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The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

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Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#21

Post by apsec112 »

This article seems very confused. Most importantly, it doesn't distinguish between what AI can do right now, and what the theoretical limit of AI is, in 50 or 100 or 500 years. Everyone agrees that AI today, and in the near future, doesn't even vaguely resemble a "person". That doesn't imply that much more powerful, "person-like" AI will forever be impossible. Airplanes weren't a practical means of travel in 1910, but by 1960 it was a different story, and some people in 1910 had already realized that plane travel was coming.

Secondly, it does a lot of handwaving about "religion". I am an atheist, and think most religious beliefs are irrational. However, that doesn't mean that every belief that "looks like" religion (in some vague, poorly-defined way) is irrational. The Aztec religion was false, but Hernan Cortes and his army of men with guns was very real. It would have been stupid for Aztec atheists to ignore Cortes because "that sounded like religion". The right question to ask is "is this claim supported by the evidence?", not "how much like religion does this claim sound?".

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#22

Post by pron »

VLM wrote: post #3

"There has been a domineering subculture—that's been the most wealthy, prolific, and influential subculture in the technical world—that for a long time has not only promoted the idea that there's an equivalence between algorithms and life, and certain algorithms and people, but a historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us and will take over from us." On a dif…

I fully agree with the religious aspect of it (religion doesn't have to be theistic at all, but the particular beliefs in an after-life/resurrection/omniscient-omnipotent being do resemble the theistic, and indeed, monotheistic religions), but I think there's another aspect to the "AI threat" belief that is more than just "vestigial monotheism".

I think this is (in part) a power fantasy. The believers in the AI threat normally perceive themselves to be different from other people due to their (self-perceived or real) higher intelligence. They therefore describe that property (that they believe makes them special) as being particularly dangerous, and therefore powerful, because they want to believe that intelligence imbues its possessor with power and a lot of it. Sadly, superbugs, meteorites, H bombs, climate change, human-rights violations, inequality and other threats don't require or possess much intelligence, but an unstoppable AI is the purest manifestation of intelligence-as-power.

In the human world, intelligence is not very correlated with power, except very roughly. The most powerful people are generally more intelligent than average, but the correlation doesn't extend far beyond that. If anything, charm, confidence and courage seem to imbue their bearers with much more power than raw intelligence. Which is why I fear (only partly jokingly) a super-charming machine than a super-intelligent one. A super-charming machine is far more likely to bend humanity to its will -- and therefore pose a greater danger -- even if what it wants may be truly idiotic; a super-intelligent machine would be far more limited in its effects...

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#23

Post by api »

tsunamifury wrote: post #18

I think Jaron knows what many engineers who have worked on AI know: That the external promise of AI is far more inflated than the capability of the actual technology. It's simply that when the current technology gets just complicated enough for the above-average person to no longer understand, everyone starts assigning magical properties and expectations to it. This results in short term over-valuations, which inevit…

This drives a long cycle of AI booms and AI winters. Right now we seem to be in another boom. When the limits of deep learning and other new techniques become apparent, we'll be back in another AI winter.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#24

Post by AndrewKemendo »

moron4hire wrote: post #17
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it a religious position? A religious position would be thinking that some unknowable process would deliver some kind of techno-rapture. So because we don't know how something works now, we will never know? C'mon. Programming is a lot like making spells and incantations. No, it's not. Maybe for laymen it looks like that, but for us developers it is definitely not the case. Granted, sometimes something works and…

Because it's based in faith that something will happen, not a rational determination based on facts on hand.

What? We are actually building this stuff...

It's about as much faith as Doug Englebart had about the PC.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#25

Post by blazespin »

tsunamifury wrote: post #18

I think Jaron knows what many engineers who have worked on AI know: That the external promise of AI is far more inflated than the capability of the actual technology. It's simply that when the current technology gets just complicated enough for the above-average person to no longer understand, everyone starts assigning magical properties and expectations to it. This results in short term over-valuations, which inevit…

Actually, it's not as inflated as you might imagine. For example, extend Deep Minds work on video games to a fully simulated 3D environment of a factory. Now, have Deep Mind learn to 'play the factory' to produce goods (starting off with the current process as the baseline). Suddenly, the potential gets pretty exciting.

