Re:Artificial general intelligence is here, and it's useless
by throwawaymath on Thursday May 23, 2019 @09:46AM
(#19991716)
This is a good critique. I'm very skeptical of the near term (<100 years) risk of AGI, but I don't really think this article's arguments are valid. Saying we already have AGI because there exist humans is vacuous and seems to almost deliberately miss the point.
If you want to counter the arguments that AGI will be capable of exponential self-improvement, you need to use an analogue other than humans. Humans categorically lack the capability to exponentially self-improve. Likewise human intelligence is definitionally non-alien, which is not something we can say a priori about any successful AGI we create.
Very slowly and not reliably.
> updating their own algorithms,
Slowly and not reliably.
> sharing their algorithms with other AGIs
Slowly.
> and learning new complex skills.
Very slowly, yes
> To add to that, they are energy efficient, you can keep one running for optimally for 5 to 50$/day depending on location, much less than your average server farm used to train a complex ML model.
To run a reasonably complex ML model does not require $1500/month.
And these AGIs require significant resources and space, much of which has to be provided by other AGIs.
> If we disagree on that assumption, than what's stopping the value of human mental labor from sky-rocketing if it's in such demand ? What's stopping hundreds of millions of people with perfectly average working brains from finding employment ?
They're slow and complex and expensive and training scales terribly. Training a model and running 1000 copies of it is not 1000 times as complex as training a model and running just one copy.