The weakest argument against AI was the standard:
Free will (or creativity) hence no AI!
I am most appalled by “philosophical externalism about mental content, therefore no AI.” Another silly one is “humans can be produced for free with unskilled labor, so AGI will never be cost-effective.”
The weakest argument in favour of AI was the perenial:
Moore’s Law hence AI!
On the other hand, imagine that computer hardware was stagnant at 1970s levels. It would be pretty plausible that the most efficient algorithms for human-level AI we could find would just be too computationally demanding to experiment with or make practical use of. Hardware on its own isn’t sufficient, but it’s certainly important for the plausibility of human-level AI when we find performance on so many problems scales with hardware, and our only existence proof of human-level intelligence has high hardware demands..
Also, you occasionally see weak arguments for human-level AI by people who are especially interested in some particular narrow AI field, which reaches superhuman performance, that assume the difficulty of that field is highly representative of all the remaining problems in AI.
Before the the recent normalization of women in the workforce, I’m not sure that it was intuitive that raising children was expensive since the childcare was not paid in money. From a certain perspective, that makes those offering the premise look bad.
I am most appalled by “philosophical externalism about mental content, therefore no AI.” Another silly one is “humans can be produced for free with unskilled labor, so AGI will never be cost-effective.”
On the other hand, imagine that computer hardware was stagnant at 1970s levels. It would be pretty plausible that the most efficient algorithms for human-level AI we could find would just be too computationally demanding to experiment with or make practical use of. Hardware on its own isn’t sufficient, but it’s certainly important for the plausibility of human-level AI when we find performance on so many problems scales with hardware, and our only existence proof of human-level intelligence has high hardware demands..
Also, you occasionally see weak arguments for human-level AI by people who are especially interested in some particular narrow AI field, which reaches superhuman performance, that assume the difficulty of that field is highly representative of all the remaining problems in AI.
Not only is this argument inductively weak, the premise seems obviously false, since childcare is actually quite expensive.
Yes, it’s quite annoying, and also neglects runtime costs.
Also the argument applies equally well to lots of non-intellectual tasks where a cheap human could well be a replacement for an expensive machine.
Before the the recent normalization of women in the workforce, I’m not sure that it was intuitive that raising children was expensive since the childcare was not paid in money. From a certain perspective, that makes those offering the premise look bad.