I think the only way that it’s actually impossible is if we believe that there’s something magical and fundamentally immeasurable about humans that leads to our general intelligence. Otherwise we’re just machines, after all. A human brain is theoretically reproducible outside standard biological mechanisms, if you have a good enough nanolathe.
Maybe our first AGI is just a Petri dish brain with a half-decent python API. Maybe it’s more sand-based, though.
I don't think it particularly moral to start heading down a path wherein we are essentially aiming to create enslaved cloned vat brains. I know that's not what they have, and that they're nowhere near that, but if they succeed in these early stages, more and more complex systems will follow in time. I don't think it a particularly healthy direction to explore.
> I don't think it particularly moral to start heading down a path wherein we are essentially aiming to create enslaved cloned vat brains. I know that's not what they have, and that they're nowhere near that, but if they succeed in these early stages, more and more complex systems will follow in time. I don't think it a particularly healthy direction to explore.
Immoral by slippery slope is not a reasonable or rational argument. You're acting like nobody would have any qualms with it being a full sized human brain instead of a thousand neurons on a tiny plate.
It's an emotional reaction to an impression of these scientists that strips them of human decency or agency. There's nothing inevitable about this abusive idea you've concocted, and the only inevitability would come if each of the hundreds of scientists involved were some sort of psychopathic sadists with no regard for _any_ human life.
There's nothing immoral about cells in a petri dish, and there's absolutely no reason to assume that it directly leads to a fully enslaved in-vitro human.
-- A human brain is theoretically reproducible outside standard biological mechanisms, if you have a good enough nanolathe.
Sort of. The main issue is the energy requirements. We could theoretically reproduce a human brain in SW today, it's just that it would be a really big energy hog and run very slowly and probably become insane quickly like any person trapped in a sensory deprived tank.
The real key development for AI and AGI is down at the metal level of computers- the memristor.
The synapse in a brain is essentially a memristive element, and it's a very taxing one on the neuron. The equations is (change in charge)/(change in flux). Yes, a flux capacitor, sorta. It's the missing piece in fundamental electronics.
Making simple 2 element memristors is somewhat possible these days, though I've not really been in the space recently. Please, if anyone knows where to buy them, a real one not a claimed to be one, let me know. I'm willing to pay good money.
In Terms of AI, a memristor would require a total redesign of how we architect computers ( goodbye busses and physically separate memory, for one). But, you'd get a huge energy and time savings benefit. As in, you can run an LLM on a watch battery or small solar cell and let the environment train them to a degree.
Hopefully AI will accelerate their discovery and facilitate their introduction into cheap processing and construction of chips.
If by "something magical" you mean something we don't understand, that's trivially true. People like to give firm opinions or make completely unsupported statements they feel should be taken seriously ("how do we know humans intelligence doesn't work the same way as next token prediction") about something nobody understand.
A brain in a jar, with wires so that we can communicate with it, already exists. Its called the internet. My brain is communicating with you now through wires. Replacing my keyboard with implanted electrodes may speed up the connection, but it wont fundimentally change the structure or capabilities of the machine.
Our silicon machines exist in a countable state space (you can easily assign a unique natural number to any state for a given machine). However, 'standard biological mechanisms' exist in an uncountable state space - you need real numbers to properly describe them. Cantor showed that the uncountable is infinitely more infinite (pardon the word tangle) than the countable. I posit that the 'special sauce' for sentience/intelligence/sapience exists beyond the countable, and so is unreachable with our silicon machines as currently envisaged.
Cantor talks about countable and uncountable infinities, both computer chips and human brains are finite spaces. The human brain has roughly 100b neurons, even if each of these had an edge with each other and these edges could individually light up signalling different states of mind, isn't that just `2^100b!`? That's roughly as far away from infinity as 1.
But this signalling (and connections) may be more complex than connected/unconnected and on/off, such that we cannot completely describe them [digitally/using a countable state space] as we would with silicon.
If you think it can't be done with a countable state space, then you must know some physics that the general establishment doesn't. I'm sure they would love to know what you do.
As far as physicists believe at the moment, there's no way to ever observe a difference below the Planck level. Energy/distance/time/whatever. They all have a lower boundary of measurability. That's not as a practical issue, it's a theoretical one. According to the best models we currently have, there's literally no way to ever observe a difference below those levels.
