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Don’t believe the hype: AGI is far from inevitable (www.ru.nl)

submitted 4 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20858435

Will AI soon surpass the human brain? If you ask employees at OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other large tech companies, it is inevitable. However, researchers at Radboud University and other institutes show new proof that those claims are overblown and unlikely to ever come to fruition. Their findings are published in Computational Brain & Behavior today.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

There are a couple of reasons that might not work:

Maybe we'll asymptotically approach a point that is lower than human-level cognitive capabilities
Gradual improvements are susceptible to getting stuck in a local maxima. This is a problem in evolution as well. A lot of animals could in theory evolve, say, human level intelligence in principle, but to reach that point they'd have to go through a bunch of intermediate steps that lead to worse fitness. Gradual scientific improvements are a bit like evolution in this way.
We also lose knowledge over time. Something as dramatic as a nuclear war would significantly set back the progress in developing AGI, but something less dramatic might also lead to us forgetting things that we've already learned.

To be clear, most of the arguments I'm making aren't really about AGI specifically but about humanities capability to develop arbitrary in principle feasible technologies in general.