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Comment by tpoacher | Hacker News Reader

AGI is not a difficult "problem". It's a difficult "definition".

Given very specific, practical, functional definitions, AGI is a breeze.

I keep hearing this argument that we already have AI, it's just the naysayers move the definition. Level 5 autonomous driving is specific, practical, functionally defined. Where's the breeze implementation?

GTA San Andreas /s

Are you sure level 5 autonomous driving is specific? What would be the exact goal behind decisions in such a system? Not even talking about the trolley problem, would the software optimize for speed or not harming people, for example? Obviously we would want a combination of both, otherwise people can either get harmed or not get anywhere in time. But then, how fast should it take a corner? How much chance of human harm should it allow to get somewhere fast? Furthermore, what do we mean by human harm? The system would obviously need to know what human harm is, to be able to avoid it. Which requires defining human and defining harm, both of which are incredibly difficult to do specifically - more on this by Rob Miles here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PKx3kS7f4A I don't think level 5 autonomous driving is specifically defined. We just don't have systems intelligent enough for this to be a problem yet.

In my opinion, this is the crux.

Think about it for a moment. Can you define human intelligence? Have you ever gotten in a debate with someone about this? Is there a commonly accepted way to designate intelligence that isn't somewhat controversial?

How will we ever define AGI if we still haven't even defined RoHI (Regular ol' Human Intelligence) sufficiently?

This is the actual issue with AGI. No one has a rigorous, concrete and non-circular definition of human intelligence.

No doubt we'll have many useful and amazing tools, but none of them will approximate human intelligence anytime soon unless we have a deeper understanding of what it is. We're just scratching the surface of the "AI" field.

But something is certain: the next time people claim AGI has arrived, it will be another chatbot.

> Given very specific, practical, functional definitions, AGI is a breeze

We have a few, but the difficulty is getting to a model that is portable to higher functions. ("Here is a feedback over the details of a world model ... Now understand that book")

Let me give you the definition most people think of today: A thing which can write any piece of software humans ever wrote given a specific goal.

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