Hi, I’m back again! That was a pretty long and detailed article, but now I’m more confused than before … 😅😅

OK, how can I help?                                                                                

Well, it seems like we’ve been thinking that human level intelligence or AGI would be around the corner for decades …

Sure, people have made a lot of very optimistic predictions in the past                                                       

I saw quotes that people in the ’50s thought it could be done in less than a year!

Well, there was a famous conference in 1956 where some of the most prominent researchers in the area at the time wanted to get together to make a breakthrough …

… but I don’t think they seriously thought at the time they could program an AGI from scratch

But where did all the optimism come from, if it wasn’t all hype? 

It certainly wasn’t “all hype”. There had been fabulous breakthrough just before that …

We went from the idea of a universal computing machine with Turing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine

in the ‘30s to actual programmable universal computers in the ‘40s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)

And during the early ‘50s people had written a string of working chess and checkers programmes

So? That doesn’t sound very radical to me … isn’t that like the hammers you told me about before?

Sure, but the breakthrough was that it turned out to be possible at all: they were the very first of their kind 🤩🤩

OK, yes, I guess I’m too used to current technology to take a chess computer seriously as a breakthrough in AI …

 Yes, in a sense. What “AGI” wants to be, is an AI that is as intelligent as a human overall, not just for a specific task. But still not necessarily do things in the same way a human does

I get that, and you’re right, we do things differently now, but at the time that was quite radical

People were optimistic because they thought that they could generalize from chess to everything else: all thought would be like a program

Yep, that ship ran into a lot of icebergs, but the assumption wasn’t entirely bogus

How so?  😆

Well, you can think of playing chess as solving a problem: how do I check the king? And an algorithm can take you there: from a set board to victory                                  

But general intelligence could just be like that: an algorithm to solve any problem

Fair enough. So what exactly went wrong?

Ha! The world is not a chessboard! There’s no fixed ruleset of legal moves that you can apply, simulate, run through, and analyze

How did they try to tackle that then?

By turning from engineering to psychology …   😎😎                       

👋  Sure thing!                                                                                

Thanks! I’ve read this article and I’m not sure I quite get the point. What is “AGI” exactly?

Ah, yes, that’s a tricky one …  😎😎                                                        

So basically “AI” just means “Artificial Intelligence”, and that’s hard enough to define, but “AGI” means “Artificial General Intelligence”

Ok, and the difference is … ? 😅

Compare it to a toolbox: you have nails, you need a hammer. You need to find patterns in data, you need an AI  🤖

As Marvin Minsky once said, we could call a program “intelligent” if it does things in a way that we would call “intelligent” if a human did them

So a machine is smart if it does things like a human? 

Defining “intelligence” in general is really hard! AI systems are really good at things humans are really bad at, and really bad at things that are really easy for humans -> https://xkcd.com/1425/ (Moravec’s Paradox)

So can we make an AI as smart as a human or no? 😆😆

Yes and no. We can make an AI do some tasks as well or faster than a human, but not in the same way a human does them, just like a car isn’t an artificial horse

Ah, that clears it up. So a hammer is better than my fist at hammering in nails, but it is not a better hand overall. Right?

 Yes, in a sense. What “AGI” wants to be, is an AI that is as intelligent as a human overall, not just for a specific task. But still not necessarily do things in the same way a human does

So we have specialized AI systems that are good at one thing, but not a general AI that is good at everything?

Exactly. BUT!  😁😁😁                                                                              

… there’s always a but … 😆

Well, there is one approach that tries to imitate how humans learn to do things: artificial neural networks that imitate the structure of the brain and can learn, instead being programmed.

They’re building a whole artificial brain?  🧠🤖

Not really no, these neural nets are generally simulated on ordinary computers 😊😊😊😊                                    

In this way, AI’s have achieved human-level skills in games  https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/alphago-zero-the-ai-that-taught-itself-go/543450/

and have learned to do more complex perception and motion  https://www.bostondynamics.com/atlas

Doesn’t this mean it is just “intelligent” full stop? What makes it “artificial”? “Artificial” makes it sound like its fake …

In a sense you are right, “artificial” is commonly used to indicate that something is not real, like artificial flavoring or coloring in food. A computer solves problems in a different way than a human, but if it gets the job done, there’s nothing “fake” about it 

OK, I’m going to read some stuff and get back to you.

Sure, have a nice weekend!    🖖🖖