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Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

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Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#371

Post by snowwrestler »

lucker wrote: post #253
JamilD wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The roundworm (c. elegans) only has 302 neurons, and about 7,000 synapses, but is capable of social behavior, movement, and reproduction. The entire connectome has been mapped, and we understand how many of these behaviors work without having to resort to additional ontological entities like your "third way". If this complex behavior can be explained using only 302 neurons, I have no doubt that the complexity of huma…

Behavior? Yes. Consciousness? Maybe not. As far as I know, no-one has ever come up with an explanation of how matter can give rise to consciousness. Obviously consciousness is affected by changes in matter — if I take certain drugs, I feel different, etc. — but there is no explanation at all for what mechanisms may give rise to consciousness in the first place, and the very idea of the material giving rise to conscio…

This line of thinking begs the question of whether consciousness is some special thing in nature. You only have to look for an explanation if you think there is something to explain.

If I start from the assumption that I am mistaken about what I think consciousness is--that maybe it doesn't exist at all the way I think it does--then I don't have to worry about how matter gives rise to it. I can focus instead on trying to understand where my definition went wrong.

Humans have never lacked for opinions or explanations about what natural things are, or how they got that way. But in the practice of science, these must yield before empirical evidence.

As you note, there is a huge amount of evidence that consciousness is physical. But there is no objective evidence that I experience consciousness as you define it. You just have to take my word for it--and so do I. But maybe I'm wrong.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#372

Post by Ygg2 »

witty_username wrote: post #332
alexbecker wrote: post #51

While I agree with Maciej's central point, I think the inside arguments he presents are pretty weak. I think that AI risk is not a pressing concern even if you grant the AI risk crowd's assumptions. Elided from https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#against-ai-risk : The real AI risk isn't an all-powerful savant which misinterprets a command to "make everyone on Earth happy" and destroys the Earth. It's a military AI that…

Global income inequality has been decreasing. http://voxeu.org/article/parametric-estimations-world-distri...

That's inequality between states. Inequality within states hasn't decreased.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#373

Post by visarga »

Animats wrote: post #339

Nearer term risks: - AI as management. Already, there is at least one hedge fund with an AI on the board, with a vote on investments.[1] At the bottom end, there are systems which act as low-level managers and order people around. That's how Uber works. A fundamental problem with management is that communication is slow and managers are bandwidth-limited. Computers don't have that problem. Even a mediocre AI as a man…

> The humans are just hands.

Not for long. Robots will be cheaper soon.

> All the thinking is done by computers.

It's hard for humans to operate on more than 7 objects at the same time - a limitation of working memory. So naturally there are simple management and planning tasks that benefit from computers ability to track more objects.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#374

Post by bambax »

apsec112 wrote: post #53

"I live in California, which has the highest poverty rate in the United States, even though it's home to Silicon Valley. I see my rich industry doing nothing to improve the lives of everyday people and indigent people around us." This is trivially false. Over a hundred billionaires have now pledged to donate the majority of their wealth, and the list includes many tech people like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuck…

How does a pledge about something you may or may not do in the future helps poor people today? How does "the majority of their wealth" address income inequality? Will said billionaires give away so much that they cease to be billionaires or even millionaires?

And how are the actions of a few billionaires relevant to what the industry does as a whole? Does Google, Facebook, or, God forbid, Uber, address the problems of poverty and inequality (which are separate problems) as a company?

To a very large extent, charity is irrelevant; charity is a way of buying oneself a conscience without actually changing anything in the world; without even addressing the problems or thinking about them.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#375

Post by peterwoo »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #322
beloch wrote: post #264

It's one thing to worry about AI's taking over the world someday . It's quite another matter entirely to think about current military automation of WMD deployment. Everyone's probably seen Dr. Strangelove at some point in time. If you haven't , stop reading immediately and go watch it. You will not regret this. Those who have watched it are familiar with a contrived, hilarious, but mostly plausible, scheme by which h…

Nuclear strike isn't particularly bad. Hiroshima + Nagasaki was 200k casualties or so. That many people are killed every year by sugar. Traffic kills over a million. Any kind of worrying about theoretical future death is silly, especially accidental death like the kind you are asking us to devote resources to. Why should I care about theoretical future death when there is real, actual death happening all around me? H…

You should care about "theoretical" future death because, via the inexorable passage of time, the future becomes the present. At which time you have "actual" death happening all around you.

