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Human-level AI is not inevitable. We have the power to change course
(www.theguardian.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The path to AGI seems inevitable - not because it’s around the corner, but because of the nature of technological progress itself. Unless one of two things stops us, we’ll get there eventually:
Either there’s something fundamentally unique about how the biological brain processes information - something that cannot, even in principle, be replicated in silicon,
Or we wipe ourselves out before we get the chance.
Barring those, the outcome is just a matter of time. This argument makes no claim about timelines - only trajectory. Even if we stopped AI research for a thousand years, it’s hard to imagine a future where we wouldn’t eventually resume it. That's what humans do; improve our technology.
The article points to cloning as a counterexample but that’s not a technological dead end, that’s a moral boundary. If one thinks we’ll hold that line forever, I’d call that naïve. When it comes to AGI, there’s no moral firewall strong enough to hold back the drive toward it. Not permanently.
As if silicon were the only technology we have to build computers.
Did you genuinely not understand the point I was making, or are you just being pedantic? "Silicon" obviously refers to current computing substrates, not a literal constraint on all future hardware. If you’d prefer I rewrite it as "in non-biological substrates," I’m happy to oblige - but I have a feeling you already knew that.
And why is "non-biological" a limitation?