has to be able to convince humans that "wow, there's an actual thinking and learning 'being' in there."
Well, in these definitions of intelligence, what one often ends up with is some combination of "deal robustly with it's environment" and a bunch of categories defined in terms of each other. That's not to say categories/qualities/term like "agency", "free will", "feel they can connect with", "find novel" and such are unimportant. It's just saying people using the terms mostly couldn't give mathematically/computationally exact definitions of them. And that matters for any complete modeling of these things.
The test set has to be unknown to the system developers.
If the system can realize the unknown tasks without further input from researchers, in the same way that a mouse can, then we have some level of generalizable intelligence.
Also, is it ever really the "first time" for a mouse when behavior has been ingrained and tuned over millions of years of evolution? Is this different than training an algorithm?
My point is just that it's really hard to define these tasks and how to evaluate performance for a machine and a mouse.
I think that replicating mouse-level adaptability in an intelligent agent while allowing 'inherited' behavioral traits will already be an achievement. And probably take us quite a while.