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Comment by brainpool | Hacker News Reader

AGI is not a research problem but an imagination problem. I can’t vouch for how good John Carmack is in imagination, but striving to put things together with a goal seems like a good place to start.

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I can imagine AGI just fine. Doesn't get me one tiny little bit closer to being able to make one. There are several ways in which one could go about such a development, all we have for now is an existence proof and none of the paths pointed out so far have been viable. Whether John will come up with novel path is not really an imagination issue but one of very deep understanding of the problem space, what has been tried so far, why it did not work and then to come up with something that either fell through the cracks as non-viable and then to recycle it in a way that it is viable (the current neural net applications are like that) or an entirely novel approach. The latter will likely come from an outsider but it would be an extremely lucky shot to hit something workable; the former may be a possibility worth investigating.

The reason why the latter has some chance is there are sometimes approaches tried early on in a field that can't succeed because something else needs to be invented first; or the computing power required is prohibitively expensive. Carmack's skills and ability to absorb knowledge might help to spot such an opportunity.

My favorite AGI so far is Cyc.

It would be great to see what Carmack could contribute to Cyc, not just his own common sense (which would be great too), but deep rich useful interesting applications of commonsense knowledge (including but not just games).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonsense_knowledge_(artific...

The parent's point was that reaching AGI isn't merely a research problem, in the sense of X amount of person-hours of research by typical researchers will solve the problem. Rather, we need new ideas and new conceptual frameworks, i.e. new imaginative leaps to reveal the path forward towards AGI.

That’s research.

Could you list a few fields of research where "X amount of person-hours of research by typical researchers will solve the problem"? I can't think of one.

It's not about fields specifically, but about particular problems within fields. An example is neuroscience discovering the function of some unknown functional unit of the brain. We have all the conceptual machinery to solve the problem, we just need to fill in the details. On the other hand, the problem of consciousness doesn't even have the conceptual machinery in place such that more details will lead to the solution. A solution here will require conceptual leaps that we can't put a boundary on like we reasonably can when the conceptual groundwork is already established.

In mathematics the word used for these kinds of problems is "inaccessible", e.g. Reimann Hypothesis or (previously) Fermat'a Last Theorem. I don't know if Carmack's chances are as good as Wiles' were but certainly better than the average joe. It's also the case that AI is a substantially younger field (arguably it was only possible to correctly evaluate ideas since powerful GPUs were released this decade) and so the difficulty of open problems including AGI is not yet known.

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