They didn't allow calculators in school until I was 16, and then only in Science class, we still had to do everything by hand in Maths, And they were forbidden in tests until college - I still have my slipstick from like 1975. Now when I do mental arithmetic in the checkout line it's like I'm freaking Gandalf.

Only one robot?

That's like when people thought having a computer for every person was outrageous.

You'll have dozens of robots. Like you have dozens of computers.

Sometime in the 69s or 70s one of those futurist guys wrote something like "in the future you will have so many computers you'll throw them out because you just don't need them. They'll be in your boxes of breakfast cereal." and you know what, they're in greeting cards. They're sometimes even in your breakfast cereal. The computer in your mouse that lets it talk USB is more powerful than any desktop computer in the '70s or early '80s.

Robots are going to go the same way.

But they're not going to be your plastic pal who's fun to be with, humanoid robots. They're going to be roombas, and dog walkers, and washing machines, and they kind of already are with your internet of things oven that sends bluetooth messages to your cellphone when it thinks it needs to be cleaned. Except it'll be sending those messages to a cleaning robot.

You won't even think of them as robots, like you don't think of the desktop-class computer in your optical mouse (which actually has two desktop class computers if you count the DSP that does the motion tracking) as a computer.

Whether some people have developed a possible trigger for the singularity or no, the singularity itself hasn't happened because if it had we would be scurrying like rodents around the virtual feet of intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, if we even still existed in corporeal form.

People have been using rotoscoping as a shortcut in animation for a long long time, but you can always tell and it's not really popular outside rock videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914

It could be argued that that's how it fell.

I was thinking more like Peter F. Hamilton's novel "Watching Trees Grow", or Fred Pohl's "Waiting for the Olympians".

If you're actually having a conversation with an AI, by all means post about it, but no actual spoilers from the future. If you're from an advanced parallel dimension like the timeline where the Roman Empire never fell, it's all good.

I'm also not going to do your work for you. It's not an easy problem.

You came in with this ambiguous scenario and crowing about how it showed a text generator had a theory of mind, because just by chance the text generator generated the text you wanted, and you want us to go "oh, wow, a theory of mind". But all its doing is generating statistically interesting text.

And when someone pointed that out, you go into this passive aggressive "oh let's see you do better" to someone who doesn't believe it's possible. That's not a valid or even useful argument. It's a stupid debate club trick to score points.

And now you're pulling more stupid passive aggressive tricks when you're called on it.

But that's not what happened.

They are not the only people involved in this discussion.

I would say closer to a fruit fly.

> Real people say 'Great' and mean it literally.

This too. And it's over a phone call. There's no body language, and he may have been busy and she's interrupting him. HE may have been driving as well.

> How about rephrasing/replacing this test with your own version that doesn't suffer the flaws you describe?

How about not asking people to do work for free?

The question seems ambiguous. I wouldn't have jumped to the same conclusion.

Frankly I'd be worrying about this guy wearing the same shirt every day for a week, or is there something odd about their marriage that she's only home infrequently enough for this to work without being a hygiene problem. Or did she buy him like a whole wardrobe of doggy themed shirts?

They're not cooking those burgers in an automated kitchen.

Don't get so salty about this. If it's a Google product they would have killed it just as you were starting to really get into it.

AGI is an artificial general intelligence. It's an intelligence capable of acting as a general agent in the world. That doesn't imply that it's smarter than a human, or capable of unlimited self improvement, or answering any question or solving any problem. An AGI could be no smarter than a dog, but if it's competent as a dog that would be a huge breakthrough.

A system capable of designing a cheap fusion reactor doesn't need general intelligence, it could be an idiot savant or even not recognizably an intelligence at all. From the point of view of a business, it should be an oracle, simply answering questions, with no agency at all. General intelligence is likely to be a problem to be avoided as long as possible, you don't want to depend on your software "liking" you.

Vinge's original paper talked about a self-improving AGI but people seem to have latched on to the AGI part and ignored the self-improving part. He was talking about one that could update its fundamental design or design successively more capable successors.

You have a really romantic view of what an AGI is.

I don't think they need to develop something in the direction of AGI, which is good because they don't seem to be working on it. Their machine learning spinoffs are much more useful and potentially profitable than actual AI.

Also, you're putting words into my mouth, but you do you.

I know enough to know there's no "the reason" and discount simplistic arguments.

You'll have to explain the logic there.

Not having a UBI and keeping people in financial stress seems to be doing a great job of undermining democracy.

Riot for universal basic income.

I’m laughing at the funny post.

Computers have been better than humans at an increasing number of tasks since before WWII. Many of these tasks, like Chess and Go, were once touted as requiring 'real' intelligence. No possible list of such tasks is even meaningful.