Brains are complicated, not magic. But complicated is bad enough.
So would you consider this blog post in accordance with your position?
I could believe that coding an AGI is an extremely laborious task with no shortcuts that could be accomplished only through an inordinately large number of years of work by an inordinately large team of inordinately bright people. I argued earlier (without protest from you) that most humans can’t make technological advances, so maybe there exists some advance A such that it’s too hard for any human who will ever live to make, and AGI ends up requiring advance A? This is another way of saying that although AGI is possible in theory, in practice it ends up being too hard. (Or to make a more probable but still very relevant claim, it might be sufficiently difficult that some other civilization-breaking technological advance ends up deciding the fate of the human race. That way AGI just has to be harder than the easiest civilization-breaking thing.)
So would you consider this blog post in accordance with your position?
I could believe that coding an AGI is an extremely laborious task with no shortcuts that could be accomplished only through an inordinately large number of years of work by an inordinately large team of inordinately bright people. I argued earlier (without protest from you) that most humans can’t make technological advances, so maybe there exists some advance A such that it’s too hard for any human who will ever live to make, and AGI ends up requiring advance A? This is another way of saying that although AGI is possible in theory, in practice it ends up being too hard. (Or to make a more probable but still very relevant claim, it might be sufficiently difficult that some other civilization-breaking technological advance ends up deciding the fate of the human race. That way AGI just has to be harder than the easiest civilization-breaking thing.)
Here’s a blog post with some AI progress estimates: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/08/ai-progress-estimate.html