Why do we fear other intelligences anyway? Isn't that just a sign of our own immaturity? Maybe we need to evolve more before we start think about creating AGI...
There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
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Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#32I 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?
Did you ever ride in the elevator again?
Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#33I've been around AI since the end of the last big hype in the late 80s. The recent leap in machine learning has felt rather hyped to me. I don't think AGI is near.
But I find myself agreeing with this article. Strongly.
And I have long suspected that, we miss a lot of the significance and opportunities in AI, because we have only one exemplar of 'higher' intelligence: a human being. AI folk are so concerned with getting computers to do the things that humans are good at, I suspect most will miss / 'refute' / deride the inflection point, because the system can't wash the dishes (or some other form of embodied cognition), or write poetry humans would find beautiful, (or understand some other socially-conditioned cue).
The superhuman fallacy really is the bane of AI.
Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#34The disasters that may befall us if we fail to narrow this gap are many. [...] Within prosperous countries, such as the United States, there is a distinct and growing threat that increased automation, coupled with an obsolete and aimless system of education, will lead to a restratification of society in which a large middle class may find itself without suitable employment and without adequate means of filling its leisure time enjoyably and constructively. --
Social Technology (1966).
The median of these final responses could then be taken as representing the nearest thing to a group consensus. In the case of the high-IQ machine, this median turned out to be the year 1990, with a final interquartile range from 1985 to 2000. The procedure thus caused the median to move to a much earlier date and the interquartile range to shrink considerably, presumably influenced by convincing arguments -- Analysis of the future: The Delphi Method. (1967)
Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#35Having 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'.
> 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'.
Sometimes, it makes more sense being cautiously optimistic (pro-active) rather than reactive. We have already gone down that reactive slope and it's better to act now before it's all too late [0].
[0] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/review-w...
Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!"
We understand what intelligence is better than we understand what consciousness is. "Artificial Consciousness" would be the vague term.
Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#37Why 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?)
Epiphenomenalism is a mind–body philosophy marked by the belief that basic physical events (sense organs, neural impulses, and muscle contractions) are causal with respect to mental events (thought, consciousness, and cognition). Mental events are viewed as completely dependent on physical functions and, as such, have no independent existence or causal efficacy; it is a mere appearance.
[...]
In 1870, Huxley conducted a case study on a French soldier who had sustained a shot in the Franco-Prussian War that fractured his left parietal bone. Every few weeks the soldier would enter a trance-like state, smoking, dressing himself, and aiming his cane like a rifle all while being insensitive to pins, electric shocks, odorous substances, vinegar, noise, and certain light conditions. Huxley used this study to show that consciousness was not necessary to execute these purposeful actions, justifying the assumption that humans are insensible machines. Huxley’s mechanistic attitude towards the body convinced him that the brain alone causes behavior.
[...]
A large body of neurophysiological data seems to support epiphenomenalism. Some of the oldest such data is the Bereitschaftspotential or "readiness potential" in which electrical activity related to voluntary actions can be recorded up to two seconds before the subject is aware of making a decision to perform the action. More recently Benjamin Libet et al. (1979) have shown that it can take 0.5 seconds before a stimulus becomes part of conscious experience even though subjects can respond to the stimulus in reaction time tests within 200 milliseconds. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism
Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 (contentio…
> Then it could know if someone were conscious or not.
How? You say "query", but what would the query look like?
Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#39Why 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 think it's just because intelligence is better defined and easier to test than consciousness.
Intelligence is one of the most poorly defined words there is; I can't even begin to imagine what you have in mind.
Consciousness is usually only one of two things; either "being aware" or "the experience of having an inner voice".
Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
#40AGI is to AI what "Flying cars" are to "atomic power".
The reason luminaries are conservative in their estimates or remain silent is that capturing the public's imagination is good for funding and recognition (not a negative assessment, btw).
With enough positive press everything seems possible to the layman, and creates a belief in the unlimited possibilities of "the future," but also the inherent "dangers" of this imagined future that "must be taken into account."
Most arguments made in the article fall flat because of false analogies. Analogies can only ever be used to illustrate, never to derive conclusions from.
The AI winter is over, and good progress is being made in a lot of fields, but AGI is nowhere on the horizon. In absence of evidence to the contrary, AGI remains, for the foreseeable future, in the realm of philosophy, science-fiction, and regrettably, alarmist articles.
For now, us humans should feel totally safe.