Does AGI Require Magical Thinking?

AGI and the Planck Scale are topics on this episode of The AI Minute. For more on Artificial Intelligence: https://voicesinai.com https://gigaom.com https://byronreese.com https://amzn.to/2vgENbn... Transcript: When I talk to AI researchers about the possibility of an artificial general intelligence, I often ask them if they think that it is possible. I generally get an answer to the effect of, “Yes, I don't think there's anything magic going on in the brain.” Sometimes people seem to think that the question boils down to that, whether it’s mechanistic, or it’s magic. If it’s mechanistic, if it’s something that we can eventually replicate, or is it magic, something we can’t. The challenge with that view is that intelligence may not come from the connections between the neurons like we think that it does, but from within the neuron itself. There's something known as the Planck Scale, which is the smallest discrete unit of space that's possible. Think of it as the resolution of the universe. What one grain of salt is to the universe, one Planck unit may be to a grain of salt. So, it's incredibly small. There is more than one theory that suggests that what is going on, even in intelligence, occurs down at that level. In which case, while it may be possible in some remote distant future to create an AGI, it may be prohibitively difficult right now. http://bit.ly/2W01zD2 gigaom May 10, 2019 at 05:15PM