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The Last Invention of Man

nautil.us

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Re: The Last Invention of Man

#81

Post by rictic »

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…

That's pretty likely, but not certain. Go-playing-AI went from "talentless amateur" to "better than every living human" in about a year.

Sometimes things progress rapidly, and some kinds of intelligence could recursively self-improve.

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#82

Post by zardo »

komali2 wrote: post #34
zardo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We probably would have found remnants of their society. Not sure if that's true. Especially if technological civilizations tend to be short lived. The Jurassic was a very^very long time ago. What's the state of the paleocryptoxenocheology field any good over view papers?

If organic matter can survive (bones and even sometimes tissues), we can be very assured that hardened structures would. Furthermore, there's nothing in the fossil record suggesting humans were around very^very long ago, so it'd have to have been a different intelligent species.

The grandparent post was about a hypothetical 100 million years dead civilization. Certainly not humans.

Wait it does say humans. Yeah, that's nuts. Intelligent civilized dinosaurs sure...

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#83

Post by SiVal »

apsec112 wrote: post #55
thaumaturgy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

My own rebuttal to that unimpressive Maciej argument is that he merely listed many ways in which something that seemed as though it ought to work didn't work out at all as expected, so we can safely assume that something as challenging as "superintelligence" won't work out either, and is therefore no danger.

But the argument that there are countless ways for plans to go awry and instead cause something unexpected to happen is hardly reassuring evidence that there is, therefore, "nothing to worry about".

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#84

Post by perl4ever »

felipemnoa wrote: post #80
thaumaturgy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>>> 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 would be crippled by existential despair, or spend all its time in Buddha-like contemplation. The only intelligence that I believe is important is problem solving…

Feelings regulate actions. People don't blindly follow rules that would lead to disaster because of more fundamental regulatory mechanisms such as feelings. In order to make an AI that is as flexible as a smart human, it can't be brittle, and therefore will need ways to break out of logical traps. That is what a general problem solver must be like, inherently.

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#85

Post by perl4ever »

kobeya wrote: post #73
sampo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe any entity significantly smarter than a human being would be crippled by existential despair This was addressed in a Spider-Man story where a villain enhances his intelligence, then first becomes a very successful crime boss, then writes novels and music, and then falls into existential despair. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Rhino

I think it was done first, and probably better, in Flowers for Algernon.

"it is a pastiche of the science fiction story Flowers for Algernon."

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#86

Post by amasad »

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…

I think you sum up their position's fallacy pretty nicely here:

>"if we don't figure out AGI safety now, by the time AGI happens it may be too late"

The keyword for me is "happens". It's as if technology ever happens, or emerges serendipitously. It's like the Kurzweilian exponential law which make it seem as if there is no agency in technology, a natural law. And our role in it is make sure when the aliens or the gods arrive we are prepared for them.

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#87

Post by danielam »

paganel wrote: post #60
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 ar…

A comparison I might make is that AI fanaticism is like the God-of-the-gaps phenomenon. There's a great deal of ignorance about what intelligence is, what computers fundamentally are, and so on, and some people like to fill that void with all kinds of fanciful and unjustified stuff. Perhaps they also feel greater justification in doing so because a few famous names, many of them popularizers, have done the same. Science fiction is fine -- it can be fun watching or reading about fictional AIs -- but many times we're not dealing with mere imaginative storytelling but uninformed and unsophisticated claims that do not withstand philosophical scrutiny. What falls under the heading of AI has proven to be an immensely useful tool for automating certain kinds of things. Observing these successes, some may happily apply the aforementioned God-of-the-gaps analogy to human intelligence. However, that would be a flawed analogy because these successes have not brought us any closer to achieving human intelligence any more than adding an indefinite number of natural numbers together gets you the negative square root of 2.

It's important to distinguish between intelligence and the power a tool can offer for good or for nefarious ends. If successes in AI have proved anything, it's that direct application of intelligence is unnecessary for many tasks that previously no one knew how to or was practically unable to perform using machines.

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#88

Post by Filligree »

ryandvm wrote: post #19
leggomylibro wrote: post #3

Didn't the people at Los Alamos think that the atomic bomb's chain reaction might keep going and set the entire atmosphere on fire? And I seem to remember the large hadron collider failing to collapse into a black hole. Sure, AI might destroy civilization and/or upend the primacy of humankind. But if history has taught us anything, it's that we're gonna go ahead and do it anyways if it's possible. It's worked so far.

It's worked so far _for us_. But don't you ever wonder why after 14 billion years and with a hundred million star systems in the Milky Way, we still haven't heard a peep from anyone out there? The longer I live, the closer I get to concluding that sentience is an inherently unstable condition.

> But don't you ever wonder why after 14 billion years and with a hundred million star systems in the Milky Way, we still haven't heard a peep from anyone out there?

I'd say it's unlikely to be AI, just because the AI could wipe us out and then go on to eat the universe. It's not a valid Great Filter candidate.

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#89

Post by Filligree »

crooked-v wrote: post #69
AgentME wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, e…

The difference is that environmental protection evangelists never literally just reinvented Pascal's wager except with an all-powerful AI instead. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk

You're not doing yourself any favours by quoting Rationalwiki on that subject. The guy who wrote that article appears to have an axe to grind with the AI risk movement in general, and Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular; as a result, it's full of misleading statements and outright lies.

Try this one instead, for a less biased take on it: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Roko's_basilisk

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#90

Post by Filligree »

AgentME wrote: post #78
crooked-v wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that environmental protection evangelists never literally just reinvented Pascal's wager except with an all-powerful AI instead. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk

I thought the point of Roko's basilisk was a paradox to use to test different decision theories and to explore the nature of identity (Should the decision theory allow your choices to be influenced on possible outcomes to possible future copies of yourself?), and maybe a little about whether dangerous thoughts could exist in theory. Not an actual prediction or argument for or against AI research, any more than say th…

If it has any use at all, then it'd have to be something like that.

GP's choice of link is extremely unfortunate, given that rationalwiki has a vendetta going against the AI risk movement in general. I would recommend https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Roko's_basilisk instead.

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