My current answer to the question of when machines will reach human-level intelligence is that a precise calculation shows that we are between 1.7 and 3.1 Einsteins and .3 Manhattan Projects away from the goal.
omg this statement sounds 100% like something that could be posted today by Sam Altman on X. It’s hititing exactly the sweet spot between appearing precise but also super vague, like Altman’s “a few thousand days”.
Like his predecessor critics of artificial intelligence, Taube, Dreyfus and Lighthill, Weizenbaum is impatient, implying that if the problem hasn’t been solved in twenty years, it is lime to give up.
Weizenbaum replies,
I do not say and I do not believe that “if the problem hasn’t been solved in twenty years, we should give up”. I say (p. 198) " . . . it would be wrong . . . to make impossibility arguments about what computers can do entirely on the grounds of our present ignorance". That is quite the opposite of what McCarthy charges me with saying.
It’s a snidely jokey response to an argument that Weizenbaum didn’t make!
And even if Joseph Weizenbaum did actually say, verbatim: “if the problem hasn’t been solved in twenty years, it is time to give up”, that’s not the same as asking for the precise time when “machines will reach human-level intelligence”.
From McCarthy’s reply:
omg this statement sounds 100% like something that could be posted today by Sam Altman on X. It’s hititing exactly the sweet spot between appearing precise but also super vague, like Altman’s “a few thousand days”.
That sentence is somewhere between exactly 420.69 and 1,337.00 millialtmans of cringe.
That paragraph begins,
Weizenbaum replies,
It’s a snidely jokey response to an argument that Weizenbaum didn’t make!
And even if Joseph Weizenbaum did actually say, verbatim: “if the problem hasn’t been solved in twenty years, it is time to give up”, that’s not the same as asking for the precise time when “machines will reach human-level intelligence”.
It’s sarcasm. The question asks for unwarranted precision and the response is a joke.
Imagining a guy who asks me a dumb question so I can let everyone know how I’d mock them with a joke answer.