Well, I’ll make the halting problem for this conversation decidable by concluding :). It was interesting to talk, but I was not convinced.

I think some amazing things are coming out of deep learning and some day our abilities will generally be surpassed. Hopefully you are right, because I think we will all die shortly afterwards.

Feel free to have the final word.

Here are two groups of claims I disagree with that I think you must agree with

1 - brains do things that a computer program can never do. It is impossible for a computer to ever simulate the computation* done by a brain. Humans solve the halting problem by doing something a computer could never do.

2 - It is necessary to solve the halting problem to write computer programs. Humans can only write computer programs because they solve the halting problem first.

*perhaps you will prefer a different word here

I would say that:

• it doesn’t require solving any halting problems to write computer programs
• there is no general solution to the halting problem that works on human brains but not on computers.
• computers can in principle simulate brains with enough accuracy to simulate any computation happening on a brain. However, there would be far cheaper ways to do any computation.

Which of my statements do you disagree with?

Given that humans can write computer programs, how can you argue that the undecidability of the halting problem stops intelligent agents from being able to write computer programs?

I don’t understand what you mean about the borrow checker in Rust or block instruction reordering. These are certainly not attempts at AI or AGI.

What exactly does AGI mean to you?

This stuff should all be obvious, but here we are.

This is not necessary. Please don’t reply if you can’t resist the temptation to call people who disagree with you stupid.

we all learned in Theory of Computation that general AI is impossible.

I strongly suspect it is you who has misunderstood your CS courses. Can you provide some concrete evidence for why general AI is impossible?

desktop time is way more expensive than phone time!

I was asked why I wouldn’t viist on my desktop. This is a great way to put it.