this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36866515

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[–] Perspectivist@feddit.uk 46 points 1 day ago (11 children)

I can think of only two ways that we don't reach AGI eventually.

  1. General intelligence is substrate dependent, meaning that it's inherently tied to biological wetware and cannot be replicated in silicon.

  2. We destroy ourselves before we get there.

Other than that, we'll keep incrementally improving our technology and we'll get there eventually. Might take us 5 years or 200 but it's coming.

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

The only reason we wouldn't get to AGI is point number two.

Point number one doesn't make much sense given that all we are are bags of small complex molecular machines that operate synergistically with each other under extremely delicate balance. Which if humanity does not kill ourselves first, we will eventually be able to create small molecular machines that work together synergistically. Which is really all that life is. Except it's quite likely that it would be made simpler without all of the complexities much of biology requires to survive harsh conditions and decades of abuse.

It seems quite likely that we will be able to synthesize AGI far before we will be able to synthesize life. As the conditions for intelligence by all accounts seem to be simpler than the conditions for the living creature that maintains the delicate ecosystem of molecular machines necessary for that intelligence to exist.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

"eventually" won't cut it for the investors though.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I think you might mix up AGI and consciousness?

[–] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 4 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I think first we have to figure out if there is even a difference.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 0 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Well of course there is? I mean that's like not even up for debate?

Consciousness is that we "experience" the things that happens around us, AGI is a higher intelligence. If AGI "needs" consciousness then we can just simulate it (so no real consciousness).

[–] Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 hours ago

Of course that's up for debate; we're not even sure what consciousness really is. That is a whole philosophical debate on it's own.

[–] Perspectivist@feddit.uk 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Same argument applies for consciousness as well, but I'm talking about general intelligence now.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Well I'm curious then, because I have never seen or heard or read that general intelligence would be needing some kind of wetware anywhere. Why would it? It's just computations.

I do have heard and read about consciousness potentially having that barrier though, but only as a potential problem, and if you want conscious robots ofc.

[–] Perspectivist@feddit.uk 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

I don’t think it does, but it seems conceivable that it potentially could. Maybe there’s more to intelligence than just information processing - or maybe it’s tied to consciousness itself. I can’t imagine the added ability to have subjective experiences would hurt anyone’s intelligence, at least.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I don't think so. The consciousness has very little influence on the mind, we're mostly in on it for the ride. And general intelligence isn't that complicated to understand, so why would it be dependent on some substrate? I think the burden if proof lies on you here.

Very interesting topic though, I hope I'm not sounding condescending here.

[–] Perspectivist@feddit.uk 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Well, first of all, like I already said, I don’t think there’s substrate dependence on either general intelligence or consciousness, so I’m not going to try to prove there is - it’s not a belief I hold. I’m simply acknowledging the possibility that there might be something more mysterious about the workings of the human mind that we don’t yet understand, so I’m not going to rule it out when I have no way of disproving it.

Secondly, both claims - that consciousness has very little influence on the mind, and that general intelligence isn’t complicated to understand - are incredibly bold statements I strongly disagree with. Especially with consciousness, though in my experience there’s a good chance we’re using that term to mean different things.

To me, consciousness is the fact of subjective experience - that it feels like something to be. That there’s qualia to experience.

I don’t know what’s left of the human mind once you strip away the ability to experience, but I’d argue we’d be unrecognizable without it. It’s what makes us human. It’s where our motivation for everything comes from - the need for social relationships, the need to eat, stay warm, stay healthy, the need to innovate. At its core, it all stems from the desire to feel - or not feel - something.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 29 points 1 day ago (3 children)

If it's substrate dependent then that just means we'll build new kinds of hardware that includes whatever mysterious function biological wetware is performing.

Discovering that this is indeed required would involve some world-shaking discoveries about information theory, though, that are not currently in line with what's thought to be true. And yes, I'm aware of Roger Penrose's theories about non-computability and microtubules and whatnot. I attended a lecture he gave on the subject once. I get the vibe of Nobel disease from his work in that field, frankly.

If it really turns out to be the case though, microtubules can be laid out on a chip.

[–] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

Penrose has always had a fertile imagination, and not all his hypotheses have panned out. But he does have the gift that, even when wrong, he's generally interestingly wrong.

