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The Great A.I. Awakening

nytimes.com

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Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#61

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

nopinsight wrote: post #21
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 resul…

>> the unrestrained distribution of the technology is similar to spreading the blueprint of nuclear warheads.

There's an episode of Pinky and the Brain where Brain invents a magnification ray and gigantises Pinky and himself - so they're now giant rats [1]. They walk about some human metropolis, looming larger than skyscrapers and terrorising everyone. To cut the story short, Pinky happens and eventually the gun shoots everything in the world.

... so Pinky and the Brain are now normal-sized mice again. Or, well, they're giant mice, but everything in the world is also giant, so they're small.

I think of that episode during discussions of the dangers of AGI and how "democratizing" it will eliminate those dangers. The problem is that AGI, like nuclear weapons, is not an equalizing force only- it is also a very destructive force, and so there is the danger that any loon with access to it could blow us all to kingdom come (with nuclear weapons, for sure; with AGI, perhaps).

On the other hand, when nuclear weapons, or AGI, giant rays etc are not democratized we have the situation we're in today: only a few entities have access to them and they basically have free (military) reign... and there is still the danger that some loon might get to a position of power were they can push a button and -blamo.

Which is why people are really worried about this sort of thing. Because once certain discoveries are made, there's no going back and at the same time the road ahead is full of danger.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fPcqu5aMyw

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#62

Post by 2468ben »

nopinsight wrote: post #21
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 resul…

I did some heavy research in various forms of machine learning and AI in grad school 10 years ago, and the more experiments and tools I created, the more I saw this "digital nuclear arms race" and didn't want to be part of it.

We don't know how many other people aren't working on this because of moral/ethical reasons. Of course, 99.9% of the world could be wary of genetic engineering, but that remaining 0.01% is enough to pursue research, get VC investment and drag the rest of us into that uncertain future.

To continue the nuclear analogy, the Manhattan project was probably the most impressive engineering program in the history of the world, but it was driven by survival in a World War. They didn't build and drop the atomic bombs for fun. You'd think that working on a limitless virtual brain should have similarly serious motivations, not just the examples of "how do I drive to X but also shop for Y?" or "is that a monkey?".

I know there are much grander societal goals with A.I. and the world really could become a "better place", but please sell society those goals, not the usual first-world problems. We already have enough people trying to destroy the world without these extra tools.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#63

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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…

>> these newfangled mechanical AGIs, which, while still crude, aren't bound by the same constraints, they can iterate much faster.

When has an AI shown capability of "iterating" in this way? We've had all sorts of different AI systems for quite a long time now, and I've never heard of a machine anywhere that has actually made itself smarter, without any human involvement.

The closest to that sort of thing anyone's ever got is AI in the line of Tesauro's TD-gammon [1] (a line that yielded AlphaGo). This type of AI has indeed beaten humans at their own games, time and time again, but (a) we're talking about board games, not the real world and (b) no such system has ever learned to do anything else besides play a very specific board game.

Take AlphaGo- it can beat the best human players, but it can't tie its own shoelaces. It can't even tell you what "shoelaces" are or what "itself" is.

How are we going to go from artificial-savant sort of systems like that to a generalised intelligence?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#64

Post by simonh »

rikibro wrote: post #36
simonh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It takes extremely long periods of time for human level intelligences to do that. This is precisely my point.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#65

Post by ythn »

aedron wrote: post #24

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 approac…

People like believing in science fiction. If it makes them feel better, let them.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#66

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

pixl97 wrote: post #53
hahajk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

>> With our modern construction equipment, we do move mountains.

We do- using machines; not machines themselves.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#67

Post by simonh »

tux1968 wrote: post #52
simonh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I understand that, but e.g. we've had the theory of Evolution and the Scientific Method for hundreds of years. They are fantastically powerful cognitive tools that have transformed our fortunes and the face of our planet. Yes they are still extremely politicized and controversial. Billions of people question their validity in the face of extraordinary quantities of evidence being rubbed in their faces every single day.

I'm honestly not trying to make some partisan, elitist point about that. I'm sorry if anyone's offended, but there it is. Let's be fair and say many of those people have more pressing concerns to deal with on a day to day basis like making a living, maintaining social relationships and solving pressing problems in their lives. But that's the point. Actually thinking these things through takes a lot of effort which many human beings don't do. It's hard for us. There are many, many things about the world that aren't really very complicated, but I just don't understand because it takes too much time and effort and I can't work it out for myself. Because I'm a barely evolved ape. It's just a fact.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#68

Post by psyc »

varjag wrote: post #55
pixl97 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 i…

> So what superintelligence can do that "ordinary" intelligence in right quantities couldn't?

Conceive of answers to this question that we can't. Do you really believe the human imagination captures all of possibility? Why?

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#69

Post by vanderZwan »

ythn wrote: post #65
aedron wrote: post #24

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 approac…

People like believing in science fiction. If it makes them feel better, let them.

The problem is when faulty beliefs lead to faulty expectations, or worse: faulty policies.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#70

Post by simonh »

gaius wrote: post #58
simonh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 surfac

You're not selling me on the idea that these people are particularly bright, on a cosmic scale.

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