Are you familiar with the egg of Columbus?

These things were all called "impossible" — and in some cases "unthinkable" — when my dad was born; supersonic simply looks like "a question of manufacturing processes" because we here in 2024 already know (as a society if not as individuals) how to make a jet engine that doesn't melt itself during operation and a rocket that doesn't explode. Going to the moon was itself the metaphor for "you can't do that thing". Rutherford famously dismissed the idea of extracting useful energy from nuclear reactions as talking "moonshine".

Before Deep Blue, sensible people insisted that Chess "required" the human intellect and couldn't be reduced to mere calculation. When it turned out to the contrary, then the goalposts moved to Go because that game was too complex to explore the state space and you can't even write a simple function to estimate how good a move was the way you can add up piece point values in chess. And then Go fell, and people suddenly decided it wasn't special after all, and "what really matters is emotional intelligence, which machines will never replicate":

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

If it is sufficient to look "at the fundamental laws and materials of matter, finding their inner workings and theorizing more useful ways of using these inner workings", then that would also suffice for intelligence, because we are existence proofs that it's possible to make a ~1.5kg, 20 watt, human-level chemical intelligence.

Everything we've done with A.I. since the field began, has been theory and testing of attempts to replicate various aspects of our intelligence.

> Sure, computers can write symphonies, but they are very far away from inventing something like a symphony. Which I would describe as something close to sapiogenesis.

If you shift the goalposts like that, then you would fail any single human, and only have sapience for the species as a whole super-organism. The word has meant a variety of different concepts before reaching its current meaning, as the economic and technological milieu, as well as the existing body of works that they were expected to be familiar with and innovate on (but only a bit because too much change all at once makes people hate you*) all continuously changed the composer's capacities for grandeur. No single composer created the modern form ex nihilo, nor even any single step towards it from the ancient Greek σύμφωνος (harmony), each step was building piece-by-piece on those who came before.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_macabre_(Saint-Saëns)#Re...

But again, this is to miss the point. The people in 2004 who wrote that script, didn't have Del Spooner say "Sure, we all know robots can write a symphony or turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece, but can they invent the concept of symphony if we never told it to them?"

To put it another way, using your own words:

> just like how I would never have thought of a ladder if I never saw one and never had a need for one

And yet, about 20 years later, never mind the 77 since the transistor or the 80.7 years of average UK life expectancy? The path the scriptwriters went for was to have the character of Sonny respond "Can you?", pointing out that most humans can't compose or paint either, not by making Sonny create works faster than most printers can actually print them — a thing which is already possible for high end systems today, which those script writers couldn't conceive of.

And not just script writers: between graduation (2006) and the actual release of these models, I've had conversations with co-workers, software engineers, who didn't think that what these models do was possible.

> I maintain that intelligence won't be cracked in my lifetime, knowing that I could look silly doing so. We can't even quantify what intelligence is, let alone begin to work towards it.

I mean, I don't know how old you are, but I don't want to predict anything after the early 2030s, even in relatively simple areas like energy production: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/03/23-17.24.34.html

But we absolutely can quantify intelligence, that's what IQ tests are and we've had them for ages, the problem right now is that we're not sure if there's a single "general" thing or lots of small skills in different areas. Humans seem to have a G-factor, but the machines keep passing all our tests almost as fast as we can fill in the gaps in this sentence: "sure, they can ${old test}, but they won't be intelligent until they can ${new test}".