zlacker

But that's the sort of thing that should be researched: is the question scientifically answerable? The answer is not obviously no. I can think of ways to scientifically test for noncomputability. If I can then certainly much smarter and knowledgeable poeple can. People just assume like yourself it is not and throw lots of money at a certain assumption. If the assumption is wrong, not only is AGI a dead end, but "human in the loop" computation should be a huge win.

>>yters+(OP)
I'm not saying it's not scientifically answerable, just that hiring people specifically to answer it is not practical.

This type of thing usually comes through unplanned breakthroughs. You can't discover that the earth revolves around the sun just by paying tons of money to researchers and asking them to figure out astronomy. All that would get you would be some extremely sophisticated Copernican cycle-based models.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-08-09

>>yters+(OP)
OK, what experiments would you design to test whether AGI is possible? Given the decades (centuries?) of thought that have gone into the issue, I'm sure a set of experiments would be valuable.

>>xamuel+j1
Bell Labs made a bunch of breakthroughs that way, i.e. information theory.

>>drongo+Zx
If humans can solve problems that require more computational resources than exist in the universe, then AGI is not possible. I have run one experiment to demonstrate this.

>>yters+VI
What was the experiment you ran?

>>xamuel+Bd1
Filling in missing assignments for a boolean circuit. In general it is an NP hard problem, and humans appear to do it pretty well at computationally intractable sizes.

>>yters+wh1
Did you publish a paper on these experiments?

I'm not familiar with the boolean circuit problem, but I wonder if it's an instance where the NP hardness comes from specific edge cases, and whether your experiment tested said edge cases. Compare with the fact that the C++ compiler is Turing complete: its Turing completeness arises from compiling extremely contrived bizzarro code that would never come up in practice. So for everyday code, humans can answer the question, "Will the C++ compiler enter an infinite loop when it tries to compile this code?", quite easily, just by answering "No." every time. That doesn't mean humans can solve the halting problem, though.

>>xamuel+Vj3
There may be some way the problem set I used is computationally tractable, but I am not aware of such. I have not published the work yet.

But, the bigger point is why are not others doing this kind of research? It does not seem out of the realm of conceptual possibility, since someone as myself came up with a test. And the question is prior to all the big AI projects we currently have going on.