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The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

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Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#91

Post by TeMPOraL »

pixl97 wrote: post #86
stepvhen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion itself does a lot of hand waving, and people tend to talk about the "existential threat" of AI with a lot of hand waving. Its an easy comparison to make. Also, a claim, by itself, can't be a religion. It would need people to attach to it with a certain fervor. >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. AI, by itself, cannot in…

>AI, by itself, cannot interact with the physical world, past bit-flipping registers on a cpu (a negligible action). For AI to be a threat, in my opinion, it would need to be coupled with some form of physical manifestation that could, in some fashion, not be under the control of a human. Now that's just silly. An AI does not need a body for any reason. What it needs is a voice, software is pretty good at simulating…

Indeed. On the Internet, nobody knows that the person ordering and paying for your services is in fact a superintelligent AI :).

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#92

Post by natch »

circlefavshape wrote: post #2

Am I missing something or does the first reply (by George Church) completely ignore everything the original article says?

Not only the first reply. Going through the replies, most of them do not seem to have read.

Pretty disappointed with the Edge here. It's clear that the participants are just exploiting it as a platform to put forward their own ideas.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#93

Post by TeMPOraL »

stepvhen wrote: post #90
Houshalter wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tl;dr is that we will eventually have AIs which are smarter than humans. Much smarter than humans, to the point that we are to them what chimpanzees are to us. They would have godlike powers and abilities. And this could happen very rapidly, as the first smart AIs design even better AIs and better computers, which then design even better AIs, and so on. The second point is that they would have no reason to keep u…

>The tl;dr is that we will eventually have AIs which are smarter than humans. Much smarter than humans, to the point that we are to them what chimpanzees are to us. >The second point is that they would have no reason to keep us around. Questions: (1) What reason do we have to keep chimpanzee's around? Why don't we just kill them all? They can't even do calculus. (2) Whatever the answer for question 1, wouldn't an AI…

1. Because we have empathy and because we have no compelling economic reason to (economics always overruling silly things like empathy).

2. Empathy, which is a part of our emotions, is an incredibly complex thing we can't even begin to formalize yet - it's extremely unlikely that a random AI we'd build would happen to have the exact same emotional makeup as we do.

3. "Smart" has a particular meaning here when used in discussing AI. It implies raw intelligence, not morals. A smart AI may be incredibly good at evaluating information, inferring new facts and doing complex tasks. None of it means it will necessarily have to ask itself philosophical questions that we do - those actually mostly come from our emotions, from our desire to understand our place in the universe.

The core of the AI-threat issue is that for an AI to not be dangerous it would have to value us and the same things we value. We can't agree about our exact values even among ourselves, and we're nowhere near even trying to formalize it on a level of detail that would be useful for programming.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#94

Post by natch »

The Edge has lost it.

Jaron's essay was a fantastic read, highly recommend it, but the respondents are not engaging with it at all.

They are just using the Edge as a platform to promote their own ideas. Most of them clearly did not read what he wrote. Even though I respect most of the participants, the platform is not eliciting their best.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#95

Post by TeMPOraL »

maldusiecle wrote: post #85
Houshalter wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tl;dr is that we will eventually have AIs which are smarter than humans. Much smarter than humans, to the point that we are to them what chimpanzees are to us. They would have godlike powers and abilities. And this could happen very rapidly, as the first smart AIs design even better AIs and better computers, which then design even better AIs, and so on. The second point is that they would have no reason to keep u…

> The second point is that they would have no reason to keep us around. They would do whatever we programmed them to do, to the point of absurdity. This is where this line of reasoning completely falls apart for me. Any complex system is going to do unexpected things that weren't deliberately designed for. My laptop computed doesn't do "whatever it was programmed to, to the point of absurdity." Why would you expect a…

Nah, that's the key. Your laptop is not doing what it was designed to, it is doing things exactly the way it was built. That's the 101 of programming - programs follow what you wrote, not what you meant.

> Why would you expect a program complex enough to simulate the human mind to act in such a predictable way, when none of the much simpler programs we already have act that way?