Let's try and stop catastrophic climate change, diabetes, and traffic/pollution related deaths, and also allow some people to worry about nuclear holocaust as well.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#376

Post by fapjacks »

ahh wrote: post #315
idlewords wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$3K per capita would be an enormous economic stimulus. Or give public schools $3K per student, and you'll see huge changes. It's a lot of money.

> Or give public schools $3K per student, > and you'll see huge changes. It's a lot of money. Yes, you'll see them spend $3K more per student. You won't actually see any improvements in the students, though. http://washington.cbslocal.com/2014/04/07/study-no-link-betw... The public schools have many problems; lack of money is not one of them. Having any idea what to do with it is.

Well, this is kind of a red herring, because it's widely known that schools of all types have been drastically increasing their administrative bodies, ballooning costs without actually doing anything for the students with that extra administration. Plus also it's the CATO Institute.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#377

Post by wruza »

nindalf wrote: post #272
zdean wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're largely limited by the greater public's threshold for acceptable casualties of their own soldiers during war. What the AI'ing of war does is to remove that natural limit and raise the amount of death and destruction a military can inflict without pushback from the general population.

I think you're _exactly right_. This is precisely the reason the Iraq and Afghanistan wars proved too costly to prosecute was that it proved too costly in men and materials. The logistics and cost of procuring and moving weapons, vehicles, living supplies etc was high, but manageable. The cost of each body bag which had to be explained to the public was not. Which is why President Obama pivoted to a drone war in area…

To make big wars like that, you have to have many great robots, not AIs. If ground robots were great at war in a wide sense, we could use it today via remote control / VR interface.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#378

Post by visarga »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #225
kazagistar wrote: post #189

They always miss a critical and subtle assumption: that intelligence scales equal to or faster then the computational complexity of improving that intelligence. This is the one assumption I most skeptical of. In my experience, each time you make a system more clever, you also make it MUCH more complex. Maybe there is not hard limit on intelligence, but maybe each generation of improved intelligence actually takes lon…

I think the issue is that once do manage to build an AI that matches human capabilities in every domain, it will be trivial to exceed human capabilities. Logic gates can switch millions of times faster than neurons can pulse. The speed of digital signal also means that artificial brains won't be size-limited by signal latency in the same way that human brains are. We will be able to scale them up, optimize the hardwa…

> it will be trivial to exceed human capabilities

You're equalling human time to AI/computer time. A one day old neural net has already experienced multiple lifetimes worth of images before it is able to beat you at image recognition. It's not trivial, but we just gloss over the extremely complex training phase because it runs on a different clock speed than us.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#379

Post by nikolaplejic »

contingencies wrote: post #340

Tangent: What's the tech scene like in Zagreb?

It's pretty good.

There are several hackerspaces (https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Zagreb - I'm partial to the one in Mama), and every now and then we'll gather around a "Nothing will happen" (http://www.nsnd.org/).

There's a vibrant meetup scene (well-covered by meetup.com), and WebCamp Zagreb (https://2016.webcampzg.org/) is the community conference that tries to gather different meetups & communities once a year.

Companies from abroad tend to open development offices here to exploit the cheaper workforce, especially since Croatia has joined the EU. There's also a number of local companies that are constantly hiring, resulting in a solid amount of hiring opportunities even for the part of the crowd that's a bit pickier.

People are leaving Croatia in general, though, and the tech community isn't immune to that. Lots of people moved to other EU countries, and although that's not unexpected at all, I believe it's left a dent within all of the above.

If you decide to visit, give me a shout. :)

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#380

Post by visarga »

beloch wrote: post #264

It's one thing to worry about AI's taking over the world someday . It's quite another matter entirely to think about current military automation of WMD deployment. Everyone's probably seen Dr. Strangelove at some point in time. If you haven't , stop reading immediately and go watch it. You will not regret this. Those who have watched it are familiar with a contrived, hilarious, but mostly plausible, scheme by which h…

> It's one thing to worry about AI's taking over the world someday .

I don't think AI taking over would necessarily be a bad thing. AI could maximize human potential much better than us. I'd rather let our technological offspring take on the role of protector - if it is really smarter than us. And of course it might kill us, but at least we would leave our more advanced children behind, we won't die for nothing.

This is a dilemma every parent has to grapple with - one day we will be weaker and less competent than our children. How will we fare under the care of our children. Will they abandon us, or love and cherish us? Should we avoid children altogether just to be safer? It's just that now humanity has a child, not individual humans.

My best guess is that AI would improve on biological intelligence and make it flourish, not suppress it, because biology is elegant and efficient. The end result would probably be a merge between computer and flesh, silicon and carbon. It won't be us vs them, but a wholly new kind of AI and humans.

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