[–] pilferjinx@piefed.social 3 points 1 day ago

Imagine that we just end up creating humans the hard, and less fun, way.

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 day ago

I could see us gluing third world fetuses to chips and saying not to question it before reproducing it.

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

For 1, we can grow neurons and use them for computation, so not actually an issue if it were true (which it almost certainly isn't because it isn't magic).

https://youtu.be/bEXefdbQDjw

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago

Yeah, it most definitely is not magic given our growing knowledge of the molecular machines that make life possible.

The mysticism of how life works has long been dispelled. Now it's just a matter of understanding the insane complexity of it.

Sure we can grow neurons but ultimately neurons are just molecular machines with a bunch of complications surrounding them.

It stands to reason that we can develop and grow molecular machines that achieve the same outcomes with fewer complexities.

[–] RedPandaRaider@feddit.org 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)
  1. Ist getting likelier by the decade.
[–] Chozo@fedia.io 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

General intelligence is substrate dependent, meaning that it's inherently tied to biological wetware and cannot be replicated in silicon.

We're already growing meat in labs. I honestly don't think lab-grown brains are as far off as people are expecting.

[–] wirehead@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Well, think about it this way...

You could hit AGI by fastidiously simulating the biological wetware.

Except that each atom in the wetware is going to require n atoms worth of silicon to simulate. Simulating 10^26 atoms or so seems like a very very large computer, maybe planet-sized? It's beyond the amount of memory you can address with 64 bit pointers.

General computer research (e.g. smaller feature size) reduces n, but eventually we reach the physical limits of computing. We might be getting uncomfortably close right now, barring fundamental developments in physics or electronics.

The goal if AGI research is to give you a better improvement of n than mere hardware improvements. My personal concern is that that LLM's are actually getting us much of an improvement on the AGI value of n. Likewise, LLM's are still many order of magnitude less parameters than the human brain simulation so many of the advantages that let us train a singular LLM model might not hold for an AGI model.

Coming up with an AGI system that uses most of the energy and data center space of a continent that manages to be about as smart as a very dumb human or maybe even just a smart monkey is an achievement in AGI but doesn't really get you anywhere compared to the competition that is accidentally making another human amidst a drunken one-night stand and feeding them an infinitesimal equivalent to the energy and data center space of a continent.

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I see this line of thinking as more useful as a thought experiment than as something we should actually do. Yes, we can theoretically map out a human brain and simulate it in extremely high detail. That's probably both inefficient and unnecessary. What it does do is get us past the idea that it's impossible to make a computer that can think like a human. Without relying on some kind of supernatural soul, there must be some theoretical way we could do this. We just need to know how without simulating individual atoms.

[–] kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago

It might be helpful to make one full brain simulation, so that we can start removing parts and seeing what needs to stay. I definitely don't think that we should be mass-producing then, though.

[–] realitista@piefed.world 2 points 1 day ago

Well it could also just depend on some mechanism that we haven't discovered yet. Even if we could technically reproduce it, we don't understand it and haven't managed to just stumble into it and may not for a very long time.

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago

I don’t think our current LLM approach is it, but I doing think intelligence is unique to humans at all.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You're talking about consciousness, not AGI. We will never be able to tell if AI has "real" consciousness or not. The goal is really to create an AI that acts intelligent enough to convince people that it may be conscious.

Basically, we will "hit" AGI when enough people will start treating it like it's AGI, not when we achieve some magical technological breakthrough and say "this is AGI".

[–] Perspectivist@feddit.uk 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Same argument applies for consciousness as well, but I'm talking about general intelligence now.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I don't think you can define AGI in a way that would make it substrate dependent. It's simply about behaving in a certain way. Sufficiently complex set of 'if -> then' statements could pass as AGI. The limitation is computation power and practicality of creating the rules. We already have supercomputers that could easily emulate AGI but we don't have a practical way of writing all the 'if -> then' rules and I don't see how creating the rules could be substrate dependent.

Edit: Actually, I don't know if current supercomputers could process input fast enough to pass as AGI but it's still about computation power, not substrate. There's nothing suggesting we will not be able to keep increasing computational power without some biological substrate.