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The Last Invention of Man

nautil.us

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Re: The Last Invention of Man

#51

Post by 21 »

dqpb wrote: post #47

When they shifted their focus toward products that they could develop and sell, computer games first seemed the obvious top choice. Prometheus could rapidly become extremely skilled at designing appealing games, easily handling the coding, graphic design, ray tracing of images, and all other tasks needed to produce a final ready-to-ship product. Moreover, after digesting all the web’s data on people’s preferences, it…

That's one theorized explanation for the Fermi paradox, that highly advanced civilizations upload into their Matrix where they live a life of bliss.

I wondered many times if an AI could invent something more viral than "cats", something maybe so viral that it causes your mind to melt (ie, you go insane by the cuteness or whatever)

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#52

Post by gonehome »

amasad wrote: post #20

A couple of weeks ago I went to see Max Tegmark (the author of this piece) speak about his new book "Life 3.0: being human in the age of artificial intelligence" in San Francisco and saw the same speculative AI intelligence explosion crap we're seeing all over the place. I was disappointed because I'm a fan of Max's work as a scientist, his "Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality" book…

I'm about half way through his book and it's pretty good - there's this story in the beginning, but the rest of the book is pretty grounded (as opposed to Superintelligence where I found the arguments in the first couple of chapters pretty weak and disappointing).

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#54

Post by frankhorrigan »

21 wrote: post #51
dqpb wrote: post #47

When they shifted their focus toward products that they could develop and sell, computer games first seemed the obvious top choice. Prometheus could rapidly become extremely skilled at designing appealing games, easily handling the coding, graphic design, ray tracing of images, and all other tasks needed to produce a final ready-to-ship product. Moreover, after digesting all the web’s data on people’s preferences, it…

That's one theorized explanation for the Fermi paradox, that highly advanced civilizations upload into their Matrix where they live a life of bliss. I wondered many times if an AI could invent something more viral than "cats", something maybe so viral that it causes your mind to melt (ie, you go insane by the cuteness or whatever)

Infinite Jest deals with this. Though I feel like it's a spoiler to say any more than that.

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#55

Post by apsec112 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #30
andrewla wrote: post #24

I think it’s a little absurd that we would make the leap to machine super-intelligence without going through the step of machine low or medium intelligence. If I could write, I’d write a companion story to this called “Omega-1, the artificial super intelligence that wasn’t really that good at things”. They try to have it write mini-AIs to solve MT problems, but it’s slow and inaccurate. They have it write and produce…

Yeah. Maciej wrote a pretty good piece rebutting AI alarmism and kind of alludes to that as one of several points. http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm > With no way to define intelligence (except just pointing to ourselves), we don't even know if it's a quantity that can be maximized. For all we know, human-level intelligence could be a tradeoff. Maybe any entity significantly smarter than a human being…

Rebuttal to that essay by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (AI safety group):

https://intelligence.org/2017/01/13/response-to-ceglowski-on...

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#56

Post by AgentME »

minikites wrote: post #13

I agree more with this essay: http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm >What it really is is a form of religion. People have called a belief in a technological Singularity the "nerd Apocalypse", and it's true. > >It's a clever hack, because instead of believing in God at the outset, you imagine yourself building an entity that is functionally identical with God. This way even committed atheists can rationaliz…

I feel like you could substitute AI for any existential threat in that to try to make people look silly.

"Climate change ... really is a form of religion" ... add some analogies to Catholic punishment fantasies and doomsday prophecies to make it sound just like the type of thing humans have been talking about forever, criticize scientists for guilting people into giving them money to study their apocalypse fantasy, etc.

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#57

Post by apsec112 »

markan wrote: post #25
amasad wrote: post #20

A couple of weeks ago I went to see Max Tegmark (the author of this piece) speak about his new book "Life 3.0: being human in the age of artificial intelligence" in San Francisco and saw the same speculative AI intelligence explosion crap we're seeing all over the place. I was disappointed because I'm a fan of Max's work as a scientist, his "Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality" book…

Yes, this is the problem with AI risk---there's a community pushing hard to gather resources to the cause, but little or no scientific work to be done. This is a rather pathological situation---among other things, the AI risk community makes their own cause look silly, and they promote an unduly negative vision of AGI. I've written more about this here: http://www.basicai.org/blog/ai-risk-2017-08-08.html . On a posit…

"but little or no scientific work to be done."

Quite a lot has been written about what scientific work needs to be done. These papers try to summarize possible research directions:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06565.pdf

https://intelligence.org/files/TechnicalAgenda.pdf

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#58

Post by apsec112 »

komali2 wrote: post #35
satori99 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...as Roko's basilisk. (Apologies if you hadn't heard of it before now)

Oh for fuck's sake, I had forgotten about this. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk

RationalWiki, and in particular this article, should not be taken as accurate. Here is one rebuttal: https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/2myg86/xkcd_1450_aibo...

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#59

Post by crooked-v »

21 wrote: post #51
dqpb wrote: post #47

When they shifted their focus toward products that they could develop and sell, computer games first seemed the obvious top choice. Prometheus could rapidly become extremely skilled at designing appealing games, easily handling the coding, graphic design, ray tracing of images, and all other tasks needed to produce a final ready-to-ship product. Moreover, after digesting all the web’s data on people’s preferences, it…

That's one theorized explanation for the Fermi paradox, that highly advanced civilizations upload into their Matrix where they live a life of bliss. I wondered many times if an AI could invent something more viral than "cats", something maybe so viral that it causes your mind to melt (ie, you go insane by the cuteness or whatever)

Well, there are any number of real-life historical cases of mass hysteria (in the literal sense), though we still don't reliably know what caused or causes the most absurd examples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Plague_of_1518

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#60

Post by paganel »

ahussain wrote: post #4

I feel like many of these speculative AI pieces seem to ignore that for every incredible breakthrough, there is a large amount of work which is required to build the scaffolding which allows the breakthrough to have real impact in the world. Even if the AI solves "Fermat's Last Theorem" type problems quickly, it seems to me that the vast majority of problems it faces will be "misplaced the database keys", "can't sche…

> Even if the AI solves "Fermat's Last Theorem" type problems quickly,

It won't. This latest fad with AI becoming self-aware reminds me of how obsessed people were about finding the philosopher's stone back in the 18th century. It didn't happen for alchemy (we got chemistry instead, which is nice), it won't happen for AI (we'll probably get something like chemistry instead, which will be nice, but we won't get any artificial "sentient" entity).

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