Assuming of course, the AI doesn't get control of the Factory by accident and does something terrible in the name of improving productivity.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#26

Post by api »

VLM wrote: post #3

"There has been a domineering subculture—that's been the most wealthy, prolific, and influential subculture in the technical world—that for a long time has not only promoted the idea that there's an equivalence between algorithms and life, and certain algorithms and people, but a historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us and will take over from us." On a dif…

Religion and ideological herd behaviors are a core part of human nature. You can't expect these to magically vanish just because people have abandoned belief in supernatural deities and magic. Those are just one form of it. Religion is a social phenomenon and cognitive style that is independent from the subject matter.

That being said: the techno-critics also display these behaviors as do the new agers, "naturalists," and others with which they tend to travel. Head over to one of those circles or boards and start arguing the futurist line and see what it gets you.

Both sides have valid points.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#27

Post by vinceguidry »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #11
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vestigial monotheism That's a fantastic metaphor. I'm curious though how someone could act in a religious manner about a self-driving car. To the original point though, I am very much in the camp of "historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us" and here is why: I believe that intelligence (and "consciousness" if you want to go down that rabbit hole) is complet…

That's a religious position. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is or how it works. More than that, we have don't even have ad hoc good models for motivation and personality, never mind useful formal and explicit models. I think Lanier is absolutely right, and I think there's a strong quasi-theological element running through all of AI and programming. Programming is a lot like making spells and incantatio…

> We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is or how it works.

We know what it is, we just don't know how it works.

Self-awareness comes in stages. We generally move through those stages throughout our daily lives. Animals display wide variations in qualities of self-awareness as well. So we can define consciousness as the sum of all of these qualities.

What I think is going to happen is that we'll start separating out lots of aspects of consciousness and explore them in software, adding more and more of them in as the state of the art of hardware gets better. The consciousness algorithms will slowly, over time, shed complexity.

Eventually, well before we get to even human-level self-awareness, we'll run into hard physical limits and realize that biology is way more effective at making the sort of compact, yet incredibly complex evolved system than any design process could be.

Biology has an advantage we don't have, it does not have to understand what it is doing, and it works ceaselessly. It can simply try over and over again over millions of years.

I predict that getting machines to become truly self-aware will be more trouble than it's worth, and that then you'll be choosing levels of comparatively-lower self-awareness for each individual component of a software system as part of architecting it. In fact, we have that tradeoff now. Do I really need to pull out ML to write a shell script?

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#28

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

tsunamifury wrote: post #18

I think Jaron knows what many engineers who have worked on AI know: That the external promise of AI is far more inflated than the capability of the actual technology. It's simply that when the current technology gets just complicated enough for the above-average person to no longer understand, everyone starts assigning magical properties and expectations to it. This results in short term over-valuations, which inevit…

Yeah, we might as well quit calling it AI altogether. It's a terrible name. It really encourages pendulum swinging.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#29

Post by waterlesscloud »

"It's not so much a rise of evil as a rise of nonsense. It's a mass incompetence, as opposed to Skynet from the Terminator movies. That's what this type of AI turns into."

That's the danger. I think Lanier is a lot closer to Musk on that point than he imagines, though.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#30

Post by simbilou »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #11
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vestigial monotheism That's a fantastic metaphor. I'm curious though how someone could act in a religious manner about a self-driving car. To the original point though, I am very much in the camp of "historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us" and here is why: I believe that intelligence (and "consciousness" if you want to go down that rabbit hole) is complet…

That's a religious position. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is or how it works. More than that, we have don't even have ad hoc good models for motivation and personality, never mind useful formal and explicit models. I think Lanier is absolutely right, and I think there's a strong quasi-theological element running through all of AI and programming. Programming is a lot like making spells and incantatio…

> That's a religious position. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is or how it works.

Well we know that it exists, or at the very least seem to exists. And there is nothing in the physical word that we have understood so far that cannot be ultimatly expressed computationally—even if it’s usually not the most useful formalism. It is of course somewhat a leap of faith to then say _everything_ is computation (or can be expressed as computation), but I would argue that science has already made this leap in it’s infancy: The Book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics… Admittedly, modern philosophy of science is a bit more nuanced but the old the statement from Galileo basically stands. Now I agree that it’s not entirely rational, but it certainly isn’t “religious”.

So yeah, I think there are very good arguments to be made that conciousness can at least in principle emerge from some kind of computation. That computation could be a complete simulation of every atom in a brain or maybe some shortcut is possible it doesn’t matter for my point. That does not mean however that I think it can be made or will be made, since has you pointed out, we have no idea what we are talking about. I completely agree with Lanier in this, the tech industry should stop focusing on this nonsense.

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