# If you don't understand a question, you probably don't have a valuable answer **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [August 9, 2024, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-dont-understand-a-question-you-probably-dont-have-a-valuable-answer/1005505 "2024-08-09T21:16:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 61
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2024, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-dont-understand-a-question-you-probably-dont-have-a-valuable-answer/1005505/61 "2024-08-11T16:32:07Z")
> [@pjd](#): > > FWIW, i’m fairly IT literate and follow the AI threads, but i’d never > heard of AGI. AGI is a very common term in artificial intelligence discussions and has been mentioned here quite often – not sure how you could have missed it. Such as in these threads, just to cite a few: > [@Autonomous robot people could be constructed right now](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/autonomous-robot-people-could-be-constructed-right-now/998540/14): > > It becomes relevant when the thing that up until now has been doing a fair job of tricking people into believing it’s actually sophont suddenly does something so appallingly mindless that stupidity is an insufficient term. I’m not saying that true AGI is impossible but LLMs aren’t it. > [@The Open Letter to "Pause All AI Development"](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-open-letter-to-pause-all-ai-development/981862/40): > > If there’s one word that can be applied to the entire history of AI development, that word is “surprise”. In the early days of AI, initial results suggested that we were just a few refinements away from human-like intelligence and even AGI, including perfect natural language understanding and perfect translation sensitive to context, register, and language idiom. Surprise! We weren’t. Which led to predictions by skeptics that we never would be. Surprise! Now we are, but it took revolutionar… > [@Straight Dope 2/24/2023: What are the chances artificial intelligence will destroy humanity?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/straight-dope-2-24-2023-what-are-the-chances-artificial-intelligence-will-destroy-humanity/980302): > > What are the chances artificial intelligence will destroy humanity? What, you thought the worst that could happen was a [search engine declares its love for you](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html)? Then you haven’t been following the AI news very closely – specifically, the publication last year of a scholarly paper entitled “[Advanced artificial agents intervene in the provision of reward](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aaai.12064).” OK, that’s not as grabby as it might be. Lead author Michael Cohen punched it up some in a tweet: “[Our conclusion is much stronger than that …](https://twitter.com/Michael05156007/status/1567240031168856064?s=20) > [@Large language model AI doesn't learn](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/large-language-model-ai-doesnt-learn/984778/12): > > If that’s all they do, is that enough to really count as “artificial intelligence”? That’s an argument I’ve seen made by people who work with the technology. What the average person thinks of as “artificial intelligence” and what LLMs actually do are quite different, and that it’s unfortunate that the name “AI” has caught on for the idea. What most people envision is referred to as an AGI: an artificial general intelligence. > [@Talk me off the ledge: Will AI destroy my industry?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/talk-me-off-the-ledge-will-ai-destroy-my-industry/981879/30): > > The real danger of “artificial intelligence” (even pretty limited ‘generative’ AI) is that the convenience will encourage people to pick the cheap and easy option rather than to do the work to develop their own skills, knowledge, and ‘voice’. Nothing that ChatGPT or Bing any of these other engines—and they are just machine synthesis engines, not actual autodidactic intellects—is in any way original, although lacking the constraints that most people have in terms of their cognitive constructs i… > [@Contrarian opinion: AI will soon hit a wall; no apocalypse will happen](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/contrarian-opinion-ai-will-soon-hit-a-wall-no-apocalypse-will-happen/997707): > > Here’s an interesting article about the doomsayers: Nope. Now, it’s true that AI has done some incredible things lately. I was playing around with Google’s [Gemini](https://gemini.google.com/app) the other day. Pretty amazing. So is [Midjourney](https://www.midjourney.com/home). Just as I felt about online maps and search engines in the late 1990s, I think, “Wow, this is already possible?!” And I do think that AI is going to put a lot of downward pressure on jobs, but that’s due more to the penny-scraping, innovation-scarce nature of late stage capitalism … > [@Artificial intelligence (singulairty) within a few months?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-intelligence-singulairty-within-a-few-months/981324/35): > > This is nonsense with respect to cultural/technological change, because we are not (yet) changing our mental hardware and operating system along with our culture. Humans have been born with essentially the same brains for thousands of years. Each new physically identical human must acquire all cultural knowledge and understanding of technology from scratch. So even if we grant the dubious assumption that there has been no qualitative change and that we’re talking about continuous exponent… > [@Is AI overhyped?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-ai-overhyped/1005471): > > The people (Kurzweil, Kaku etc) Saying that AGI is [gonna happen this year](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pUye38cooOE) or in 2029, where are they getting their optimism from? My yardstick is we have AGI when the average entry level worker (Me) Doesn’t need to do their job anymore. I just find the predictions of life being completely altered in such a short time too fantastic to believe (And I want to believe it) Are the people making these bold predictions wrong because they don’t have any real world experience in shitty dead end jobs, o… --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-dont-understand-a-question-you-probably-dont-have-a-valuable-answer/1005505)._