It seems to me that intelligence is something that needs to be acquired from other intelligent beings through a lengthy process, thus it requires first and foremost learning how to interact with people, what we call socialisation. Therefore I believe if machines ever become intelligent we will absolutely notice, because we will have to teach them like we teach babies, and we will have plenty of time to adapt.
There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
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Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’re just as bad at predicting in the other direction. General strong AI has been about 20 years away since the 1960s. Nanotechnological antibody robots were supposed to be coursing through our bloodstreams making us near immortal long before now.
Oh, of course! The article itself puts some effort into repeatedly stating the fact that people are saying 50 years does not in any way imply it will actually be 2 years and it might well be 500 .
This is a useless claim though. There are an infinite number of things that could happen that would be very bad for Earth that could happen anytime between 2 to 1000 years from now. We're bad at forecasting ALL of them. We can't use this indeterminacy to prove we should be working on X when the same is applicable to another thing Y.
Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#23AGI is not coming, DL methods have run into a plateau recently for the past year.
Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#24I was on an elevator full of people, and between two floors something went wrong and we went into free-fall for part of a second.
We made it to the next floor, the door opened, my fellow passengers were content to stay in the elevator.
I turned, said "My plan is to not die in an elevator today" and got off. What is wrong with people?
Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#25Why AGI and not "Artificial Consciousness" ? Is it because people think that consciousness is a by-product emerging from many kinds of pattern detection algorithms that suit all cases? (if so, what is the evidence for that?)
I don't have any way to prove that you're conscious. It seems premature to assume that a hypothetical future AGI will necessarily possess consciousness, even if we could agree on what exactly "consciousness" is.
OK but here's a little gedankenexperiment: suppose I had a machine that could simultaneously simulate 2 consciousnesses (either parent/child configuration or sibling), (bear with me) import recordings from conscious beings, and allowed one consciousness to query the other. Then it could know if someone were conscious or not.
(if I am getting this right) those would be the minimal criteria for being able to (contentiously) prove if a person were conscious or not.
But the thing about humans is that they cannot simulate 2 consciousnesses simultaneously (apart from culturally-designated illness known as multiple personality disorder), nor can we import another's consciousness. Nor do we even particularly (barring Totoni's work, or Tegmark's work] know what consciousness is. Those two properties are (probably) never going to be human-capable. In that regard, humans are unlikely to be able to ever be a (or 'the') kind of being used to determine whether or not something is conscious; if ever it will be possible, that will be a machine's task.
Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#26AGI is not coming, DL methods have run into a plateau recently for the past year.
That's interesting, but could you elaborate in more detail?
Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#27Why AGI and not "Artificial Consciousness" ? Is it because people think that consciousness is a by-product emerging from many kinds of pattern detection algorithms that suit all cases? (if so, what is the evidence for that?)
A conscious system might be unintelligent, while it’s possible to imagine a highly intelligent system with no consciousness. They’re just different things. Also pattern detection is often raised in the way you just did, but it’s realy a distraction. Pattern detection just helps recognise things, it’s not inherently related to the ability to reason about things. So you need both, but they are not the same thing either…
But where does consciousness arise? Is the ability to reason about things independent of this concept?
Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#28Having done some work with the state-of-the-art of AI, I personally don't think AGI is near - might not even be possible. But the catch is the unreliability of (even expert) predictions on technology futures. My take is that it's worth taking pragmatic steps towards studying AI safety measures (i.e. OpenAI), but not going as far as to talk the likes of 'AI research regulation'.
Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#29Why AGI and not "Artificial Consciousness" ? Is it because people think that consciousness is a by-product emerging from many kinds of pattern detection algorithms that suit all cases? (if so, what is the evidence for that?)
Probably because it's best to not use terms that are likely to spark debate just by word choice unless you actually want to have that debate? If you're concerned with AI risk, it doesn't really matter the precise nature of your philosophy of mind as long as it allows artificial devices capable of reasoning with possibly adversarial goals.
Ah, so the AGI term users are like "ha-ha I chose a vague term, now you can't argue semantics, take that!"
Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, of course! The article itself puts some effort into repeatedly stating the fact that people are saying 50 years does not in any way imply it will actually be 2 years and it might well be 500 .
This is a useless claim though. There are an infinite number of things that could happen that would be very bad for Earth that could happen anytime between 2 to 1000 years from now. We're bad at forecasting ALL of them. We can't use this indeterminacy to prove we should be working on X when the same is applicable to another thing Y.
But equally, because we aren't working on all of them, doesn't mean it isn't worth working on any.
Also, be careful not to confuse uncertain duration with more general uncertainty. They are related, but not the same.