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Comment by nolemurs | Hacker News Reader

> People who ask questions such as this often don't consider that it remains eminently possible that AGI is an impossibility for us to build.

I 100% agree that AGI is probably a long ways off barring some surprise (not that such a surprise is impossible, but definitely not expected). That said, the fact that the human brain works means that brains can be made. Unless you think there's something literally magical going on in the brain, then the brain is just a physical thing, and other physical things with similar behavior can be constructed. Maybe we won't be able to do it with current computer hardware, but some day we'll manage it.

I've never heard an argument that AGI was impossible that didn't basically boil down to "No, we're special, and you can't prove otherwise." Not a very convincing argument.

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> "No, we're special, and you can't prove otherwise."

More the opposite. What makes you assume we're smart enough to fully understand how it is that we work and reproduce it non-biologically? My main issue is around some people treating it as an inevitability as opposed to a possibility. I mean I'm all for humans performing crazy engineering feats but we have to ask ourselves if some feats are beyond us. Could we build a star? Would we build a star? Will we build one 2017?

You get me?

Is it not possible that we could simulate a star though? Not in 2017, but at some point?

sure but we haven't even started to define what constitutes a valid simulation. That's half of the point here, we're trying to recreate something that we don't know.

That's true. The big if is whether we can ever have the resources to fully simulate the human brain. If we ever get close to that, then we can worry about the "intelligence explosion" and so on. It feels very possible that we'd work out how the human brain works at some point, though.

I'm of the opinion that no, we will not. The computing power required to simulate a star (or a human brain, to go back down the analogy chain) is not there and will not be there, without some quantum computing magic. I doubt the sun provides enough energy for us to fully simulate the sun.

Simply running basic neural network is slow work, even with the best supercomputers we have today. Throw in the fact that a neural network is a super simplistic model of how we currently believe synapses work, and the scale of the simulation problem gets hard, fast.

> I doubt the sun provides enough energy for us to fully simulate the sun.

That's an interesting way to put it! I tend to agree that simulating a human brain will need more than the computational resources to train a neural network with 1 billion neurons (if those resources will ever be available, which is questionable). That's not to say we won't find a way around that problem though. Of course, all the worry about a dangerous AGI hinges on this premise, and how we get there is at best unclear at the moment.

> What makes you assume we're smart enough to fully understand how it is that we work and reproduce it non-biologically

Absolutely nothing. I believe we'll eventually make artificial intelligence, and I doubt we'll really understand it when we make it. Human intelligence evolved naturally as a result of a statistical process. When we make artificial intelligence it's totally likely that it will be the result of some human controlled statistical process that looks nothing like traditional software.

> Could we build a star?

Almost certainly eventually.

> Would we build a star?

Probably not. But building a star would require vast resources, and I'm not sure what we'd get out of it. There are lots of stars. Artificial intelligence really isn't comparable on this front.

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