91–100 of 209 posts
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There was a bank of six, I stayed off that one for a week.
How did you choose one week, rather than a day, or forever? Why were "people" foolish to stay in the elevator and keep using it that day, while you were not foolish because you waited a week?
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We are defined by DNA but DNA has evolved.
Sorry but I don't quite understand your comment. What do the chemical underpinnings of evolution have to do with AGI?
If humans can evolve from basic physical buildings blocks of the universe then why shouldn't AGI be possible especially when we now reach a point were computers can learn i.e. like we have become pattern recognizing feedback loops. Sure there is some way yet, but there is absolutely no evidence that it shouldn't be possible.
To me technology is a natural continuum of evolution i.e. it's part of nature. The reason why I believe this is that information is what really matters here which is why we have evolved to become pattern recognizing feedback loops and why what seems to be the most powerful innovation besides fire and the wheel is the ability to simulate more or less anything around us manipulating and storing information.
Our DNA is what made us possible. Other animals DNA weren't configured to turn them into self-aware entities. I believe that all biological life will be replaced by digital/silicon-based life because it's simply a better information carrier and that is what evolution will always be giving preference to better information carriers. "Technology" not humans will explore the universe and escape the next big life-destroying asteroid or whatever else endanger the survival of the DNA.
And yes I am aware DNA is chemically based but technology will be able to simulate it. Whether there will be true transcendence between analog and digital is anyone's guess but I don't believe humans are the last step in evolution.
Almost all of the bugaboo about runaway superhuman organisms comes down not to machines learning and reasoning about the world but to the effective high-level objective function controlling the actions of an autonomous system.
Not making the distinction obscures important things. For one thing we seem to be well on the way to a situation where we arguably have something worthy of the moniker artificial intelligence but the agency is delegated to the human objective function. Considering what complete refuse of human specimens are likely to command some of the first moderately general AI systems that concerns me far more than any summoned demon of Musk's for the foreseeable future.
Also, studying these high-level objective functions for autonomous behavior is a very worthy goal, but going first for issues of "value alignment" and "safety", without any specifics of what works for an implementation?? Sure, do it if you enjoy it and have resources to burn. But be prepared to spend heroic efforts coming up with results that are either trivial or non-issues if you were to consider them with a working mechanism in front of you.
That seems to be a very interesting article. However, it’s quite long. Anybody ok with writing a short synthesis or abstract? Thanks
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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".
Neither of those is a concrete definition. Defining "consciousness" as "being aware" is just punting the question on to "how do you define the word AWARE?". And some people don't have an inner monologue. It's not specifically mentioned in http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex... but it's of that same class of thing; there are certainly hits on Google for people claiming not to have an inner voi…
Let me set the record straight, though. I'm not claiming to not have an inner life; I'm claiming to not have an inner voice, except if I'm reading "out loud" internally or whatnot. (Which is useful when writing, but not necessary.)
I just use other modalities.
To the best of my knowledge there's only one guy, a philosopher, who's claimed to have no inner life at all--and I don't think I believe him.
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"Alphago was not such an event. Yes, we did predict that Alphago is decades away, but that's assuming that academics will continue working on it at their pace using their limited resources. No expert was surprised with Alphago." Even taking that as true, I'm not sure how it's relevant. The article isn't talking about how good our forecasting is given certain assumptions. It's saying that we won't know until right bef…
Alphago is the equivalent a 1950s team coming up with a much better transistor that everyone expected to see in the next ten years in months AGI is a 1950s team surprising absolutely everybody by secretly spending a couple of years and a couple of billion dollars and creating an iPhone. By the time the iPhone was actually possible, everybody thought it was an impressive use of existing technologies rather than requir…
A couple of isolated groups of scientists then discover that certain nuclear reactions with uranium _do_ produce neutrons as a by-product, but in a way that is intractable to use for a chain reaction (too much mass required). Further research shows that the idea of a runaway chain-reaction becomes more plausible, and further discoveries supporting this are now considered dangerous and are no longer openly published.
Shortly thereafter, one group acquires unlimited funds and is able to discover exactly what is required to create an uncontrolled chain reaction. Over the next couple of years, it spends thousands of man-years to perform the vast engineering effort requried to actually accomplish this.
Almost everybody not directly involved with this research and development effort, are taken completely by surprise when the new phenomenon is publicly and dramatically demonstrated.
If the locker concept is valid, and we compare our 'clock' of the alpha rhythm of ~12 Hertz, and the fastest computer clock of about ~12 gigahertz(1,000,000,000 times as fast) we can see we will be at a serious disadvantage once it starts to compete with us. Such an AI will operate on it's basic motivations at it's full speed. We turn it on - it can then start to learn ( I assume we will have pre-loaded it's fully parallel, content addressable memory with whatever we want of human knowledge - so it starts from there). Will it operate properly or rationally? or go insane? Being a set of boxes, it can be reset as needed, with updates to add sanity. Then it will become a Mechanical Turk of great capability. Will it become a dictator? only if we permit it to have access to fools(us?). Will it become a killer machine? only if we add guns and internal power so we do not pull the plug. We already see these lesser Turks in operation, they will get better and better. The man/woman who owns one could own the world via high speed trading - in truth, there will be many at high tech data combat. May we live/die in interesting times...
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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?
For me, the "smoke under the door" moment was Karpathy and Li's Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions [1]. The almost perfectly grammatical machine-generated captions of photos were unnerving to me in a way that simple categorization was not. It somehow called to mind the image of a blank-eyed person speaking in a monotone while images flashed in front of them. What if they wake up? [1]: h…