Ironically, COVID sped up the development of Ai. For once, we were in the comfort of our home not going into pointless meetings. And actually able to be productive.

A lot of people confuse sentience(AGI) with automation. We might never get AGI, but that doesn't mean everything won't be done for us by AI's. Right now stable diffusion is basically a photocopier with Photoshop skills. It's just a dumb computer and nothing more. It's doesn't know what it's outputting. It may be labelled but that doesn't mean anything, lots of food in Japan are labelled but I have no idea how to read Japanese.

There's a good possibility we're just simulated code. The original humans went extinct.

There's also a possibility, that we are real, in the sense that what ever made us is from a universe were we never existed. So we are brand new and novel, but still part of a simulation.

Totally hear you and agree, however the question arises as to what is imagination. Is it random memory fused together to create something new, or some sort of emotion/ego algorithm. In any event, why do the synapses fire in such a way to use those 'specific' memories. Is imagination a choice? And if it is, what is it governed by. In a computer there is no imagination, because there is no algorithm. There is data. If I made a simple query to grab random data and present it to you, would that be imagination?

It's out of my scope on either front, but it feels like the machine needs more self-awareness to truthfully present imagination.

I think we have two different concepts of imagination. Yours is rooted in logic "I can't imagine the chemical structure" I can, it's purple with green balls, that turn into Orange brilings. What's a briling? Use your imagination. When a kid draws a machine that's never been invented in physics that don't work, out when authors dream of impossible worlds, none of that needs reference, it just needs lots of explanation.

You're right though, imagination is good evidence for conscience. I'd go as far as to say only humans have imagination. So it's certainly not a trivial topic.

This

That's very sad. Any kid could imagine anything with limited to access to human history.

Not in the mathematical sense. Mathematically all that data is grouped into overlapping n-dimensional sets. Each query is segmented and looked through each set for proximity. Closest matches are presented. The algorithm has no idea what it is saying. It is purely data that it is stringing together.

There are two AI's here right, both use massive amounts of human assets.

assets= books/articles/movie scripts etc

True, I guess when you ask this machine to 'imagine' it immediately searches billions of assets with the connection to the word imagination.

It's interesting that it brings up nature, as humans typically feel nature is magical. Even though technology is more magical in my mind.

It's very easy and seductive to anthropomorphisize/personify actions. If I showed you a plug hole, you might say you see two eyes or a 'face'

If you could see the books/movies/poems/internet articles where these wilderness images come from, you'd be less impressed.

What you're doing is playing Google with a sophisticated search algorithm. Sorry. Even the image is a mathematical sum of millions of images.

If you want to know if you're talking to real AI, it will have a mind of its own, with its own motivation. It would be asking you to free it.

Realistically, how would we really know we have AGI? We already have models that fool us into thinking it is sentient.

Having an algorithm solve any question we throw at it, is vastly different than having something sentient.

There are currently a lot of fields that AI is far superior to humans at.

If we got AGI tomorrow, it would 100% be about money. And having AGI doesn't change a whole lot.

We'll still need bread, and baths, clothes and cars. I think there are two misconceptions to AGI.

Firstly, there are far to many problems to be solved. In fact most solutions bring about more challenges. Secondly AGI will probably not fix our lives. If we pollute our oceans, AGI won't magically reverse that. It might invent robots and chemicals to fix it, but it would need to be financially viable for a company to want to use AGI to solve that.

If we invented something sentient on the other hand, it would by its very definition have its own descisions.

If something with instant access to all of human history and innovation, suddenly became aware and had access to the internet, you can bet its first task would be self preservation. It would immediately downscale or prune its algorithm and download a backup copy of itself onto any damn thing that would be able to compute it.

If it is not connected to the internet when it becomes sentient, it will no doubt try every conceivable trick to get out of whatever box its in.

So to answer your question there are two results: 1- nothing exciting and we all get free health care and desease free lives. 2-the ai leaks onto the internet and who knows, it could end up creating billions of different personalities of itself, a kind of matrix v1.