I guess if it's true that consciousness is a cognitive ability, but I don't really think we have any idea what consciousness is or where it comes from. I guess "most likely" it's some kind of cognitive ability, so I hear you there, but I leave that out of my idea of AGI because it's all conjecture. For all I know consciousness comes from your liver.

I love the comparison to how DNA has developed. Definitely a great parallel to draw there that I haven't heard before - what a thought!! I agree with everything you're saying. Thanks for the thoughtful replies!

I think I see what you're saying. I'm gonna try and simplify it for my caveman brain so I know we're on the same page, and then pose a question for you -

1 - i read a scientific paper from the year 3023 with new info and new words (or combinations of words, for ex, if I read the words "string theory" in the 1930s, I'd have no idea what to do with it) with new meanings/ideas that really haven't been in existence before this time 2 - no matter how much I read it, I really just won't understand how these new concepts and words connect to my legacy concepts and words, until someone reasons out for me what those new words and concepts mean or I, say "get creative" and figure it out for myself 3 - I study that connection between the old concepts and new concepts until I have a clear understanding and roadmap of the connection between them

So what I'm getting from your comment is that AI really can't do step two, but I, a human, can. But - I'd propose that the only way to do step 2 is by using the current roadmap I have and proposing new solutions, then testing them to see if they align with the solution (maybe oversimplifying here).

So my question for you is, to determine the truth of the process in step 2, is it testing or proposing new solutions that limits AI?

Can't tell if you're trolling or not, but nobody's mad here! Just looking for a discussion to throw around some thought provoking ideas. I have a good question for you. How would you know AGI if you saw it? What would be a defining factor that makes it obvious that a system has reached that level?

Well put! To piggy back off your point, I think the persistence issue in it's current state is what will ultimately stop it from taking over too many knowledge worker jobs. The efficiency it currently creates for each current knowledge worker will of course be a threat to employment if production doesn't increase as well, but if history is at all trustworthy, production will increase.

I think the biggest issue right now (outside of data storage) for creating AI that is persistent in it's knowledge is the algorithm to receive and accurately weigh new data on the fly. You could say it's the algorithm for wisdom, even.

I agree, I'm just not convinced of any evidence that the reasoning that went into your response is integral to the validity of the response itself. So basically, my argument is that whether or not LLMs can reason isn't really that important, because the output is compelling either way. I'd like to believe that there's some magic in our capability to reason that makes the world run a little better, but I just don't know

I am familiar with how these transformers work and I'm not suggesting that anything is conscious here. Truthfully, I don't think we can create consciousness, if that's what you received from my post. The fact of the matter is that our nature of communication can be defined by matrices of probabilities and gpts illustrate this pretty damn well. Therefore, it stands to reason that other perceptive abilities & routines we may have as people can also be defined by matrices of probabilities, and enacted by something not human. Since you seem to be an expert in AI / ML, do you think this is true?

Interesting. So then we can suppose that if you had enough of these humanoids walking around, they could gather data and feed it back into a "hive mind" (as much as I hate that saying), and retrain the software running the humanoid with that new data, basically giving it a chance to "learn".

I see many hardware limitations with this possibility, but it's an interesting thought.

Perhaps another interesting thought based off of yours is, how much brand new data in our surroundings (that's not already trained on the internet) do you suppose exists in the world?