Don’t believe the hype: AGI is far from inevitable
Will AI soon surpass the human brain? If you ask employees at OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other large tech companies, it is inevitable. However, researchers at Radboud University and other institutes show new proof that those claims are overblown and unlikely to ever come to fruition. Their findings are published in Computational Brain & Behavior today.
Creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) with human-level cognition is ‘impossible’, explains Iris van Rooij, lead author of the paper and professor of Computational Cognitive Science, who heads the Cognitive Science and AI department at Radboud University. ‘Some argue that AGI is possible in principle, that it’s only a matter of time before we have computers that can think like humans think. But principle isn’t enough to make it actually doable. Our paper explains why chasing this goal is a fool’s errand, and a waste of humanity’s resources.’
In their paper, the researchers introduce a thought experiment where an AGI is allowed to be developed under ideal circumstances. Olivia Guest, co-author and assistant professor in Computational Cognitive Science at Radboud University: ‘For the sake of the thought experiment, we assume that engineers would have access to everything they might conceivably need, from perfect datasets to the most efficient machine learning methods possible. But even if we give the AGI-engineer every advantage, every benefit of the doubt, there is no conceivable method of achieving what big tech companies promise.’
