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Comment by satisfice | Hacker News Reader

Hofstadter came to Apple in 1987 and spoke on this exact topic. I gleaned two things out of it at the time:

- He looks and sounds so much like Gilligan from Gilligan’s Island that I found it distracting.

- His ideas about analogies in computing were incredibly vague.

I am a big fan of the guy. Godel, Escher, Bach was the first book that really taught me what logic is. But it’s fascinating to reflect on how little computing has advanced with regard to practical analogizing.

GPT-3 is a parlor trick. Making vapid systems that fool people who aren’t thinking deeply is not going to end in successful general AI.

I predict, when the day comes that real general AI lands, we will discover that it is chronically manic or depressed or otherwise uncooperative. We will have re-invented teenagers. And we will never, ever be able to safely trust them.

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Where does the idea come from on HN that anyone is working on “general” AI? It’s a straw man argument. That’s not the goal of GPT3 or pretty much any of the current AI research.

The idea comes from the vast and overwhelming deluge of marketing of AI products, which give the calculated impression that products are “smart.”

I just saw a product being described as containing the “distilled wisdom of 1000 testers.” So, really? Are you actually wondering how people like me can think that some might be trying to work on genral AI?

It should have been called Augmented Intelligence from the start. The goal is to augment human cognition. Give us better tools. AGI is the stuff of scifi and futurists.

I think the problem with mythologizing and the fictional nonsense would have grown up around whatever term was originally adopted.

AGI though is just the worst. If I am consider to posses general intelligence then why I am so bad at painting? I would love to be able to paint, even to just do Picasso ripoffs but I can't even make something close after much time, effort and training on past data/paintings.

When a computer has the same type of problem though then it negates any concept of general intelligence for the computer.

Nothing short of an Artificial God will satisfy what we mean by AGI.

Our poorly defined language here is causing philosophical problems.

I think a good analogy is to artificial light. The attitude towards AI would be to not be impressed by the light bulb but be constantly waiting for some miniature Sun/star that doesn't even make sense. That light bulb is not real artificial light says the AGI fanatic.

Some people have the goal to understand human cognition. Augmentation is good - I agree - but understanding would also be useful I think. I think that understanding ourselves and how our society processes information could allow us to avoid some of the mistakes that plague us.

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