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Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

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Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't think anything in that post 'demolishes' the criticism or even advances some sort of argument. It's just a huge wall of text full of weird analogies which is quite typical for these 'rationalist' community posts. People like Bostrom or Yudkowsky have one thing in common. They are not engineers and they stand to gain financially (in fact it is what pays their bills) to conjure up non-scientific pie in…

So you agree there is room for them to work on this, yet you feel they are making engineers generally look like cultists? Maybe you’re just being oversensitive. The hype wave on AI danger is completely over, and there’s nothing wrong with people studying the question if that’s their interest.

You know we've been here before, right? I mean, lighthill report, Ray Kurzeweil is a serial offender for over thirty years, the singularity is around the corner thing, outrageous claims for fMRI, self driving cars. Over hyped ibm Watson which now health professions are talking about misdiagnosis problems.

Sure. We have google image match and better colorisartion and some improvements in language processing, and good cancer detection on x-rays. These are huge. But hype is, alas, making engineering increments look like cult.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#22

> The second premise is that the brain is an ordinary configuration of matter, albeit an extraordinarily complicated one. This is the part I doubt is true. There was a time when humans thought brains were very complex systems of microscopic clockwork because gears were the pinnacle of technology. How do people keep mistaking pattern matching with intelligence?

> How do people keep mistaking pattern matching with intelligence?

Isn't that true? At what level you call something intelligent rather than just a clever pattern recognition?

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#23
This idea that we’re close to some runaway superintelligence has been a theme through the history of AI. I look at AI today and I see some powerful techniques for optimization and categorization. There’s still an enormous leap we need to make before we’re making something that has the autonomous intelligence of a fly. We’re at least 20 years away from the first signs of real intelligence—the biggest problem is that we keep trying to engineer it rather than reverse engineer it.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#24

> The second premise is that the brain is an ordinary configuration of matter, albeit an extraordinarily complicated one. This is the part I doubt is true. There was a time when humans thought brains were very complex systems of microscopic clockwork because gears were the pinnacle of technology. How do people keep mistaking pattern matching with intelligence?

> How do people keep mistaking pattern matching with intelligence? Isn't that true? At what level you call something intelligent rather than just a clever pattern recognition?

Making inferences is beyond pattern matching.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#25

> The second premise is that the brain is an ordinary configuration of matter, albeit an extraordinarily complicated one. This is the part I doubt is true. There was a time when humans thought brains were very complex systems of microscopic clockwork because gears were the pinnacle of technology. How do people keep mistaking pattern matching with intelligence?

Because we have things like Quantum Field Theory that tells us the energy scales it's valid for, and it's experimentally checked to be valid for those scales.

Since the brain doesn't presumably contain supernovas, black holes or particle accelerators, that means that we have a basic theory covering the mechanics down.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do people keep mistaking pattern matching with intelligence? Isn't that true? At what level you call something intelligent rather than just a clever pattern recognition?

Making inferences is beyond pattern matching.

how do you know? some things that were thought of as inferences in the past have been shown to be clever pattern matching.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#27
post #4

"The orthogonality thesis is false. Source: Rick and Morty" Why does anyone take this writeup seriously?

First time encountering a Maciej idlewords post, huh? He doesn't even take himself seriously. That also doesn't stop him from being an excellent and thoughtful writer.

I don't mean to say "he made a Rick and Morty reference, Serious Adults don't make Rick and Morty references". That'd be dumb. I mean that he points to a robot in Rick and Morty that was sad about being programmed to pass butter, and attempts to infer from this that real robots would refuse to intelligently pursue arbitrary goals, and therefore that the orthogonality thesis is false. He's treating a thing that happened in fiction as though it was a real thing that happened somewhere that we should treat as evidence. That doesn't work.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#28
> Having realized that the world is not a programming problem, > AI obsessives want to make it into a programming problem, > by designing a God-like machine.

We invented programming to solve problems from the real world. What do you mean by a "programming problem"?

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making inferences is beyond pattern matching.

how do you know? some things that were thought of as inferences in the past have been shown to be clever pattern matching.

Can you provide an example?

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#30
If smart, intelligent humans are the ones that's going to make artificial superintelligence, wouldn't that make us more intelligent than them? Unless AI can create a more intelligent versions of themselves on its own, I have second thoughts believing this idea.
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