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The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

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Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#141

Post by amag »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #137
amag wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This all reminds me of the Y2K debacle. The world would end. Everything would stop. A common example given in the media (by "IT-professionals") was that all elevators would stop, I was always like: "WTF would an elevator check what date it is?"

Yeah. I remember Y2K and since I was already taking baby steps in programming back then, I was also perplexed as for why it would matter. 16 years later now, I see that about the only thing that could do some real damage was software in factories and stock exchanges breaking, and requiring downtime to fix. It would be that downtime that could do actual harm. Because I've now seen some code that runs in factories and.…

Yes, after seeing my fair share of code in different production systems, vehicles, med tech, etc, I'm amazed the world doesn't stop every day..

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#142

Post by tim333 »

IanDrake wrote: post #54
tim333 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3) Because it's a real possibility. What makes you think the otherwise very intelligent people are wrong? Maybe we should look to the stupid and to philosophers who don't understand computers for answers?

>What makes you think the otherwise very intelligent people are wrong? Mostly history. Specifically the history of such predictions made by smart people of their own time that never came to pass. I assure you, this has all been predicted before. AI taking over the earth is always a decade away. There are people who wear tin-foil hats and there are those that sell tin-foil hats. The former think they're saving the wor…

> AI taking over the earth is always a decade away.

I can't say I've seen that said. Any sources? Most predictions I've seen for AI surpassing human intelligence are for mid 21st century. The reasoning isn't rocket science. I wrote an essay about it for some school exam 34 years ago. If you discount the religious stuff then brains are biological computers of roughly fixed ability and regular computers are less able but get better each year. If so, they'll overtake and you can kind of graph it and make a rough estimate of when.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#143

Post by dennisgorelik »

vinceguidry wrote: post #27
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 separat…

It is surprising how even after 50+ years of Moore law technology is still does not cope with biology. Single cell carries about 700MB of genetic information in its nucleus.

https://medium.com/precision-medicine/how-big-is-the-human-g...

It is orders of magnitude more dense than current technology.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#144

Post by tim333 »

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…

Your link is about banks pretending the financial markets were OK before the 2008 crash which is really a different thing. Probably some people assign magical properties to AI but a lot of average people use things like Siri and Google Translate and have seen self driving cars on video and have a realistic idea of what they can and can't do.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#145

Post by ArkyBeagle »

IanDrake wrote: post #41
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…

The real question for me is: What is motivating otherwise very intelligent people to promote the idea that AI will take all our jobs and/or enslave us? Possible answers: 1) To prop up their investments in AI to get higher valuation. 2) To reach a political goal, such as basic income, which is often justified as necessary in a world where computers and robots take over the work force. 3) ?

It's just another apocalyptic narrative. They are apparently fun; you get yards of cognitive dissonance out of it.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#146

Post by ArkyBeagle »

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…

I find the failures to be sufficiently spectacular that they're entertaining.

But on a more serious note, as some of the higher-order techniques of applied mathematics become more and more popular and find expression in tools ordinary people can use, that's liable to change a lot of things. If we get better at characterizing systems and making model-controllers for them, this might just matter a lot.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#147

Post by pron »

tome wrote: post #119
pron wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we can predict more-or-less what will happen when a large meteorite hits earth, but we have no clue (other than sci-fi scenarios) for the nature of the threat AI poses, if only because we are so far away from understanding what AI is. We don't know if intelligence can be separated from agency and agenda, we don't know if intelligence can be separated from emotions, and we don't even know if intelligence can eve…

> the argument for "human intelligence at a higher speed" fails on several grounds I'd be interested if you said more about that.

Sure, but you need to understand that I'm not trying to predict what would necessarily happen, only to show how such a thing could possibly fail.

Think what could happen if your brain worked much faster. The world will mostly seem to slow down. A very conceivable outcome is one of boredom and possibly madness. You could perhaps multi-task and think of many different things, but we are generally terrible at multitasking, so we have no idea whether an intelligence even could multitask well.

Another problem is that we don't know anything about the information capacity of a mind. A faster mind of the same size could potentially have trouble dealing with all that extra information (again -- madness, maybe?)

One thing that hints at those capacity limits is the need for sleep. We don't know why, but some hypotheses say that it's necessary to do some "information cleanup" operations in the brain. It is possible that an AI would need to sleep, too. The AI may need to sleep a lot more to handle much more information.

It is therefore conceivable at least that a mind has to work at a speed that is commensurate with the speed of the world around it, and one that is appropriate for its capacity.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#148

Post by ArkyBeagle »

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…

Maintenance turns out to be a subdiscipline of logistics.

And if your instrumentation is good enough, it really becomes a subdisicipline of logistics, plus maybe the machines can begin to defend themselves from ordinary abuse.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#149

Post by ArkyBeagle »

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…

It is kind of religion - sort of classical American Yankee machine-worship. Even the Puritans/Pilgrims thought that organization - essentially a technology - could save them from the swamp gases of British life.

And I can't say it didn't work, but I'm probably a fanatic at this religion anyway.

I think Mark Twain more or less says this outright in "Connecticut Yankee." Speaking of Twain, he grievously injured himself financially chasing the dream of a typesetting machine far ahead of its time.

If it's religion, it's religion that (mostly) works.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#150

Post by kang »

Jach wrote: post #126
mcguire wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Certainly it isn't human level now, and it might take a decade or two to get there. " Any chance you could define "human level" in a way to make this a meaningful sentence? Twenty-five years after I was introduced to this problem and I still have never heard a better definition of "intelligence" than the Turing test, and it's a purely operational, "I'll know it when I see it" thing.

I.J. Good: "Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultrai…

> it would probably by default already be superior in some ways by virtue of its ability to not need sleep, do calculations efficiently and correctly, have access to perfect memory, and so on

Or maybe we'll learn that in order to be intelligent the machine needs to sleep, do mistakes, forget some things, etc.

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