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0 pointsbuu70010mo ago0 comments

I think there's a useful distinction that's often missed between AGI and artificial consciousness. We could conceivably have some version of AI that reliably performs any task you throw at it consistently with peak human capabilities, given sufficient tools or hardware to complete whatever that task may be, but lacks subjective experience or independent agency; I would call that AGI.

The two concepts have historically been inexorably linked in sci-fi, which will likely make the first AGI harder to recognize as AGI if it lacks consciousness, but I'd argue that simple "unconscious AGI" would be the superior technology for current and foreseeable needs. Unconscious AGI can be employed purely as a tool for massive collective human wealth generation; conscious AGI couldn't be used that way without opening a massive ethical can of worms, and on top of that its existence would represent an inherent existential threat.

Conscious AGI could one day be worthwhile as something we give birth to for its own sake, as a spiritual child of humanity that we send off to colonize distant or environmentally hostile planets in our stead, but isn't something I think we'd be prepared to deal with properly in a pre-post-scarcity society.

It isn't inconceivable that current generative AI capabilities might eventually evolve to such a level that they meet a practical bar to be considered unconscious AGI, even if they aren't there yet. For all the flak this tech catches, it's easy to forget that capabilities which we currently consider mundane were science fiction only 2.5 years ago (as far as most of the population was concerned). Maybe SOTA LLMs fit some reasonable definition of "emerging AGI", or maybe they don't, but we've already shifted the goalposts in one direction given how quickly the Turing test became obsolete.

Personally, I think current genAI is probably a fair distance further from meeting a useful definition of AGI than those with a vested interest in it would admit, but also much closer than those with pessimistic views of the consequences of true AGI tech want to believe.

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felipeerias10mo ago

One sci-fi example could be based on the replicators from Star Trek, who are able to synthesize any meals on demand.

It is not hard to imagine a "cooking robot" as a black box that — given the appropriate ingredients — would cook any dish for you. Press a button, say what you want, and out it comes.

Internally, the machine would need to perform lots of tasks that we usually associate with intelligence, from managing ingredients and planning cooking steps, to fine-grained perception and manipulation of the food as it is cooking. But it would not be conscious in any real way. Order comes in, dish comes out.

Would we use "intelligent" to describe such a machine? Or "magic"?

svachalek10mo ago

I immediately thought of Star Trek too, I think the ship's computer was another example of unconscious intelligence. It was incredibly capable and could answer just about any request that anyone made of it. But it had no initiative or motivation of its own.

foobiekr10mo ago

Regarding "We could conceivably have some version of AI that reliably performs any task you throw at it consistently" - it is very clear to anyone who just looks at the recent work by Anthropic analyzing how their LLM "reasons" that such a thing will never come from LLMs without massive unknown changes - and definitely not from scale - so I guess the grandparent is absolute right that openai is nor really working on this.

It isn't close at all.

voidspark10mo ago

That's an important distinction.

A machine could be super intelligent at solving real world practical tasks, better than any human, without being conscious.

We don't have a proper definition of consciousness. Consciousness is infinitely more mysterious than measurable intelligence.

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