Will AI soon surpass the human brain? If you ask employees at OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other large tech companies, it is inevitable. However, researchers at Radboud University and other institutes show new proof that those claims are overblown and unlikely to ever come to fruition. Their findings are published in Computational Brain & Behavior today.
If producing an AGI is intractable, why does the human meat-brain exist?
Ah, but here we have to get pedantic a little bit: producing an AGI through current known methods is intractable.
The human brain is extremely complex and we still donโt fully know how it works. We donโt know if the way we learn is really analogous to how these AIs learn. We donโt really know if the way we think is analogous to how computers โthinkโ.
Thereโs also another argument to be made, that an AGI that matches the currently agreed upon definition is impossible. And I mean that in the broadest sense, e.g. humans donโt fit the definition either. If thatโs true, then an AI could perhaps be trained in a tractable amount of time, but this would upend our understanding of human consciousness (perhaps justifyingly so). Maybe weโre overestimating how special we are.
And then thereโs the argument that you already mentioned: it is intractable, but 60 million years, spread over trillions of creatures is long enough. That also suggests that AGI is really hard, and that creating one really isnโt โaround the cornerโ as some enthusiasts claim. For any practical AGI weโd have to finish training in maybe a couple years, not millions of years.
And maybe we develop some quantum computing breakthrough that gets us where we need to be. Who knows?
Ah, but here we have to get pedantic a little bit: producing an AGI through current known methods is intractable.
I didnโt quite understand this at first. I think I was going to say something about the paper leaving the method ambiguous, thus implicating all methods yet unknown, etc, whatever. But yeah, this divide between solvable and โunsolvableโ shifts if we ever break NP-hard and have to define some new NP-super-hard category. This does feel like the piece I was missing. Or a piece, anyway.
e.g. humans donโt fit the definition either.
I did think about this, and the only reason I reject it is that โhuman-like or -levelโ matches our complexity by definition, and we already have a behavior set for a fairly large n. This doesnโt have to mean that we arenโt still below some curve, of course, but I do struggle to imagine how our own complexity wouldnโt still be too large to solve, AGI or not.
Anyway, the main reason Iโm replying again at all is just to make sure I thanked you for getting back to me, haha. This was definitely helpful.