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Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

Humans. There are arrangements of atoms that if constructed and activated, act perfectly like human intelligence. Because they are human intelligence.

Human intelligence must be deterministic, any other conclusion is equivalent to the claim that there is some sort of "soul" for lack of better term. If human intelligence is deterministic, then it can be written in software.

Thus, if we continue to strive to design/create/invent such, it is inevitable that eventually it must happen. Failures to date can be attributed to various factors, but the gist is that we haven't yet identified the principles of intelligent software.

My guess is that we need less than 5 million years further development time even in a worst-case scenario. With luck and proper investment, we can get it down well below the 1 million year mark.

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> Human intelligence must be deterministic, any other conclusion is equivalent to the claim that there is some sort of "soul" for lack of better term.

No, not all processes follow deterministic Newtonian mechanics. It could also be random, unpredictable at times. Are the there random processes in the human brain? Yes, there are random quantum processes in every atom, and there are atoms in the brain.

Yes, this is no less materialistic: Humans are still proof that either you believe in souls or such, or that human level intelligence can be made from material atoms. But it's not deterministic.

But also, LLMs are not anywhere close to becoming human level intelligence.

>It could also be random, unpredictable at times.

It isn't. But if it were, we can also write that into the algorithm.

>But also, LLMs are not anywhere close to becoming human level intelligence.

They're no farther than about 5 million years distant.

"Human intelligence must be deterministic, any other conclusion is equivalent to the claim that there is some sort of "soul" for lack of better term. "

Determinism is a metaphysical concept like mathematical platonism or ghosts.

> Thus, if we continue to strive to design/create/invent such, it is inevitable that eventually it must happen.

~200 years of industrial revolution and we already fucked up beyond the point of no return, I don't think we'll have resources to continue on this trajectory for 1m years. We might very well be accelerating towards a brick wall, there is absolutely no guarantee we'll hit AGI before hitting the wall

>We might very well be accelerating towards a brick wall, there is absolutely no guarantee we'll hit AGI before hitting the wall

We've already set the course for human extinction, we're about 6-8 generations away from absolute human extinction. We became functionally extinct 10-15 years ago. Still, if we had another 5 million years, I'm one hundred percent certain we could crack AGI.

> if deterministic, then can be done in software.

You just need a few Dyson spheres and someone omniscient to give you all the parameter values. Easy peazy.

Just like cracking any encryption: you just brute force all possible passwords. Perfectly deterministic decryption method.

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