I think it's surprising that you think the first two points are controversial. They seem quite obvious to me.
First, we know of no special requirement that exists in human brains that provides intelligence that machines lack. In other words, We don't have any reason to expect that machines will be limited by human intelligence or some level below. On the contrary, we have great reasons to expect that machines will easily be able to exceed human intelligence - for example, the speed and reliability of digital computation or the fact that computers can be arbitrary sizes and use amounts of power and dump waste heat that our biological brains couldn't dream of. If you accept that AI is making progress along a spectrum of intelligence, moving closer towards human level intelligence now, then it seems absurd to doubt that it would be possible for AI to surpass human intelligence. Why would that be impossible? It's like claiming we could never build a machine larger than a human or stronger than a human. There's no reason or evidence to support such a claim.
Second is the idea that AI is making progress towards human and superhuman intelligence. I think you should be convinced of this by simply looking at the state of the art 5 years ago versus today. If you put those points on a plane and draw a line between them, where is that line in 5 years or 10?
Today GPT4 can play chess, write poetry, take standardized tests and do pretty well, answer math problems, write code, tell jokes, translate languages, and just generally do all sorts of cognitive tasks. Capabilities like these did not exist five years ago or to the extent they did, they existed only in rudimentary forms compared to what GPT4 is capable of. We can see similar progress in different domains, not just large language models - for example, image generation or recognition.
Progress might not continue then again it might. It might accelerate. As the capabilities of the models increase, they might contribute to accelerating the progress of artificial intelligence.
First, we know of no special requirement that exists in human brains that provides intelligence that machines lack. In other words, We don't have any reason to expect that machines will be limited by human intelligence or some level below. On the contrary, we have great reasons to expect that machines will easily be able to exceed human intelligence - for example, the speed and reliability of digital computation or the fact that computers can be arbitrary sizes and use amounts of power and dump waste heat that our biological brains couldn't dream of. If you accept that AI is making progress along a spectrum of intelligence, moving closer towards human level intelligence now, then it seems absurd to doubt that it would be possible for AI to surpass human intelligence. Why would that be impossible? It's like claiming we could never build a machine larger than a human or stronger than a human. There's no reason or evidence to support such a claim.
Second is the idea that AI is making progress towards human and superhuman intelligence. I think you should be convinced of this by simply looking at the state of the art 5 years ago versus today. If you put those points on a plane and draw a line between them, where is that line in 5 years or 10?
Today GPT4 can play chess, write poetry, take standardized tests and do pretty well, answer math problems, write code, tell jokes, translate languages, and just generally do all sorts of cognitive tasks. Capabilities like these did not exist five years ago or to the extent they did, they existed only in rudimentary forms compared to what GPT4 is capable of. We can see similar progress in different domains, not just large language models - for example, image generation or recognition.
Progress might not continue then again it might. It might accelerate. As the capabilities of the models increase, they might contribute to accelerating the progress of artificial intelligence.