If a difference smaller than that is relevant to brain function, then brains have a way to observe the difference. So I'm sure the field of physics eagerly awaits your explanation. They would love to see an experiment thoroughly disagree with a current model. That's the sort of thing scientists live for.
Had you performed your reading outside of PopSci, you would know that the "general establishment" does not agree with your interpretation of Planck units. In fact, even a cursory look at the Wikipedia page on Planck units would show you that some of the scales can obviously not be interpreted as some sort of limits of measurability.
A reasonable interpretation for the Planck length is that it gives the characteristic distance scale at which quantum effects to gravity become relevant. Given that all we currently have is a completely classical theory of gravity and an "unrelated" quantum field theory, even this amounts to an educated guess.
No observations have ever been made that would suggest that the underlying spacetime is discrete in any sense, shape or form. Please refrain from posting arrogant comments on topics in which you are out of your depth.
I, uh... What? Did you mean to respond to some other post there?
I can't see how anything you said is a response to anything I said. My statement was very simple: if two models predict the same result, you can use either of them. As far as we have worked out so far, continuous and discrete spacetime give the same results for every experiment we can run. If you have an experiment where they don't, physicists would really love to see it.
Firstly, my comment was overly antagonizing, sorry for that.
My problem is with the interpretation of Planck units; they really do not appear in current theories as signifying any theoretical lower limit to measurability, as I must interpret that you claim by saying:
> As far as physicists believe at the moment, there's no way to ever observe a difference below the Planck level. Energy/distance/time/whatever. They all have a lower boundary of measurability. That's not as a practical issue, it's a theoretical one. According to the best models we currently have, there's literally no way to ever observe a difference below those levels.
For example, the Planck energy is a nice macroscopic quantity of approximately 2 gigajoules. For the Planck quantities that are more extreme, the measurement is not hampered by the theory but by practical issues.
Sure, we don't expect our theories to hold at Planck length, but this is not due to something that's baked into the Standard Model or general relativity.
That’s an interesting thought. It steps beyond my realm of confidence, but I’ll ask in ignorance: can a biological brain really have infinite state space if there’s a minimum divisible Planck length?
Infinite and “finite but very very big” seem like a meaningful distinction here.
I once wondered if digital intelligences might be possible but would require an entire planet’s precious metals and require whole stars to power. That is: the “finite but very very big” case.
But I think your idea is constrained to if we wanted a digital computer, is it not? Humans can make intelligent life by accident. Surely we could hypothetically construct our own biological computer (or borrow one…) and make it more ideal for digital interface?
Absolutely nothing in the real world is truly infinite. Infinity is just a useful mathematical fiction that closely approximate the real world for large enough (or small enough in the case of infinitesimals) things.
But biological brain have significantly greater state space than conventional silicon computers because they're analog. The voltage across a transistor varies approximately continuously, but we only measure a single bit from that (or occasionally 2 for nand).
Not quite. Smaller wavelengths mean higher energy, and a photon with Planck wavelength would be energetic enough to form a black hole. So you can’t meaningfully interact electromagnetically with something smaller than the Planck length. Nor can that something have electromagnetic properties.
But since we don’t have a working theory of quantum gravity at such energies, the final verdict remains open.
Measurability is essentially a synonym for meaningful interaction at some measurement scale. When describing fundamental measurability limits, you're essentially describing what current physical models consider to be the fundamental interaction scale.
It sounds like you are making a distinction between digital (silicon computers) and analog (biological brains).
As far as possible reasons that a computer can’t achieve AGI go, this seems like the best one (assuming computer means digital computer of course).
But in a philosophical sense, a computer obeys the same laws of physics that a brain does, and the transistors are analog devices that are being used to create a digital architecture. So whatever makes you brain have uncountable states would also make a real digital computer have uncountable states. Of course we can claim that only the digital layer on top matters, but why?
> 'standard biological mechanisms' exist in an uncountable state space
Everything in our universe is countable, which naturally includes biology. A bunch of physical laws are predicated on the universe being a countable substrate.
Physically speaking, we don’t know that the universe isn’t fundamentally discrete. But the more pertinent question is whether what the brain does couldn’t be approximated well enough with a finite state space. I’d argue that books, music, speech, video, and the like demonstrate that it could, since those don’t seem qualitatively much different from how other, analog inputs stimulate our intellect. Or otherwise you’d have to explain why an uncountable state space would be needed to deal with discrete finite inputs.
Maybe our first AGI is just a Petri dish brain with a half-decent python API. Maybe it’s more sand-based, though.