Well what I'm saying is that we can derive your first paragraph purely with computing power. What we need are computers with roughly 100 billion cores, each at least capable of simulating a neuron (maybe an Intel 80286 running Erlang or similar), and a simple mesh network (more like the web) that's optimized for connectivity instead of speed. This is on the order of 100,000*100,000,000,000 = 1e16 transistors, or about 7 orders of magnitude more than an Intel i7's billion transistors. It would also be running at at least 1 MHz instead of the 100 or 1000 Hz of the human brain, so we can probably subtract a few orders of magnitude there. I think 10,000 times faster than today is reasonable, or about 2 decades of Moore's law applied to video cards.
Then we feed it scans of human minds doing various tasks and have it try combinations (via genetic algorithms etc) until it begins to simulate what's happening in our imaginations. I'm arguing that we can do all that with an undergrad level of education and understanding. Studying the results and deriving an equation for consciousness (like Copernicus and planetary orbits) is certainly beyond the abilities of most people, but hey, at least we'll have AGI to help us.
Totally agree about the rest of what you said though. AGI <-> sacrifice. We have all the weight of the world's 7 billion minds working towards survival and making a few old guys rich. It's like going to work every day to earn a paycheck, knowing you will die someday. Why aren't we all working on inventing immortality? As I see it, that's what AGI is, and that seems to scare people, forcing them to confront their most deeply held beliefs about the meaning of life, religion, etc.
Then we feed it scans of human minds doing various tasks and have it try combinations (via genetic algorithms etc) until it begins to simulate what's happening in our imaginations. I'm arguing that we can do all that with an undergrad level of education and understanding. Studying the results and deriving an equation for consciousness (like Copernicus and planetary orbits) is certainly beyond the abilities of most people, but hey, at least we'll have AGI to help us.
Totally agree about the rest of what you said though. AGI <-> sacrifice. We have all the weight of the world's 7 billion minds working towards survival and making a few old guys rich. It's like going to work every day to earn a paycheck, knowing you will die someday. Why aren't we all working on inventing immortality? As I see it, that's what AGI is, and that seems to scare people, forcing them to confront their most deeply held beliefs about the meaning of life, religion, etc.