But Google can read, injest, and search for information far faster than I can.

Stockfish players chess far better than I can.

AlphaGo plays Go far better than I can.

Random Sudoku bot built on top of minizinc / z3 / whatever SAT solver can solve NP-complete problems better than any human.

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Here's the thing: what is "strong AI" ?? As far as I can tell, we're already at superhuman AI in most intelligence tasks (collecting data, collating it together, analyzing it, etc. etc.).

Its called a computer. What if "superhuman AI" is just the stuff we have today at our fingertips? It wasnt very long ago when reading documents and organizing them was considered AI. But today, we call that Google.

Stockfish and AlphaGo are also available for humans to use. A human using Stockfish will be just as good at chess as a strong AI using Stockfish, and likewise for any future improvements to chess engines that either humans or strong AIs develop.

There are no superhuman craftsman AI.

Something that could in one package:

- hold a conversation about what it is that needs to be done

- clean a room

- fix a sink

- make a chair or table out of wood

- dig a hole

We don't know how to make AI that will learn to play even simple game like montezuma's revenge in some reasonable play time like 30 min.

We are currently closer to months or years of gameplay required.

> We don't know how to make AI that will learn to play even simple game like montezuma's revenge in some reasonable play time like 30 min.

Explain to me why a Tool-assisted Speedrun doesn't count as "AI". Its certainly not a human who is playing that (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFB0kuPx5mQ).

> Something that could in one package:

I'm not sure if that sort of thing is worth the investment.

But if we have "Fly the F35 airframe" (which is incredibly unstable), then we suddenly reach "only computers can fly this thing" levels. Just the assumption of super-human control systems is baked into modern products. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyN-CRNrb3E

Our cell phones are largely manufactured by machines these days. A few tidbits here and there remain in human hands for cheapness... but a lot of today's stuff is basically an AI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRu02F6AOmg

> Explain to me why a Tool-assisted Speedrun doesn't count as "AI". Its certainly not a human who is playing that (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFB0kuPx5mQ).

Because TAS are made by human speedrunners, who go through the painstaking process of specifying inputs for each frame. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, TAS are basically the exact opposite of AI.

> I'm not sure if that sort of thing...

> But if we have "Fly the F35 airframe"...

> Our cell phones are largely manufactured by machines...

That's a red herring. There's plenty of evidence we can make very useful narrow AI in many fields, and nobody is arguing against that.

The point is, they are, well, narrow. What your parent is saying is that there's no evidence that the statistical techniques behind the current wave of AI are capable of anything else.

To paraphrase Norvig, it could well be that we're trying to get to the moon by climbing a tree, reporting steady progress all the way to the top of the tree.

When I was involved in physics I thought that the range of problems that were solvable were like a continent (linear systems) surrounded by islands (integrable systems and a domain in which perturbation theory works around them.)

I thought that the problems solved by Bethe, Feynman and their cohort were the easy problems and the current generation is struggling with problems that were much harder, possibly impossible to solve.

One example is the problem of chaotic dynamics with six degrees of freedom as opposed to four degrees of freedom. With four degrees of freedom you have unbroken KAM tori that partition the phase space into areas that it will stay in forever. In 6 DOF or more, some tori are still unbroken but it's possible for the system to go around them, so even in a phase space region that has a lot of intact tori (e.g. the motion of the planets around the Sun) you can't prove anything for the long term (e.g. the Earth doesn't get ejected from the solar system.)

Look also at examples such as the halting problem, Godel's theorems, etc. I'm not sure if a "higher intelligence" could actually solve that many problems we can't because the problems are intractable.

The work that most (even highly skilled) people do is more like playing chess or writing a novel than proving theorems.

Not pushing the boundaires of human knowledge, but requiring skills which are not easily learned without experience and within which there is a huge variation in human ability.

Can you really say that the existence of an agent (or a million) matching or exceeding the 100th percentile in many different skills would not be a massive change?

Superhuman chess playing A.I. is a reality today.

I don't think it changes the human condition.

If any kind of "Terminator" threatens the human race I think it is something that can understand individual psychology and seduce anyone.

> Humanity is an existence proof for human level AI, and it seems arrogant to assume that our brains are at the limit of what is possible.

Why? Is it arrogant to assume that Turing machines are at the limit of what is possible to compute? Perhaps, but we also have good reasons to believe that to be the case. If you're just talking about things like computational speed differences or being able to control powerful machinery and weaponry, then those are already available for humans to use, and can already be used by humans to do bad things much more effectively. It seems to me that any future improvements in computational speed, memory capacity, etc. will also continue to be available to humans as well as any strong AIs we might develop.