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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

1) That the rise of AI has been predicted again as "coming soon" in the 60s and 70s and nothing came out of it once already.

2) That current AI is just very primitive NNs, and all the hoopla is mostly hype (like Big Data, Grid Computing, Biotechnology, Nanotechnology, Virtual Reality, 3D Printing, and several other previous fads served as revolutionary and the cure for everything)

3) That they are several orders of magnitude more primitive than a human brain.

4) That we haven't had Moore-law style increases in CPU power for quite some time.

5) That, never mind AI, we can't even make a good email app...

6) That all kind of peddler make good money by tooting AI (e.g. IBM selling BS tech as "Watson")

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If you can agree that intelligence is just an information processing challenge instead of a magical god-given treasure, then general AI is inevitable.

Though note that you couldn't come up with an argument against the future of AI development in six points. They were all independently irrelevant, like denying future medical breakthroughs because doctors didn't wash their hands 100 years ago. Your points are all distracted, like suggesting Elon Musk's tweeting habits today doom all future humans from ever reaching Mars.

>If you can agree that intelligence is just an information processing challenge instead of a magical god-given treasure, then general AI is inevitable.

As a scientist, I don't believe anything is "inevitable" (that's for religious people to believe).

I can very much imagine scenarios where we're already on the steep end of a technological curve, having exhausted most low hanging fruit, and failing to make many more revolutionary breakthroughs (no matter the timeframe).

>Though note that you couldn't come up with an argument against the future of AI development in six points. They were all independently irrelevant, like denying future medical breakthroughs because doctors didn't wash their hands 100 years ago.

I didn't want to make an argument against the possibility or impossibility of AI in abstracto (whether it's physically possible or not. Since our brain does it, it is physically possible. That's boring, again left to religious people to discuss, of which there's no shortage, even among the atheists). I wanted to make one about its _actual_ possibility, given what we know of our technological development, past claims, trends, etc.

Okay, it's a magical god-given treasure, which is as good a definition as any in this context, which illustrates the problem. When most talk about general AI, what they talk about is artificial consciousness. That's fair enough, but you can't build what you don't understand.

If someone says general AI is possible because consciousness is not a magical god-given treasure, I'm allowed to ask what is is instead. That would give me a model to at least see how someone would approach it, something to falsify against.

General AI is to current AI what flying saucers are to airplanes: if you look at the latter it's easy to envision the former, and seeing the technological advances it seems inevitable. On closer inspection though, a whole new sets of concepts--some very improbably--are needed.

Flying saucers would need some gravity cancellation property. Not impossible by itself, but far from a natural evolution of aircraft.

By analogy, general AI would need a workable model of consciousness. Again, not impossible by itself, but also not a natural consequence of current advances in the field of AI.

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