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Comment by danybittel | Hacker News Reader

And yet the computer is so much better in many areas than a human.

It so weird to compare the two. Why would you even want that? We have already plenty of brains on earth. Who sais, that once a computer works like a brain.. it doesn't also come with it's downsides?

There are lot's of problems in compute.. making it more brain like, more linguistic isn't going to solve that.

I believe the whole notion of "a computer as an assistant", is doing more damage than good.

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My takeaway is that Sussman is looking at his field after a lifetime of contribution. He's looking for signposts on where we can go next. He's not valuing one over the other, but looking at the brain and saying, "Here's something that exists that's operating on problems in a way we can't begin to approach using current software/hardware techniques". He sees some hints available to us in the noise reduction things he talks about at the end. In that way, the talk is more him challenging the audience to question our approaches and implied constraints rather than him trying to present us with an answer. It's one of my favorite videos (the way too loud HI at the beginning, notwithstanding).

Well an assistant is traditionally the one who eventually replaces the master, so that notion is not conceptually wrong.

Do people still think there will be any humans left alive in a few hundred years? We've gone as far as we could as biological constructs, switching to a more adaptable architecture is just the next step forward. Our bodies are overfitted for living on this one specific planet which is greatly limiting the real goal of life: to expand to new areas and replicate.

> Do people still think there will be any humans left alive in a few hundred years?

I will go on the record and predict there will be some human beings alive in a few hundred years.

Alright there will always be some that stubbornly cling on, but I would bet that most entities that could be considered intelligent beings won't be human by that point, just out of practicality.

Stupid flesh and blood humans with their finite needs! Let's build cyborgs with infinite information processing capability so their needs can never be saturated!

Question is, would they be alive by choice, and would they want to continue being alive?

Are you and I alive by choice? I don’t know what this means.

I will go further and boldly predict that some of these future people will like living.

Ok, I'll spell out what I meant. One of the possible scenarios where, centuries after GAI was created, there would still be humans (recognizable to us as such) alive, is the same as the reason why horses and pigs and cows are alive today - because they're bred as inputs to some industrial process.

Well, in human history there have been many people bred as inputs to an industrial process. Today most people of conscience look on those situations (past and present) in horror. I would hope that humans someday learn to never allow that to happen to any of us again.

> I would hope that humans someday learn to never allow that to happen to any of us again.

I would hope so too, but here we are, racing full steam towards AGI.

Dude, already happening, it never stopped, it isn't 'horror' it's 'efficiency'. There is no such thing as 'people of conscience'. It will always happen, because, human nature.

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