Technology

It's means "it is".

I think you meant compression. This is exactly how I prefer to describe it, except I also mention lossy compression for those that would understand what that means.

It's more intelligent than most people, we just have to raise the bar on what intelligence is and it will never be intelligent.

Fortunately, as long as we keep a fuzzy concept like intelligence as the yardstick of our exceptionalism, we will remain exceptionnal forever.

Todays AI is clippy on steroids. It's not intelligent or creative. You can't feed it physics and astronomy books without the equation for C and tell it to create the equation for C. It's fancy autocorrect, and it's a waste of compute and energy.

I think you're misunderstanding the point the author is making. He is arguing that even the current state is not intelligent, it is merely a fancy autocorrect, it doesn't know or understand anything about the prompts it receives. As the author stated, it can only guess at the next statistically most likely piece of information based on the data that has been fed into it. That's not intelligence.

Citation Needed (by Molly White) also frequently bashes AI.

I like her stuff because, no matter how you feel about crypto, AI, or other big tech, you can never fault her reporting. She steers clear of any subjective accusations or prognostication.

It’s all “ABC person claimed XYZ thing on such and such date, and then 24 hours later submitted a report to the FTC claiming the exact opposite. They later bought $5 million worth of Trumpcoin, and two weeks later the FTC announced they were dropping the lawsuit.”

Agreed.

When I was a kid we went to the library. If a card catalog didn't yield the book you needed, you asked the librarian. They often helped. No one sat around after the library wondering if the librarian was "truly intelligent".

These are tools. Tools slowly get better. Is a tool make life easier or your work better, you'll eventually use it.

Yes, there are woodworkers that eschew power tools but they are not typical. They have a niche market, and that's great, but it's a choice for the maker and user of their work.

Honestly I don't think we'll have AGI until we can fully merge meat space and cyber space. Once we can simply plug our brains into a computer and fully interact with it then we may see AGI.

Obviously we're not where near that level of man machine integration, I doubt we'll see even the slightest chance of it being possible for at least 10 years and the very earliest. But when we do get there it's a distinct chance that it's more of a Borg situation where the computer takes a parasitic role than a symbiotic role.

But by the time we are able to fully integrate computers into our brains I believe we will have trained A.I. systems enough to learn by interaction and observation. So being plugged directly into the human brain it could take prior knowledge of genome mapping and other related tasks and apply them to mapping our brains and possibly growing artificial brains to achieve self awareness and independent thought.

Or we'll just nuke ourselves out of existence and that will be that.