Stuart Russel doesn't put a specific date on the arrival of AGI. That puts him at odds with Musk, who predicts 2030-2040.
It's also at odds with the study that has the very biased question asking experts "when do you think AGI will arrive?". Many chose not to answer the question, and thus their answers can't be averaged in.
Many of the AGI safety conscious crowd skip over the question of whether we will be able to create AGI and just assume we will.
There's no precedent for this kind of discovery. Fire, the lightbulb, and nuclear weapons all pale in comparison.
We also don't know how long it will take to solve Provably Safe AI problem. Wouldn't it be wiser to start preparing now?
Nuclear weapons were deemed impossible by some experts at the time. Throughout history, whenever there are a number of experts who believe something to be impossible and a substantial number who believe it to be possible, the latter are almost always right.
See also my other answer that begins with "Unlike airplanes, ..."
> We also don't know how long it will take to solve Provably Safe AI problem. Wouldn't it be wiser to start preparing now?
Sure, go for it. I think this has been in the news a lot recently because Musk told government leaders to expect AGI as early as 2030-2040.
It's a bit of a ridiculous claim. One of the biggest AI competitions, ImageNet, expects to run for the next 12 years, and that's just for making sense of images.
Perhaps it'll be done in less than 12, however, the predictions of the ML community and Musk do not line up.
> Nuclear weapons were deemed impossible by some experts at the time.
I suppose time will tell with regards to AGI then. I suspect we'll have another economic dip before 2030, and all this hype will die down before then. And, we'll remember this time as any other in the past when we predicted flying cars by the year 2000
Edit: I think the announcement above is about object recognition on still images, which is largely solved. The "new ImageNet" one on Kaggle in the reply below is for videos.
By the way, since you appear to be reasonable skeptic, would you mind replying to my comment beginning with "Unlike airplanes, ..."? Specifically I wonder what would be a minimum threshold for you to believe that AGI is likely possible.
> would you mind replying to my comment beginning with "Unlike airplanes, ..."?
Ok, will try
> Specifically I wonder what would be a minimum threshold for you to believe that AGI is likely possible.
Current machine learning tech doesn't have any sense of creating its own goals. We also don't know how to encode that. All of the systems we have target specific problems, like playing Atari games, identifying objects in images, or playing Go. These are all great milestones in machine learning tech. They do not indicate we're much closer to developing a new intelligence. If we could set a system out there and have it determine its own goals and learn things on its own, then maybe I'd believe we're close to creating AGI. As it stands, we don't know how to run a program that decides what it wants to learn. Every program we write has our hand in it.
My suspicion is that our quest for developing AI leads us to discover more about ourselves than AI itself. I think we'll continue to refine our definition of intelligence, and continue to use the tools we build to augment our own intelligence.
Most humans do not really come up with our goals on our own either. We are heavily influenced by genes and environment. People's personality are partially changed by the environment and occupation they are in. Twins adoption studies also show that genes have surprisingly strong effects on personality even after decades living apart.
By your definition, humans do not possess general intelligence.
Edit-Reply:
I don't think we can resolve an age-old philosophical question on Free Will in a comment thread, so I'll leave it at that. :) However, General Intelligence and Free Will are largely orthogonal.
We can imagine an alien who is highly capable of any tasks human can perform and beyond, including coming up with creative subgoals as necessary, but will only serve their master's ultimate goal(s). An AGI could be like that alien but built to serve human masters. The twist is that when someone orders an AGI to efficiently reduce animal suffering, without value alignment with humans, it could come up with euthanasia as a subgoal to reduce the suffering of starving kittens.
> Most humans do not really come up with our goals on our own either
I disagree. I believe we have free will, in addition to being influenced by our environment/genes.
This is my general point, that contemplating AI is a way for us to investigate how we ourselves operate. You have your theory and I have mine. Nobody has shown how we can be replicated.
EDIT
> We can imagine an alien who is highly capable of any tasks human can perform and beyond, including coming up with creative subgoals as necessary, but will only serve their master's ultimate goal(s). An AGI could be like that alien but built to serve human masters. The twist is that, without value alignment with humans, some subgoal could be killing starving kittens to reduce their suffering
If the AGI's goals are determined by a human, then it is technically trivial to encode human values. The hard part is convincing humans not to encode evil values.
So it isn't that AGI would go rogue, it's that humans could. That's an age-old, Adam & Eve question. It's not specific to AI technology.
Unfortunately, no one can really articulate the full set of human values yet, especially since they are often in conflict in real-world situations. Which value(s) should be prioritized over others? How about differing values between cultures and human groups within each culture?
You might have heard of the Trolley Problem. There are many and more complicated variations of that.
The problem with AGI is more acute than most other technologies because it is software-based, which makes it nigh impossible to regulate effectively, especially globally.
> Which value(s) should be prioritized over others? How about differing values between cultures and human groups within each culture?
Don't kill humans sounds like a good start.
Honestly, this problem seems a lot simpler to me than creating AGI itself.
I agree it is challenging. The most imminent question is probably, "should a self driving car be allowed to kill 10 people on the sidewalk to avoid a head-on collision, or should it accept the head-on and let the driver die?"
These domain specific problems will come up before the AGI one does, and we can address them as they become relevant.
You've noted that regulating AGI is difficult, and it sounds like you don't have any other solution in mind.
It is often not practical for something dumber to regulate something far more intelligent. (Humans win against lions despite our physical weakness.) So the best solution I have heard of is to create a Provably Safe AGI (or Friendly AI in Yudkowsky's term) and have them help us regulate other AI efforts. A moral core that aligns with human values need to be part of this Safe AGI.
It is definitely very challenging to create one, and more challenging than creating a random AGI. The morality also needs to be integrated into the Safe AGI as its core that is not susceptible to self-modification ability that an AGI could have. Thus, we need to work on that aspect of AGI now.
Edit: You don't need to paste the same comment all over this thread. Spamming doesn't lead to interesting conversation.
> So what would be your equivalent position in the 1940s about the nuclear solution?
I've seen people throwing that example in this thread and I don't see why.
Multiple countries invested heavily in building the bomb. It was not a question if building a bomb was possible, but rather how soon, and by whom.
> In other words, what are the risks and benefits of adopting a "worried" versus a "don't worry about it" position?
Some people do worry about it, but everyone need not. I don't.
> If there's a possible huge meteor (say 30% chance) of hitting the Earth in about 50 years, would you be "worried"?
Good example. No I wouldn't because I know we have systems monitoring for such an event. If something is coming, we will know about it. I'm not sure how far in advance we would know, but I expect as it got nearer more and more people would do their best to come up with a good solution.
We're no nearer to AGI today than we were when neural networks were developed 30 years ago. Science fiction would have you believe it, but we don't look at SciFi movies of the 50s as particularly prescient, and we shouldn't do so for today's films either.
It's also at odds with the study that has the very biased question asking experts "when do you think AGI will arrive?". Many chose not to answer the question, and thus their answers can't be averaged in.
Many of the AGI safety conscious crowd skip over the question of whether we will be able to create AGI and just assume we will.
There's no precedent for this kind of discovery. Fire, the lightbulb, and nuclear weapons all pale in comparison.