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The Great A.I. Awakening

nytimes.com

11–20 of 147 posts

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#11
post #8

Sundar seems very confused here. The idea that we should invent AGI to make "personal digital assistants" is like Hogwarts students inventing time machines so they can take two classes at once. I mean, yes, it would technically enable you to do that, but it doesn't matter because at that point you have way, way bigger problems. If a fleet of alien spaceships arrived in the sky over Manhattan tomorrow, our first react…

By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, causing the runway effect that leads to superintelligence. The idea of making "personal digital assistants" is humans thinking they can tame a god to be a servant. Taming a superintelligence would be like a dog taming human civilization, and perhaps the gap between man and ASI is larger than the gap between dog and man.

>By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements,

I see no reason that's necessarily true. I'm a general intelligence, and I can't make myself smarter.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, causing the runway effect that leads to superintelligence. The idea of making "personal digital assistants" is humans thinking they can tame a god to be a servant. Taming a superintelligence would be like a dog taming human civilization, and perhaps the gap between man and ASI is larger than the gap between dog and man.

>By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, I see no reason that's necessarily true. I'm a general intelligence, and I can't make myself smarter.

You are a general intelligence ,but do you know why you are intelligent ?.Since you cant explain your own intelligence you cant improve on it, no such issues for AI unless its built using NN.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, causing the runway effect that leads to superintelligence. The idea of making "personal digital assistants" is humans thinking they can tame a god to be a servant. Taming a superintelligence would be like a dog taming human civilization, and perhaps the gap between man and ASI is larger than the gap between dog and man.

>By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, I see no reason that's necessarily true. I'm a general intelligence, and I can't make myself smarter.

But you can build something smarter than yourself (or at least that's what we think we can do)... So this new entity, smarter than us, might be even better at building something smarter than itself...

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#14
post #8

Sundar seems very confused here. The idea that we should invent AGI to make "personal digital assistants" is like Hogwarts students inventing time machines so they can take two classes at once. I mean, yes, it would technically enable you to do that, but it doesn't matter because at that point you have way, way bigger problems. If a fleet of alien spaceships arrived in the sky over Manhattan tomorrow, our first react…

By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, causing the runway effect that leads to superintelligence. The idea of making "personal digital assistants" is humans thinking they can tame a god to be a servant. Taming a superintelligence would be like a dog taming human civilization, and perhaps the gap between man and ASI is larger than the gap between dog and man.

This already happens in the form of the employer-employee relationship.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, causing the runway effect that leads to superintelligence. The idea of making "personal digital assistants" is humans thinking they can tame a god to be a servant. Taming a superintelligence would be like a dog taming human civilization, and perhaps the gap between man and ASI is larger than the gap between dog and man.

>By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, I see no reason that's necessarily true. I'm a general intelligence, and I can't make myself smarter.

You're an iteration of an AGI system that has been improving itself for hundreds of millions of years. The rate at which biological AGIs improve over time is very slow, but it's not like nature has any good reason to be in a hurry.

But interesting things happen when you network billions of biological AGIs together, it leads to all sorts of emergent phenomenon, and now the biological AGIs are working on these newfangled mechanical AGIs, which, while still crude, aren't bound by the same constraints, they can iterate much faster. Biological AGIs have crippling bandwidth/memory issues which aren't really a problem at all for their mechanical counterparts. These mechanical AGIs, I think they'll go places.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#16

A lot of AI is about vector space these days. https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp-tutorial/forums/t/1234... "That interim also saw dedicated attempts on the part of Google’s competitors to catch up. (As Le told me about his close collaboration with Tomas Mikolov, he kept repeating Mikolov’s name over and over, in an incantatory way that sounded poignant." "Just as the chip-design process was nearly complete, Le and…

but it turns out you can represent a language pretty well in a mere thousand or so dimensions

That makes sense, considering that Basic English has only a thousand words yet can express most concepts with enough words.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, causing the runway effect that leads to superintelligence. The idea of making "personal digital assistants" is humans thinking they can tame a god to be a servant. Taming a superintelligence would be like a dog taming human civilization, and perhaps the gap between man and ASI is larger than the gap between dog and man.

>By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, I see no reason that's necessarily true. I'm a general intelligence, and I can't make myself smarter.

Even if we discarded ethics about eugenics and human genome manipulation the iteration cycles for wetware are still a lot longer than they are for silicon.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, causing the runway effect that leads to superintelligence. The idea of making "personal digital assistants" is humans thinking they can tame a god to be a servant. Taming a superintelligence would be like a dog taming human civilization, and perhaps the gap between man and ASI is larger than the gap between dog and man.

>By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, I see no reason that's necessarily true. I'm a general intelligence, and I can't make myself smarter.

Singularity-style outcomes do seem unlikely, in the same way a lot of exponential threats stop being scary if they turned out to be logistic curves.

That said, a key counter to the idea is that humans possesses very limited real control over how they are manufactured. Even if you had a solid idea how to make yourself smarter, it seems likely you wouldn't have the tools and potential to implement that idea in practice. Humans don't even control what their own minds respond to positively or negatively.

Once something like a designed computer chip is involved, that changes. The intelligence can act on itself more readily and doesn't have millenia of calorie-conserving optimisations built in.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#19
post #8

Sundar seems very confused here. The idea that we should invent AGI to make "personal digital assistants" is like Hogwarts students inventing time machines so they can take two classes at once. I mean, yes, it would technically enable you to do that, but it doesn't matter because at that point you have way, way bigger problems. If a fleet of alien spaceships arrived in the sky over Manhattan tomorrow, our first react…

By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, causing the runway effect that leads to superintelligence. The idea of making "personal digital assistants" is humans thinking they can tame a god to be a servant. Taming a superintelligence would be like a dog taming human civilization, and perhaps the gap between man and ASI is larger than the gap between dog and man.

I'm not certain this would be true. It reminds me of the industrial revolution, when people we convinced that machines could bootstrap themselves into contraptions that could move mountains. But there are physical constraints preventing that.

I don't know what the future holds, but the fact that undecidable problems always seem to involve Turing Machines either designing or inspecting other Turing machines makes me suspect that singularity won't be the explosion some expect.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#20
post #8

Sundar seems very confused here. The idea that we should invent AGI to make "personal digital assistants" is like Hogwarts students inventing time machines so they can take two classes at once. I mean, yes, it would technically enable you to do that, but it doesn't matter because at that point you have way, way bigger problems. If a fleet of alien spaceships arrived in the sky over Manhattan tomorrow, our first react…

The tricky part is to prevent AGI from developing goals of its own. You want it omnipresent and allknowing but dormant, and only react to inputs from the user.

But such thing cannot be tamed. As the AGI is democratized, it's bound to happen that someone somewhere will make it evolve goals.

The future of the human kind will be decided in a great measure by what kind of goals such an AGI will set first.

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