Exactly. We suck at making complex programs do what we want them to. This is the source of worry.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#96

Post by sinxoveretothex »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #74
hyperbovine wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of intelligent people are promoting the idea that AI will take a lot of our jobs, for the simple reason that a lot our jobs do not require that much I. Whether it's driving a truck, plowing a field, or making food at a McEatery, a frighteningly large proportion of our economy consists of tasks which can be automated by technology coming online in the next decade or two.

Here's a big task that is a) not directly related to computers, and b) the coming wave of automation can't take away - maintenance . All those buildings, tracks, machines, etc. can't clean and fix themselves. We can't jump over everything with the standard market approach of making cheap disposable crap and replacing it wholesale when some component breaks. There's infrastructure . Like water mains, electrical condui…

I don't have an analogical example in mind, but I think that often-times, what happens when a revolution gets past a hurdle like automation vs maintenance, is that the hurdle gets worked around.

In this case, I think that, to a large extent, maintenance can be side-stepped by recycling and rebuilding. A bit like how the current world works: we can fix anything, but for most things, it's simpler to throw and buy a new one because the labour is more costly than the product itself. One example is asking a computer repair shop to fix your laptop screen (particularly so if said screen is touch-sensitive).

In a world where energy is free (fully solar for example), this is awesome: oh, you just got a month old car but a better design just came out? No problem, you'll get the newest one when your turn comes.

I doubt I'll see this kind of world (if it ever comes) in my lifetime, but it doesn't seem so far-fetched, I think.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#97

Post by eanzenberg »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #82
eanzenberg wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wat. I keep hearing the argument that there "won't be useful work to be done soon." Considering that a median house still costs 4x yearly median salary means that not only do we live in a resource-scarce world but we will continue to for a long time. Just because you don't "see" the work humans currently do doesn't allow you to be ignorant to it happening. Just because you personally don't want to work (as most peopl…

Why, there still will be plenty of work to do - maintenance, for instance. But probably not enough for everyone . That "a median house still costs 4x yearly median salary" means exactly nothing. The size of median salary is market driven, and the price of housing reflects the games banks and housing developers are playing, and thus can be arbitrarily high.

The house price is set by what buyer's are willing to pay for them. This is taking into account that in median, 4 years of that person's work-output will be required to purchase a house.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#98

Post by Houshalter »

pron wrote: post #61
apsec112 wrote: post #21

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, b…

> 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. Indeed, arguing about the potential threats of air-travel in 1910 (let alone in 1810) would have been silly. The point isn't whether or not AI is possible (or could pose a serious threat), but whether or not discussing it as a threat given our curren…

>The point isn't whether or not AI is possible (or could pose a serious threat), but whether or not discussing it as a threat given our current, near-zero, understanding of it is productive.

It definitely is productive. We can either slow research on AI, or we can research AI safety now. Or both. There's no reason we have to just accept our fate and do nothing, or just hope everything works out when the time comes.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#99

Post by TeMPOraL »

eanzenberg wrote: post #97
TeMPOraL wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, there still will be plenty of work to do - maintenance, for instance. But probably not enough for everyone . That "a median house still costs 4x yearly median salary" means exactly nothing. The size of median salary is market driven, and the price of housing reflects the games banks and housing developers are playing, and thus can be arbitrarily high.

The house price is set by what buyer's are willing to pay for them. This is taking into account that in median, 4 years of that person's work-output will be required to purchase a house.

In which country is that? Last time I checked, the common way for financing a house purchase in the entire Western world is through a mortgage loan, which makes the house price tied to the size of the loan a bank is willing to give to an average person.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#100

Post by stepvhen »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #78
stepvhen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion itself does a lot of hand waving, and people tend to talk about the "existential threat" of AI with a lot of hand waving. Its an easy comparison to make. Also, a claim, by itself, can't be a religion. It would need people to attach to it with a certain fervor. >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. AI, by itself, cannot in…

There's a pretty cool story about underestimating bit-flipping :). http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/ Besides, just look at us, humans. Who would ever build an AI and then keep it away from any means of communication? That wouldn't be a very useful AI. If one wants that, one can pick a rock and imagine it has a mind. Or talk to a cat.

That was a fun read.
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