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The Great A.I. Awakening

nytimes.com

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Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#21

Post by nopinsight »

apsec112 wrote: 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…

This is why I doubt if efforts like OpenAI will ultimately turn out to be beneficial or catastrophic. I understand their purpose of democratizing the power and benefits of AI technology broadly. However, if their platform can provide a critical component or developmental path to AGI in the future, the unrestrained distribution of the technology is similar to spreading the blueprint of nuclear warheads. It could result in an equivalent of nuclear arms race, but worse--because a small team of capable programmers of any rogue organizations could come up with new improvements.

It is true that we are probably quite far from AGI, but nobody really knows how far. We could be closer than most experts think. Few experts in 2006 would expect deep neural networks to beat a Go champion or be able to describe visual scenes in natural language sentences within a decade. Unexpected things happen, and we are much further behind in terms of preventive technology like Friendly AI. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligen...)

Given the existential risks involved, I would propose more careful handling of the technology. (I agree that opening up most other technologies is usually a positive thing.)

See "Superintelligence" for comprehensive arguments against unfettered development of AGI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang...

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#22

Post by snovv_crash »

YZF wrote: post #13
ClassyJacket wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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...

Or maybe it would be smart enough not to.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#24

Post by aedron »

And the pattern of overselling A.I. continues. What we have accomplished in this generation is pretty good pattern recognition. Nice, but limited in its usefulness to obvious applications, like translation and image and audio classification. Go and Chess games are rule-constrained enough to be reducible to patterns, so it works for them too, giving a false impression of 'general AI'.

What's worse is that this approach seems to be a dead end, in the sense that it is only useful for pattern recognition, which can substitute for decision making only for extremely simple processes (absent a quantum leap in a range of technologies), and even then those kinds of applications are notoriously difficult to develop and maintain.

I look forward to the enormous benefits we will get from machine learning, as we are already seeing, but again, overselling it won't do us any good.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#25

Post by smhost »

Fricken wrote: post #15
ClassyJacket wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 newfangl…

That gives me some really strong existential heebie jeebies. I mean, what then even is our value? Why exist at all, at that point? I don't know about other people, but I get my sense of purpose in believing that we're the captains of this Spaceship Earth, and that we're making progress towards something significant. I don't know what that something is, but I have a vague idea, and at the very least we seem to be the best that we've got. I don't know. Maybe I'm thinking about all of this wrong. God, why am I so damn confused all the time? Fuck.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#26

Post by jacobush »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #3
aaron-lebo wrote: post #2

The use of Hemingway as an example is unfortunate. Something less literary would be a better example maybe?: Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude. Near the top of the west there is a dry and frozen dead body of leopard. No one has ever explained what leopard wanted at that altitude. One of those is pretty sti…

I just hope that we do see multiple such platforms of AI prevailing in the long term. Fragmentation in AI platform would ensure flexibility and bit of privacy protection on consumer side and eventually these competitors can keep each other in check. for example, Amazon echo vs Google home. If Google starts being very creepy in terms of accessing my data to serve me ads, I would just switch to Echo or some other platf…

Starts being... ? 1999 called

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#27

Post by simonh »

smhost wrote: post #25
Fricken wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 newfangl…

That gives me some really strong existential heebie jeebies. I mean, what then even is our value? Why exist at all, at that point? I don't know about other people, but I get my sense of purpose in believing that we're the captains of this Spaceship Earth, and that we're making progress towards something significant. I don't know what that something is, but I have a vague idea, and at the very least we seem to be the…

> God, why am I so damn confused all the time?

You and me both. I'm afraid it's because we're only just barely sentient. If you think about it, in evolutionary terms we literally only just now managed to build a technological society because we only just got smart enough to do it. We are by definition at the absolute minimum level of intelligence that's able to do that, otherwise we'd have done it sooner. We've had plenty of time.

The human brain is a botch job of highly optimizes special-function systems that has developed just enough sophistication to manage basic levels of abstract thought. That's why it takes months of training and practice to teach us how to reliably perform even the simplest mathematical tasks such as multiplication or division.

We've spent thousands of years congratulating ourselves on how clever we are compared to animals and how we're the ultimate product of the natural world. "I think, therefore I am" is held up as an amazing deep insight that's one of the pinnacles of our philosophical achievement. Future AIs will laugh their virtual asses off. So it's not just you, it's all of us. At least you're aware of it.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#28

Post by [deleted] »

Fricken wrote: post #15
ClassyJacket wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 newfangl…

[deleted]

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#29

Post by simonh »

snovv_crash wrote: post #22
YZF wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Or maybe it would be smart enough not to.

Good point, I don't think I've seen that suggested before. However I think motivation is a big issue. Our instincts and emotions are what drive us far more than rationality. If we decide to build an AI smarter than us and program it to really, really want to design an even smarter AI then it might essentially have no choice.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#30

Post by delegate »

Honest question - have you read this entire article ?

...

I'm sure it's written by a smart and talented journalist - but it's just too long. I cannot possibly allocate so much of my time to read a single news article!

I know it's kind of my problem, but I'm sure lots of others are just like me - it's just the nature of our tech-provoked ADD.

I skimmed through it all right, but I didn't get too much out of that. If I need to go deep, I grab a book!

Good journalism doesn't get through, because it asks too much attention of its (busy) readers.

A TLDR version of good articles is a must. That's a good problem for AI isn't it ? For the moment, though - I'm sure the authors themselves could make a nice summary readable in maybe 3-5 minutes.

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