By Todd Russell
There is really only one major technology I’m interested in that crosses into gaming as much as other sectors and that’s AI. We have a category dedicated to it and it’s not because I’m somehow obsessed with it, like too much of the tech space, but because I’m fascinated how and where it will take life, humanity and of course the entertainment we enjoy for pleasure and social interaction. It would be journalistic incompetence to avoid covering AI.
There is a glaring problem with the current “AI” being pushed out to us.
The tech industry is thirsty, walking through the desert of investors, being teased by the great mirage known as AGI. In simpler terms, AGI is AI sentience. It’s something nobody has figured out — yet. The tease is that they will figure this out, so to further this goal to find that great prize, it’s mo money, mo money, mo money!
“They’re kind of hitting the same ceiling on capabilities,” Andreessen said. “Now, there’s lots of smart people in the industry working to break through those ceilings, but sitting here today, if you just looked at the data, if you just looked at the charts of performance over time, you would say there’s at least a local topping out of capabilities that’s happening.” via Those Bold AGI Predictions Are Suddenly Looking Stretched – Business Insider
The answer is simpler than all these great technical minds seem to understand and respect. They think the answer is about more power. Like if they just give all the power and resources to sophisticated algorithms, they will achieve AGI.
They won’t.
You heard it here in the quiet little corner of PGM. I believe the answer is more obvious — at least to me — simpler than throwing more power and more training data. It’s something we all know already:
The answer is life.
I’ve mentioned this on the Twitch stream before and probably some, many or all I don’t know, might have missed the logic behind this thinking. We don’t understand the human brain. We don’t. Doctors don’t, scientists don’t. We understand a very tiny percentage of what the human brain does. We know the brain can do things we can’t artificially create.
“What’s not understood is how clusters of neurons from the diverse regions of the brain collaborate to form consciousness. So far, there’s no evidence that there is one site for consciousness, which leads experts to believe that it is truly a collective neural effort. Another mystery hidden within our crinkled cortices is that out of all the brain’s cells, only 10 percent are neurons; the other 90 percent are glial cells, which encapsulate and support neurons, but whose function remains largely unknown. Ultimately, it’s not that we use 10 percent of our brains, merely that we only understand about 10 percent of how it functions.” via Do People Only Use 10 Percent of Their Brains? | Scientific American
And yet that mystery is the key in my mind to unlock AGI. We must take and use something organic to create AGI. Something that has the risk of death, because if it will die then it can make decisions based on its own mortality. Machines must be able to die to think.
I know that sounds radical but to me it’s the answer to AGI. I don’t know how this organic material is meshed with a machine. Frankly, it makes me think of the fictional enemy, The Borg, but I think some sort of combination of organic and machine will achieve AGI.
Will we see AGI from purely machines in the next five years? I don’t believe we will — unless we find some way to think outside the machine box. The problem is most everybody seems to be thinking inside the machine box.
They need to get out of 100% machine. Will they? I would think someday they will. Is this a prediction? Sure, it is.
“It may well be possible that while in principle we can sort of understand how the brain works, given its vast complexity, humans may never fully understand,” Koch said. “Maybe what it means to understand shifts from the kind of classical model of scientific understanding, like Newton’s apple or the double helix of DNA. The details of the brain may be way beyond human capacity and capability to understand, so we may more and more need to rely on computer models to give us correct answers without us knowing why those particular answers are correct.” via Why is the human brain so difficult to understand? We asked 4 neuroscientists. – Allen Institute
What do you think, friendly intelligent readers? Use your brains. Your own brain can see the solution to AGI.
AI is the ultimate unknown at this point when it comes to Man vs Machine. As of now, Man is in the lead but Machine is steadily catching up and how soon before it passes us? The bigger question in my opinion is, when AI gets to the point of cognitive thinking and possibly emotional quantum thinking, which direction does human vs machine go. Is it possible to co-exist with a self sufficient AI human or are we creating our worst sci-fi nightmare.
There are many great thinking scientists and writers that have explored this in a more thoughtful way like Isaac Asimov and his proposed Three Laws of Robotics. Yes, even with those Laws things could go wrong. Btw, not talking about the Will Smith movie that was way too Hollywood and not about Asimov’s deep thinking. I would like to think we would welcome another species, another lifeform, as human are curious in nature and they seek to understand and get along more than to do the more dramatic thing: which is fear and fight. I believe we would at first be skeptical, which we are right now, but the “AI” we’re currently seeing isn’t nearly as complex as it’s being made out to be. It’s a bunch of connected computers, consuming mass amounts of power and energy to essentially copy and mashup information that already exists. It isn’t intelligence at all, only the mirage this article highlights.
AI was the big selling point for Samsung selling their new s25 phones this year not the hardware. The AI in phones is still in a very infant stage and not very useful at this point. Like you said before, AI needs all the data we can throw at it to be able to be useful. Needs the “shall we play a game” to learn.