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What is it like to be an AGI?

17 points| korymath | 3 years ago |korymathewson.com

20 comments

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bcrl|3 years ago

The Bobiverse books by Dennis E. Taylor touch upon this, as Bob is a human that becomes the AI in a replicant that is the intelligence behind a von Neumann probe sent out from earth. One of the ways that he maintains his sanity is to build a simulated VR environment to help maintain his sanity.

I personally think that the really hard part in creating an AGI is going to be training. As an adult human, one can look at an object and instantly know what its texture is going to feel like on one's fingers or even lips, how it will bounce and if it will shatter. How did we gain that knowledge? As babies we put absolutely everything we saw into our mouths and sucked or chewed on it. As kids we played for hours on end with all kinds of toys and household objects. Coming up with a way of training an AGI to be human level will be hard, as there is such a vast scope of knowledge in "common sense" that will be exceedingly difficult to implant into an AGI without the AGI having an ability to interact with the real world.

On the other hand, once that body of knowledge becomes an available training data set, evolution can take off at speeds otherwise impossible in the real world.

mint2|3 years ago

AGI: Adjusted gross income? That didn’t make sense.

Acronyms in headline are not the place to put them unless it’s very certain the target audience is innately familiar. Guess I’m not that audience.

porknubbins|3 years ago

I agree, and stay in this world too long and all your acronyms will be overloaded. ISA is instruction set architecture ? Income sharing agreement?

Especially when the headline poses a counterfactual/impossible question they should help as much as possible.

abdulhaq|3 years ago

It's not 'like' anything, computer programs don't have true feelings, though they can certainly be programmed to act as if they do. It can be programmed to say 'hey, life is great' but it means nothing. They have no soul, no spark from the divine.

mckirk|3 years ago

And how do you prove that you have such a spark?

martijnvds|3 years ago

Ask any early 80s Sierra adventure game protagonist?

jasfi|3 years ago

Those early Sierra games, the ones that used typed text to interact with the environment, were really inspirational. I was very disappointed when they replaced that CLI-like interface with mouse-driven icons. No doubt the icons were more user friendly and had none of the flaws of trying to enter the right text, but it still felt like something was lost.

Relatedly, I'm working on natural language understanding, which I believe is key to AGI. https://lxagi.com

jasfi|3 years ago

This is projecting way too much of our own experience onto what is really just computer processing.

ravi-delia|3 years ago

Everything that computes is probably "just computer processing". I wouldn't be shocked if enough translates that it's not totally useless

bmn3267|3 years ago

freakin' awesome most probably, if you're on the side of half full glass.

jhbadger|3 years ago

It would depend on the legality of the situation -- like in Gibson's Neuromancer where a fully-intelligent AI has Swiss citizenship and yet the software and supercomputer it is running on is owned by a corporation -- “Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI.” as a character puts it.