I think that AGI timelines might be very short based on an argument taken from a different side of things.
We all can agree that humans have general intelligence. If we look at how our general intelligence evolved from simpler forms of specific intelligence typical for animals—it wasn’t something that came from complex interactions and high evolutional pressure. Basically there were two aspects of that progress. The first one is the ability to pass on knowledge through generations (culture). Something that we share with some other animals including our cousins chimpanzee. The second one is intersexual selection—at some moment in the past, our species started to have sexual preferences based on the ability to gossip and talk. It is still there, even if we are not 100% aware of that—our courtship, known as dating, is based mostly on meeting together and talking. People who are not talkative and introverts, even if successful, have a hard time dating. These two things seem to be major drivers for us to both develop more sophisticated language and better general intelligence.
It seems to me that this means that there are not many pieces missing from using current observations and some general heuristics like animals do, to have full-fledged general intelligence.
It also suggests that you need some set of functions or heuristics, possibly a small set, together with a form of external memory, to tackle any general problem by dividing it into smaller bits and rejoining sub-solutions into a general solution. Like a processor or Turing machine that has a small set of basic operations, but can in principle run any program.
Thought on short timelines. Opinionated.
I think that AGI timelines might be very short based on an argument taken from a different side of things.
We all can agree that humans have general intelligence. If we look at how our general intelligence evolved from simpler forms of specific intelligence typical for animals—it wasn’t something that came from complex interactions and high evolutional pressure. Basically there were two aspects of that progress. The first one is the ability to pass on knowledge through generations (culture). Something that we share with some other animals including our cousins chimpanzee. The second one is intersexual selection—at some moment in the past, our species started to have sexual preferences based on the ability to gossip and talk. It is still there, even if we are not 100% aware of that—our courtship, known as dating, is based mostly on meeting together and talking. People who are not talkative and introverts, even if successful, have a hard time dating.
These two things seem to be major drivers for us to both develop more sophisticated language and better general intelligence.
It seems to me that this means that there are not many pieces missing from using current observations and some general heuristics like animals do, to have full-fledged general intelligence.
It also suggests that you need some set of functions or heuristics, possibly a small set, together with a form of external memory, to tackle any general problem by dividing it into smaller bits and rejoining sub-solutions into a general solution. Like a processor or Turing machine that has a small set of basic operations, but can in principle run any program.