There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
The only non-speculative and relevant claim here is that the experts were wrong about Winograd Schemas. The paper Eliezer cites to prove that we&#x27;ve made unexpected progress in Winograd Schemas only deals with a very specific type of Winograd Schemas, and not an arbitrary one. This is awfully dishonest for someone purporting to be a skepticist.<p>Also, the wording seems to imply that WS performance is already pretty high in the 50%-60% range. WS is a binary task. Randomly picking the answer would have 50% accuracy. Even 70% performance on a small subset of typed WS is pretty bad, and as the authors point out in the paper, this is a start, and far from a breakthrough that would make experts&#x2F;predictors nervous.<p>Trust the experts, please. They are wrong a lot, but the best policy is still to trust the experts and not charlatans who want to monetize fear, especially when the charlatans themselves make zero falsifiable claims, and are simply turning the table to say &quot;Why can&#x27;t YOU prove to me that God doesn&#x27;t exist?&quot;.<p>This debate is so easily won by them. Simply come up with a falsifiable claim about the short-term future. What will the AI community get done in 2 years according to you, that all AI experts right <i>now</i> will say is impossible? When that thing does get done, everyone would convert. Win!<p>Alphago was not such an event. Yes, we did predict that Alphago is decades away, but that&#x27;s assuming that academics will continue working on it at their pace using their limited resources. No expert was surprised with Alphago. No expert will be surprised when Starcraft or Dota is solved. It&#x27;s simply a matter of compute and some tricks here and there. Why? Because these are closed systems, with good simulators available. You just need to keep playing and storing the actions in a big lookup table a la Ned Block, and you&#x27;re done.