151–160 of 256 posts
What really terrified me wasn't skynet or Hal, but what Charles Stross describes in his novel Accelerando. Basically, machine controlled businesses (“slyly self-aware financial instruments”) evolving to the point where their aptitude at understanding and manipulating economics eclipses anything a human can compete with. It terrified me because there is efficiency incentive for the buying/selling of goods and services…
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(6) It is easier to move a problem around (for example, by moving the problem to a different part of the overall network architecture) than it is to solve it. In other words, saying "it's the definition that we don't have, not the implementation" just pushes the magic smoke around.
I don’t understand what you are saying. I’m saying that I don’t think human intelligence is doing anything more than pattern matching, logical inference and post-hoc justification. Give me an example of something that falls outside that. There is no magic.
I think humans do way more than that. As the saying goes, "the easiest person to fool is yourself." Humans are able to lie to themselves to the point that they don't realize they are lying to themselves. They're able to create realities that no one else sees but themselves.
The cat argument is completely off base IMO. The "AI" has an almost perfect motivating lever for humans: economics. A super-intelligent AI that wanted to manipulate humans could do a lot with the stock market to feed money to its long term interests. What long term interests might those be? More servers? More storage? More hardware? More software? More AI research? Better, more programmable chips? Eyes everywhere? Ro…
> Transhumanism, mind uploading. We're fucking hypnotized. Almost. If this is what the AI wants, then it's doing a really bad job . The way current tech culture is, any other concern than making money will get you labeled as crazy. This applies even to Maciej's writing. For trying to make a short-term profit, you'll be judged as good, serious person or bad, evil monster, depending on the way you approach it. But try…
Which, ultimately, is kind of unfalsifiable, since finding a super-intelligent AI if it wants to hide would be a losing battle, which is why I put this up tongue-in-cheek.
My actual belief is closer to "we are the neurons in a giant distributed overmind linked with whatever communication technology is available at hand." In this view, we're just gradually offloading the computation from human brains into computers, and it's a continuous process. In short, we're desperately piling our knowledge into this magic cauldron hoping it will figure it all out for us. What's gonna pop out?
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So far we anchor the companies to humans that have to carry the risk of the consequences of the company's actions. There are investment funds that work as hybrids, and of course it's just a matter of time till someone offers shell-company-as-a-service for cheap. (Currently it's rather pricey.)
> So far we anchor the companies to humans that have to carry the risk of the consequences of the company's actions. Not really. Companies are typically limited liability, and even criminal law in countries such as the US and England acknowledges that there are cases when no particular human is culpable for a company's criminal actions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_liability ). Of course, people are still…
> If we knew enough, and had the technology, we could exactly copy its structure and emulate its behavior with electronic components, just like we can simulate very basic neural anatomy today. Being able to simulate a brain with electronics, if it is possible, is not enough. You have to simulate it without a large increase in the space or time requirements. If there are 100B neurons in the human brain but it takes 10…
> Just because we can easily imagine it does not make it easily achievable or even possible. It is without question possible, because we exist. It is also possible to do it quickly, because again, we exist. The only thing that is unclear is: 1. How hard it is to do artificially. 2. How far from optimum the human mind is, and how complex it is to improve upon it.
Nature is pretty good at optimization. We can often build devices that out perform animals on certain characteristics, but that's because we've limited the scope of what they do and we aren't concerned with the energy requirements. We also know that, as interesting as our brains are and as powerful as they are at certain kinds of problems, they aren't the best at all of them. For instance, chimps appear to have a significantly better short term working memory. It is possible that we are already close to optimum for the kind of intelligence we are interested in. I suspect that if we manage to significantly improve upon it, it will be because we don't have to concern ourselves with the energy requirements.
Maybe it is our destiny to create an entity that is better than we are. If humans die off or are pushed aside as a result, will that be so bad? Artificial superintelligence is only a dystopia from our current perspective.
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You're essentially arguing that AGI can't exist, and you're assuming when people say "AI will turn the world to paperclips" they mean a really smart go-playing neural net could do that. Of course it can't. Everyone agrees there is some magic smoke necessary for AGI that we haven't figured out yet. The arguments that AI will eat the world are about AGI , not current instances of narrow AI. It may be true that an AGI w…
Eh, if you are talking about something truly human-like rather than what people usually mean when they say AI these days, I think there are other limits. We're running up against limits on feature-size in our integrated circuits. If you invent an AGI that can make smarter copies of itself... it's pretty likely those same physical limits will continue to apply, meaning that each iteration will be better than the last,…
We know that nothing in physics prevents AGI, because humans exist. And AGI itself, even if it isn't entirely runaway, could pose a challenge. (I'd argue that corporations are a form of AGI that is already a major challenge for our societies.)
The singularity as described by its acolytes, on the other hand, runs into the kind of physical limits you describe. Personally, I don't think it'll happen, and it's more likely that the period we're living in today will at some point in the future be called the singularity.
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Ironically, given the articles criticism of the simulation argument, there is an 'escape hatch' with respect of the ability of simulating a human mind in the form of the simulation argument: it is possible that human brains in our universe is just the tip of the iceberg and relies on a massive amount of computation 'outside' of the main simulation that is impossible to do faster 'in universe'. Of course we have absol…
That's a really interesting thought. Essentially, the technical analogy of what a 'soul' could be.
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> So far we anchor the companies to humans that have to carry the risk of the consequences of the company's actions. Not really. Companies are typically limited liability, and even criminal law in countries such as the US and England acknowledges that there are cases when no particular human is culpable for a company's criminal actions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_liability ). Of course, people are still…
Consequences famously never came for executives in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Our legal system has not kept up with the innovation in the realm of shenanigans perpetrated through a veil of plausible deniability. Corporations are evolving at a rapid pace.
I'd say that it's a good thing that the law is generally not designed to punish harmful ends, but intent (wilful, negligent or reckless) to cause well-defined harmful ends. The financial crisis was a collective malfunction of the financial system that was mostly not anticipated (barring the lucky minority that bet against the status quo).