KiC Debates: Will we ever achieve artificial general intelligence?

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, was founded as a non-profit dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) would benefit all of humanity. At the time, AGI — the capability of AI to learn, reason and adapt to new situations like a human can — was largely dismissed as science fiction. A decade later and AGI is at the forefront of most discussions about artificial intelligence: some of the largest companies in the world are betting billions on achieving human-level AI.

Philosopher Tim Crane thinks these bets are fundamentally misplaced, arguing that there can be no such thing as AGI (as far as computational AI is concerned). He argues this from reflections on the idea of computation itself. He also argues that even the name itself contains a fundamental flaw — as far as psychology concerned, it is questionable that intelligence is a useful category (let alone 'superintelligence').

Philosopher Simon Rippon remains agnostic on whether we'll ever achieve AGI, but thinks that Tim Crane's reasoning contains fundamental flaws.

What do you think? Join us on 20 January to watch Crane and Rippon debate whether AGI will ever exist, vote for whose arguments you find the most compelling, and share your thoughts, too!

KiC Debates is organized by the Knowledge in Crisis project, which is supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under the Clusters of Excellence programme (10.55776/COE3). We're a collaboration between the University of Graz, the University of Salzburg, and the University of Vienna, led by Central European University.