For Truly Intelligent AI, We Need to Mimic the Brain’s Sensorimotor Principles

In a recent essay by Sam Altman, titled “The Intelligence Age,” he paints a picture for the future of AI. He states that with AI, “fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics—will eventually become commonplace.” On an individual level, he states (italics added), “We can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine.” The benefits of AI, according to Altman, will soon be available to everyone around the world.

These claims are absurd, and we shouldn’t let them pass without criticism. Subsistence farmers in central Asia can imagine living in a villa on the Riviera, but no AI will make that happen. The “discovery of all of physics,” if even possible, will require decades or centuries of building sophisticated experiments, some of which will be located in space. The claim that AI will make this commonplace doesn’t even make sense.

Altman isn’t alone in claiming that we are on the cusp of creating super-intelligent machines that will solve most of the world’s problems. This is a view held by many of the people leading AI companies. For example, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has proposed that AI will soon be able to accomplish in five to 10 years what humans, unassisted by AI, would accomplish in fifty to one hundred years. Although not guaranteed, he thinks AI will likely eliminate most cancers, cure most infectious diseases, and double the human lifespan. These advances will occur because AI will be much smarter than humans. As he put it, we will be “a country of geniuses,” although they will be “geniuses in a datacenter.”[…]

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