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Re:Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise ... by mschuster91 on Monday January 30, 2023 @07:55PM (#34589235)
The question of if an AI can be regarded as a sentient being has already been debated ad nauseam in science fiction (e.g. Data in Star Trek).

All that's needed is someone to achieve GAI at a supercomputer level. From then on, it's just a matter of scaling it down. Your iPhone has more compute power than a supercomputer 30 years ago, after all.

And what's also a way to "cheat" is fusing computers and organic matter. Brain-in-a-vat style, or, for yet another Star Trek reference, Voyager's organic compute network (which IIRC even suffered a pathogen infection at one point). And that is definitely possible in the next 10-15 years. Give Musk's Neuralink enough apes to euthanize and it will get done.

Re:Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise ... by chongli on Monday January 30, 2023 @08:26PM (#34589578)
Your iPhone has more compute power than a supercomputer 30 years ago, after all.

In 30 years we will not have an iPhone-sized device with the power of today's supercomputers. Transistor scaling is in its final stages. We'll be lucky to get 2-3 more process nodes and that'll be it.

Re:Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise ... by ElectricalUnion on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @09:58AM (#34595804)
This assumes we don't use anything but transistor scaling for the next 30 years in mobile computing.
Re:Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise ... by runarberg on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @02:23PM (#34600413)
Even if we find a novel semiconductor that can scale 1000x better then silicon transistors (say DNA semiconductors), then we are still limited by classical computing. Meaning our most intelligent systems are still just good old statistical inference (I say still, but statistical inference is really powerful, and getting 1000s of orders of magnitude better at statistical inference means a world of amazing discoveries).

Perhaps quantum computing will enable new kinds of inference, then we will need to scale superconductors like we did transistors in the past 75 years, that is possible (not in the next 10-15 years though; 30-40 years is more realistic). However I don’t think this will lead to anything more then amazing statistical inference. People theorized artificial neural networks way back in the 1940s and we already had algorithms for it in the 1970s. I’m not aware of any algorithms, not even theoretical ones that gives us AGI, on any computing device (not even quantum computers).

Re:Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise ... by runarberg on Monday January 30, 2023 @08:43PM (#34589724)
GAI is not limited by computing power, but theory. Yes we will be able to make better inference by feeding more data into our models, supervised learning will be able to work with thousands of parameters, etc. This will lead to all sorts of new discoveries in many fields, including biochemistry, astrophysics, neurology, etc. It will also bring us a bunch of new fun toys to play with including better and more capable robots, and it will also lead to better engineered social systems (including traffic engineering; but also public transit, and—yes—self driving vehicles—but we already have self driving trains, so it is not as big of a deal as you think it is).

However this misses my point about AGI. It is not about computing capabilities but theory. AGI will have to evaluate situations that has never arisen before without having data that directly directs it. I don’t see how statistical inference can do that, and as such we will need an entirely new methods of training it. Like I said, we haven’t even conceived how an AGI technology works, there are no algorithms which will work in theory even with unlimited computing power. Contrast this, for example, with quantum computing, which has a bunch of algorithms demonstrating it’s capabilities. With AGI all we have is “perhaps our cars become better at driving them selves”. I’m not buying it.