Is AGI possible within the known laws of physics?

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One of the questions from https://jacyanthis.com/big-questions.

Resolves according to my judgement of whether the criteria have been met, taking into account clarifications from @JacyAnthis, who made those predictions. (The goal is that they'd feel comfortable betting to their credance in this market, so I want the resolution criteria to match their intention.)

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predictedYES

Seconding the previous comments. General intelligence is obviously physically possible - it's us humans. It seems to me that for AGI to be physically impossible would basically be equivalent to saying that human intelligence involves something outside of known physics that cannot be reproduced outside of humans - which I am very happy to bet against. I'd even be happy to bet 99% that AGI is physically possible with silicon chips, leaving aside all the other ways it could theoretically be built.

👋 I'm a general intelligence made by a human, within the laws of physics! 😊

predictedYES

@Sinclair Babies aren't artificial.

predictedYES

@IsaacKing they're made by humans, even with deliberate engineering (e.g., play classical music while they incubate). Where exactly do you draw the line? Evolution? What if we make silicon life by creating a large, bountiful environment where life can emerge through evolution? What if somebody made us that way?

This list can go on and on...!

It's clearly impossible for a few trivial reasons.

Humans absorb about 1 gb/s of visual information. Over childhood that's about e20 bits. The largest data centers are e15.

Making the earth a million times larger is crippled by gravity hence you would obviously break physics before building an AI.

@MarkIngraham But it's possible though, that much processing power exists, it's called a human. So computers just need to be made more space efficient for this purpose. Probably computers specifically built for AGIs

predictedNO

@RileyN that would be a clone not an ai

@MarkIngraham no, because they'd be made from silicon not carbon.

@RileyN Very true, agreed. However note that fundamentally the default state of humans is NOT to absorb data. We have to focus to absorb data, update world models, it just doesn't happen on its own. It's perfectly possible to go to the best colleges in the world, hang out with smart people, and walk away with nothing at all if you weren't paying attention. The same kids who attend the lectures in the same college in the same classroom end up walking out with different learnings and often one doesn't learn much at all, because they just weren't paying "attention"