alt Hacker NewsYou don’t know me, but I am in the tech industry and believe AGI will never happen.
Albeit that is because I did a BSc in psychology where I developed a deep distrust for intelligence research and concluded that intelligence is not a useful term in philosophy nor science (and especially not in engineering).
I strongly agree. In scientific terms, we already know how to achieve 1G constant acceleration space flight. "All we need to do" from an engineering standpoint to achieve it is develop miniaturized fusion reactors and superconducting electronics. Hell, something approximately as good was achievable since the 1950s with a gargantuan ship that pooped out atomic bombs through a giant shock absorbing pusher plate[0]. Trivial, right? Except it isn't. Both of these projects, which are scientifically feasible, are completely impossible to actually build. They are off the table in engineering terms.
We are so much closer to 1G constant acceleration space flight than we are to AGI. We know, in principle, how to achieve 1G travel. We don't know, in principle how to achieve AGI. Our best guess so far is something along the lines of "emergence" which means "maybe if we do enough matrix math in the right way it'll wake up and become a being with agency and intelligence". Another way to say this is "hopes, prayers, and lots of GPUs".
Let's all get a grip. Without a coherent theory of intelligence, you aren't gonna make one in a lab. That's not how science works, it's not how engineering works. Start at the beginning.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propu...