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Comment by sailingparrot | Hacker News Reader

> [know that AGI] is centuries or even further away (basically some indeterminate time frame because we don't even know if we're on the right path).

How can you, in the same sentence, say the time frame is indeterminate and that it is 100+ years away?

We just don't know, period.

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Well what we do know is that current AI methods are very task specific and there is nothing that generalizes well to many tasks. If it was happening in the next century we would at least have some idea how to start generalizing to many tasks with a single model or something comparable to that. We had the analytical engine in 1830s and we didn't see a turing machine or lambda calculus until the 1930s

It is extremely hard (read impossible) to predict what is going to evolve exponentially or asymptomatically in the future. Look at computing and aerospace for example. Take the state of those 2 domains and ask someone in 1900 where they think we would be in 2000, I am pretty sure they would have been quite far off.

Working at an AI lab myself, while I agree with your statement about the state of AI today, I don't know any of my colleague that would be confident to say it's 100+ years away.

> If it was happening in the next century we would at least have some idea

Just like at the beginning of the 20th century we knew ~0 about quantum physics and less than 50 years later A-bombs were getting dropped.

Or how, at the same time no plane could achieve sustained/controlled flight (and the goal was merely to stay above ground) and less than 70 years later not only were we leaving Earth's atmosphere: a man was walking on the moon.

We have no idea how long it will take to achieve AGI, let's leave it at that.

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