Edit: I think the announcement above is about object recognition on still images, which is largely solved. The "new ImageNet" one on Kaggle in the reply below is for videos.
By the way, since you appear to be reasonable skeptic, would you mind replying to my comment beginning with "Unlike airplanes, ..."? Specifically I wonder what would be a minimum threshold for you to believe that AGI is likely possible.
> would you mind replying to my comment beginning with "Unlike airplanes, ..."?
Ok, will try
> Specifically I wonder what would be a minimum threshold for you to believe that AGI is likely possible.
Current machine learning tech doesn't have any sense of creating its own goals. We also don't know how to encode that. All of the systems we have target specific problems, like playing Atari games, identifying objects in images, or playing Go. These are all great milestones in machine learning tech. They do not indicate we're much closer to developing a new intelligence. If we could set a system out there and have it determine its own goals and learn things on its own, then maybe I'd believe we're close to creating AGI. As it stands, we don't know how to run a program that decides what it wants to learn. Every program we write has our hand in it.
My suspicion is that our quest for developing AI leads us to discover more about ourselves than AI itself. I think we'll continue to refine our definition of intelligence, and continue to use the tools we build to augment our own intelligence.
Most humans do not really come up with our goals on our own either. We are heavily influenced by genes and environment. People's personality are partially changed by the environment and occupation they are in. Twins adoption studies also show that genes have surprisingly strong effects on personality even after decades living apart.
By your definition, humans do not possess general intelligence.
Edit-Reply:
I don't think we can resolve an age-old philosophical question on Free Will in a comment thread, so I'll leave it at that. :) However, General Intelligence and Free Will are largely orthogonal.
We can imagine an alien who is highly capable of any tasks human can perform and beyond, including coming up with creative subgoals as necessary, but will only serve their master's ultimate goal(s). An AGI could be like that alien but built to serve human masters. The twist is that when someone orders an AGI to efficiently reduce animal suffering, without value alignment with humans, it could come up with euthanasia as a subgoal to reduce the suffering of starving kittens.
> Most humans do not really come up with our goals on our own either
I disagree. I believe we have free will, in addition to being influenced by our environment/genes.
This is my general point, that contemplating AI is a way for us to investigate how we ourselves operate. You have your theory and I have mine. Nobody has shown how we can be replicated.
EDIT
> We can imagine an alien who is highly capable of any tasks human can perform and beyond, including coming up with creative subgoals as necessary, but will only serve their master's ultimate goal(s). An AGI could be like that alien but built to serve human masters. The twist is that, without value alignment with humans, some subgoal could be killing starving kittens to reduce their suffering
If the AGI's goals are determined by a human, then it is technically trivial to encode human values. The hard part is convincing humans not to encode evil values.
So it isn't that AGI would go rogue, it's that humans could. That's an age-old, Adam & Eve question. It's not specific to AI technology.
Unfortunately, no one can really articulate the full set of human values yet, especially since they are often in conflict in real-world situations. Which value(s) should be prioritized over others? How about differing values between cultures and human groups within each culture?
You might have heard of the Trolley Problem. There are many and more complicated variations of that.
The problem with AGI is more acute than most other technologies because it is software-based, which makes it nigh impossible to regulate effectively, especially globally.
> Which value(s) should be prioritized over others? How about differing values between cultures and human groups within each culture?
Don't kill humans sounds like a good start.
Honestly, this problem seems a lot simpler to me than creating AGI itself.
I agree it is challenging. The most imminent question is probably, "should a self driving car be allowed to kill 10 people on the sidewalk to avoid a head-on collision, or should it accept the head-on and let the driver die?"
These domain specific problems will come up before the AGI one does, and we can address them as they become relevant.
You've noted that regulating AGI is difficult, and it sounds like you don't have any other solution in mind.
It is often not practical for something dumber to regulate something far more intelligent. (Humans win against lions despite our physical weakness.) So the best solution I have heard of is to create a Provably Safe AGI (or Friendly AI in Yudkowsky's term) and have them help us regulate other AI efforts. A moral core that aligns with human values need to be part of this Safe AGI.
It is definitely very challenging to create one, and more challenging than creating a random AGI. The morality also needs to be integrated into the Safe AGI as its core that is not susceptible to self-modification ability that an AGI could have. Thus, we need to work on that aspect of AGI now.
Edit: I think the announcement above is about object recognition on still images, which is largely solved. The "new ImageNet" one on Kaggle in the reply below is for videos.