Gigaom AI Minute – February 25

Transcript

The range on when people think we will get an artificial general intelligence ranges from five to five hundred years. Generally speaking, people who think it is coming sooner are in the camp of people who are more likely to be concerned about it, and think that it's potentially a threat to humanity. Why do people disagree so much on this question? I think it boils down to five distinct reasons, and I'd like to cover each one of them in an AI Minute episode.

Number three, just how hard intelligence is. People who think that an AGI is coming soon and that it is potentially a threat think that intelligence may just be a relatively straightforward thing that we just haven't, kind of, stumbled across. That it may be governed by just a few laws, like the way Newton's Laws of Motion govern an enormous amount of the activity that occurs in the universe. People who think that an AI is further away see intelligence as much more of a difficult multifaceted system, without a single principle that orders it.

Interestingly, both groups point, in their own way, to biology. The first group says that your genetic code that makes you, that makes your brain, is actually quite small from a code standpoint. And the amount that you are different than, say, a chimp is very small, implying that maybe an intelligence system can be made with just a little bit of code. People on the other side of the fence look at the complexity of the brain and how different parts of the brain do different things and say that the brain is a system with a whole lot of different intelligence hacks, as it were, and we're going to have to figure them out one at a time.