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The Great A.I. Awakening

nytimes.com

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Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#51

Post by pixl97 »

varjag wrote: post #32
BeingIncubated wrote: post #9

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.

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.

>I mean what superintelligence supposed to do?

Compared to every other life form on Earth you are super intelligence. This super intelligence thing has already happened once. Of course this spread of super intelligence has wiped out most large mammals on this planet, 10s of thousands of other species, most of the fish in the ocean, and is adding gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere.

You can't beat chess in one move because mathematics does not allow it. Unless this said ASI develops bending 4D spacetime (in which you could beat chess in one move with some new rules) then the game simply does not have a piece that moves that way. That said ASI can be just a little smarter than us, and put us to extinction like we did with the Neanderthals.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#52

Post by tux1968 »

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…

There's a difference between knowledge and intelligence.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#53

Post by pixl97 »

hahajk wrote: post #19
BeingIncubated wrote: post #9

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.

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 s…

>when people we convinced that machines could bootstrap themselves into contraptions that could move mountains.

With our modern construction equipment, we do move mountains.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#54

Post by golergka »

zalq wrote: post #34
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.

If your bottleneck in reading text is in scanning words from the screen, then you either don't reflect on what you read or you're reading boring things.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#55

Post by varjag »

pixl97 wrote: post #51
varjag wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>I mean what superintelligence supposed to do? Compared to every other life form on Earth you are super intelligence . This super intelligence thing has already happened once. Of course this spread of super intelligence has wiped out most large mammals on this planet, 10s of thousands of other species, most of the fish in the ocean, and is adding gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere. You can't beat chess in one move…

> Compared to every other life form on Earth you are super intelligence. This super intelligence thing has already happened once.

You extrapolate the trend from one data point. There is no indication that we have some matyoshka type hierarchy of intelligence. It could well be binary, either intelligent or not. No reason so far to think otherwise.

> You can't beat chess in one move because mathematics does not allow it.

So what superintelligence can do that "ordinary" intelligence in right quantities couldn't? Something specific beyond theoretical grasp of "just" intelligent machine?

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#56

Post by eli_gottlieb »

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…

The confusion comes from thinking that "purpose" or "value" or "meaning" are some kind of existential syrup that gets poured onto you from a great cosmic syrup-bottle, rather than being an inherent part of your existence as a sentient, sapient life-form.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#57

Post by eli_gottlieb »

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…

>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.

This is not even a very popular paradigm for neuroscience these days. Look up "predictive processing" for something more recent.

>"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.

I already laugh my fleshy ass off at that one.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#58

Post by gaius »

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…

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.

I don't think that's true - you could get a bunch of contemporary humans and drop them on a pre-industrialized planet and tell them to bootstrap a technological civilization yet they'd probably all have died of old age before scratching the surface. Locating the raw materials and iteratively building more and more sophisticated artefacts simply takes time, no matter how smart you potentially are.

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