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The Great A.I. Awakening

nytimes.com

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Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#81

Post by drvdevd »

2468ben wrote: post #62
nopinsight wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enou…

Perhaps the general availability of AGI is antithetical to the notion of information privacy in the 21st century. And not just for individuals either, but for governments as well. I can imagine that control will only be possible with very deep, widespread monitoring.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#82

Post by eli_gottlieb »

psyc wrote: post #68
varjag wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

>Do you really believe the human imagination captures all of possibility? Why?

Well yes, because we are already generally intelligent. The problem is not to have the right hypothesis space built into our wetware, but to locate correct (action-guidingly veridical) hypotheses within the existing hypothesis space based upon sense-data.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#83

Post by recycleme »

ryaniscool wrote: post #71
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…

Yup, in general, people predicting the imminent end of civilization from sentient A.I. lack technical understanding of how current A.I. works. Yes, it may put you out of a job one day but it won't actively seek to destroy the human race.

> Yes, it may put you out of a job one day

This would be a massive issue in the US with the current setup.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#84

Post by visarga »

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…

> 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 disagree. Chatbots and physical robots are where AGI is going. It's basically AI that is interacting with people and the world directly, not just computing away in a cluster, broken from reality.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#85

Post by visarga »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #61
nopinsight wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shoo…

We already have 7 billion of these H(uman)GI's walking around the world, with guns and dangerous tech. If the AGI will be much smarter, we shouldn't fear it the same we fear a dictator with nukes.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#86

Post by eli_gottlieb »

matt4077 wrote: post #7
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language is something we intuitively understand. To get weak AI's potential, consider how many less-intuitive problems might be similarly addressable.

Word embeddings are actually quite neat. You get to the poinr where you can do QUEEN - OLD - PRESIDENT = GIRL. Or take the new google translate as a very practical example. But yes, it's not quite the groundbreaking progress that has been achieved in image and video.

>You get to the poinr where you can do QUEEN - OLD - PRESIDENT = GIRL.

That's very nice, but it seems to miss the difference between a monarchy and a presidential republic.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#87

Post by chadgeidel »

Retric wrote: post #78
nopinsight wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Repeat after me, "AI is not Magic." A super intelligent AI does not change the laws of physics or even get to predict the weather two weeks from now. Sure, they could learn to be a good hacker but the worlds best hacker can't get into air gaped systems. More importantly, flawless security trumps hacking. If there is nothing to exploit there is no way in, which means a lone AI is much more powerful than lot's of AI's…

I'll admit this is purely hypothetical, but given that we know many people act on stuff they read on the Internet in an uncritical fashion - we cannot dismiss AI because it "doesn't have access to air gapped systems". A human has access to that system - a superintelligent AI could convince that human to "push the buttons".

I don't actually believe this will happen, but I'm not 100% confident it wouldn't. I don't know what a superintelligence would look like!

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#88

Post by torpfactory »

It occurs to me that the thing that will probably limit advancements in AGI will be the availability of data to feed these systems.

If you believe that Moore's law is only on life support and not totally dead, there will be more processing power to harness in the future. The number of researchers and investment are clearly growing very quickly. The models used can endlessly be improved.

But on the other hand there are so many things that even today just aren't captured as digital data. I work as a mechanical engineer and there are many nuances to mechanical design that appear nowhere in print (or youtube video, or blog post for that matter). Learning these things takes a complex combination of of sight touch and intuitive leap. Even unsupervised learning requires some input to feed the net. I just don't see where it will come from.

Anyone think I'm way out of line here?

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#89

Post by gallerdude »

torpfactory wrote: post #88

It occurs to me that the thing that will probably limit advancements in AGI will be the availability of data to feed these systems. If you believe that Moore's law is only on life support and not totally dead, there will be more processing power to harness in the future. The number of researchers and investment are clearly growing very quickly. The models used can endlessly be improved. But on the other hand there ar…

I think part of it is we're feeding in really small subsets of existing data. Someday we'll be able to feed in 4K 60FPS video, and it'll be able to learn patterns from that. Right now we can only access a subset of the existing data.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#90

Post by adjkant »

Retric wrote: post #78
nopinsight wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Repeat after me, "AI is not Magic." A super intelligent AI does not change the laws of physics or even get to predict the weather two weeks from now. Sure, they could learn to be a good hacker but the worlds best hacker can't get into air gaped systems. More importantly, flawless security trumps hacking. If there is nothing to exploit there is no way in, which means a lone AI is much more powerful than lot's of AI's…

There's a subtle argument here philosophically that I think is crucially tied to AI: determinism.

If the world is deterministic, a sufficiently powered and advanced AI with enough data could actually predict the weather, not just for two weeks, but for years. This also enables many other things viewed as magic.

This, of course, is incredibly far off. And I don't see a flaw in your point on flawless security. Though, I doubt we have many, if any, truly flawless security systems in existence. We just don't know their flaws, making them good enough for now. The world could get really interesting once AI's start programming and writing app security to protect itself from malicious AI's.

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