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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2024
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Roger Penrose wrote a whole book on the topic in 1989. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/179744.The_Emperor_s_New_Mind
His points are well thought out and argued, but my essential takeaway is that a series of switches is not ever going to create a sentient being. The idea is absurd to me, but for the people that disagree? They have no proof, just a religious furver, a fanaticism. Simply stated, they want to believe.
All this AI of today is the AI of the 1980s, just with more transistors than we could fathom back then, but the ideas are the same. After the massive surge from our technology finally catching up with 40-60 year old concepts and algorithms, most everything has been just adding much more data, generalizing models, and other tweaks.
What is a problem is the complete lack of scalability and massive energy consumption. Are we supposed to be drying our clothes at a specific our of the night, and join smart grids to reduce peak air conditioning, to scorn bitcoin because it uses too much electricity, but for an AI that generates images of people with 6 fingers and other mangled appendages, that bullshit anything it doesn't know, for that we need to build nuclear power plants everywhere. It's sickening really.
So no AGI anytime soon, but I am sure Altman has defined it as anything that can make his net worth 1 billion or more, no matter what he has to say or do.
Is the goal to create a sentient being, or to create something that seems sentient? How would you even tell the difference (assuming it could pass any test a normal human could)?
Powering off a pile of switches is turning it off. Powering off a sentient being is killing it. Not to mention a million other issues it raises.
What do you think Sam Altman's net worth is currently?
Until you can see the human soul under a microscope, we can't make rocks into people.