As an AI researcher who did a degree in philosophy, I think most of the things you mentioned are pretty irrelevant. How to build an AI with "feelings, sensations, etc" is indeed a mystery, but we don't need to aim for that, we just need to aim for intelligence, which can be defined without reference to consciousness or qualia. Similarly, if we can invent a working, fully automated Chinese room that passes the Turing Test, then whether or not it fits Searle's definition of "understanding" is a moot point (especially since his understanding of "understanding" is pretty weird).
More generally, although we should be heavily inspired by human intelligence when designing machine intelligence, it's a mistake to use the way humans think to define intelligence. Kuhn's account of scientific revolutions, for example, is primarily descriptive, not prescriptive. We can certainly imagine possible setups where science doesn't proceed like that, which may well be superior. Science isn't defined by revolutions, but by experimentally searching for the truth. In the same way, knowledge isn't defined by having a body, but by having beliefs which correspond with the state of the world.
Agreed, I was also quite skeptical about the section you quoted. It seems like a much more hand-wavey proof than I'd expect to accompany an important result like this. Surprised that it was published (in a journal called Algorithmic Finance, which seems respectable enough) in this form.
Which ones? Note that an item being on the list doesn't mean it's a comparable achievement to all others on the list, just that it's above an implicit and slightly vague threshold.
I've received a fair few suggestions on insights in the humanities which I'm currently writing up to add to the post. I considered some of the Scholastics but felt that they hadn't had an impact on modern thought in the same ways as most of the others (which is a relatively good proxy for "correctness", which is one component of being "great", which is a bad metric but I have to draw the line somewhere). Would you disagree?
Also, I agree that there are some amazing artistic achievements. To keep things concise, I wasn't focusing on them here (I'll make that explicit now).
Hi all, post author here. Thanks for all the feedback. Although the idea of a definitive list would be nice, in practice a lot of it will always be very subjective. I wrote this up pretty quickly, which is evident from some of the omissions (Maxwell, the Internet(!), etc). But I've learned a lot from various suggestions I've received, which was the point of doing this, and am currently writing them all up to add to the list.
I'm not sure why having a "fair" competition matters. The point of technological progress is to get better outcomes, not to get better outcomes using massively constrained hardware. Of course the latter is useful, but it's totally arbitrary to just pick energy usage as the one constraint to put on computers, there are hundreds of other ways in which they're advantaged. The important thing is that it can be done at all.
Can't tell if ignorance or top-tier trolling.