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The Great A.I. Awakening

nytimes.com

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Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#31

Post by ghgr »

delegate wrote: post #30

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…

I hear you. I guess long form journalism has its place, but for me it's in the library next to the novels. When reading news I want to go straight to the point. In fact, I'd pay for an API that returns an array of news, and for each one the Five Ws (and 1H) [1] in a machine readable format, at most two sentences long.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#32

Post by varjag »

BeingIncubated wrote: post #9
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…

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.

So far there is no reason to think that superintelligence (i.e. not just cheap, abundant general human-level intelligence) is possible at all. It has to be qualitatively superior.

I mean what superintelligence supposed to do? Solve the halting problem or do other plain impossible things? Chess computers can beat a human champion with sheer firepower, but they still can't do checkmate in one move.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#33

Post by ilarum »

delegate wrote: post #30

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…

There are services like http://smmry.com/about which offer an API. Some sub-reddits I frequent already have bots that auto invoke this API and post the TLDR as a comment on every original post, and it seems to work acceptably well.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#34

Post by zalq »

delegate wrote: post #30

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…

Hi, I can recommend using the Chrome extension 'Reedy' which allows you to blast through this at 800-1200 words/minute. You can start slower and gradually increase the speed, but once you get the hang of it, an article like this takes no more than what an ordinary article would have taken to read normally.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#35

Post by aedron »

delegate wrote: post #30

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…

The article was so good that I read it through to the end, but it was definitely a bit long to conveniently fit into my normal work/non-work flow.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#36

Post by rikibro »

simonh wrote: post #27
smhost wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Our brain has been this capable for a long time. It just happens we're standing on the sholder of giants.

It takes time to build the tools to do what humankind can do now.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#37

Post by adriand »

delegate wrote: post #30

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…

I read the whole article, but I didn't read it all at once. It was interesting enough that after I'd read the first half, I kept thinking about it, and made sure I finished it the next day.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#38

Post by notzorbo3 »

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…

What's our value now, without AGI? I'm personally glad I don't get my sense of purpose from being the captains of this Spacehip Earth, cause we're doing a horrible job at it. And that will never change through a conscience choice from us because the sacrifices we'd have to make are just too big.

I've personally never believed that we, as a collective, have a purpose or even value. There isn't a point to our existence. For me, it's hedonism and altruism all the way.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#39

Post by Quarrelsome »

BeingIncubated wrote: post #9
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…

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.

IF AGI is developed.

Lets not take is as a certainty. This problem might be beyond our capabilities. Its kinda like stating: When we invent warp-drive. We don't have a proof for warp-drives same as we don't have a proof for building AGI.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#40

Post by taneq »

simonh wrote: post #29
snovv_crash wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Good point, I don't think I've seen that suggested before.

A fictional example, but Alastair Reynolds' "Inhibitors" are a type/race of machines which, while intelligent, were specifically designed to limit their own degree of sentience.

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