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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)

#161

Post by Jyaif »

lsc wrote: post #65

what I find interesting is that for most of my life, Moore's law was... as real as gravity; It seemed like any problem you had, wait a few years and you could just brute force it. The future really did look limitless. Now, moore's law has slowed down. Hell, I've got a 7 year old laptop next to me, and it still works for games. I mean, in the '90s, a 7 year old computer would be a museum piece. I mean, for big AI adva…

> I'm just saying there are almost certainly limits.

Nobody is saying that there's no limit, it's just that the limits may be super high. The most animals can lift is a couple of hundreds a kg by roughly one meter. Machines can move hundreds of time this amount to other planets.

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

#162

Post by jki275 »

gnode wrote: post #160
rectang wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Consequences famously never came for executives in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. 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…

That's a rather charitable view of 2008. I don't think many people share it.

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

#163

Post by rawoke083600 »

lsc wrote: post #65

what I find interesting is that for most of my life, Moore's law was... as real as gravity; It seemed like any problem you had, wait a few years and you could just brute force it. The future really did look limitless. Now, moore's law has slowed down. Hell, I've got a 7 year old laptop next to me, and it still works for games. I mean, in the '90s, a 7 year old computer would be a museum piece. I mean, for big AI adva…

True ! But interesting for most ML problems.. Parallelism can greatly and easily improve performance... So if we wait a few years and get more cores/threads :)

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

#164

Post by pdimitar »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #143
exoesquitur wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you say is true for silicon, but Turing complete molecular machinery is already out there, we just have yet to master its intricacies. The nightmare AGI scenario likely involves molecular computing using a chemically optimal code-base and engineered lifeforms a version or two up from current DNA microcode. This is most likely to be created by a human-AI collaboration, which will be innocuous enough in itself....…

That's more worrying than silicon AGI, which I think is a non-starter. The basic problem with AGI is that software is ridiculously brittle and ad hoc, with no useful heuristics for general - as opposed to task-oriented - self improvement. We can't even make bug-free web pages. So the idea that we can engineer a bug-free self-improving AGI is unconvincing. Moving to neo-biology doesn't necessarily change that - but it…

> We can't even make bug-free web pages. So the idea that we can engineer a bug-free self-improving AGI is unconvincing.

This is mostly true because of current economical realities in the IT sector.

If very rich people have long-term plans to invent an AGI and they have labs where trying to do so is an everyday activity then I am pretty sure they'll use more serious methodologies.

So what you say is true but only within the bounds of the lowest common denominator ("a regular programmer working a wage job").

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

#165

Post by Fricken »

animal531 wrote: post #136
davidhyde wrote: post #130

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.

I agree. Comparing ourselves to humans of either 100k years in the past or the future will probably show that we have very little in common. An AI might be a big sudden leap (in any direction), but it's still something that came to be because of us.

Humans with European ancestry have been evolving along a distinct and separate lineage from Australian aboriginals for 80k years. In scientific terms Europeans and native Australians don't actually qualify as two separate races.

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

#166

Post by HumanHater »

davidhyde wrote: post #130

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.

Humans wants religion, humans need religion, a lot of humans can't survive without religion. All those reports about religion decline in the world look misleading. It is just Christian God fell out of favor and a lot of people choose to worship Holy Technological Progress. You can easily recognize worshipers of his two main sects in threads like this.

First one claims that you don't need to worry about Climate Change, Super AI, Antibiotic Resistance Pathogens etc because Holy Progress would protect humanity from any threat. It is benevolent God who didn't let us down this far.

Second one claims that sacrificing yourself, your loved ones and the rest of humanity on the altar of Holy Progress is actually worthy goal. Because that is what they believe their God wants.

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

#168

Post by eternalban »

> But for most of us, [the brain as an ordinary configuration of matter] is an easy premise to accept.

The Geocentric (Ptolemaic) model of cosmos was also a very easy premise to accept, until our sensory apparatus and measuring systems exceeded a certain level and the model failed. Note that it was also perfectly conformant with Occam's Razor (i.e. minimal assumptions) given the sensory and measurement systems available at the time of its conception and wide acceptance.

Also one does not need to be "very religious" to entertain the notion that consciousness (Self-sense) may be a fundamental feature (like EM or gravity) of reality. It is simply one of the 2 options on the table: reactive black-box of matter (the 'processing structure as basis for mind' thesis) or what I'll call 'deep-structure of material universe as a basis for mind' that does not delineate the 'mind' as bounded by 'brain'.

We, like the ancients, may not yet possess the sensory and measuring apparatus (think telescopes, accurate clocks, and mathematical tools) to note that the fact (apparent to our primitive cognitive tools) that "the sun, the moon, and the stars move and earth stands still" is not the entire story of the cosmos.

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

#169

Post by agsdfgsd »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #156
darawk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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 prob…

>Nature is pretty good at optimization.

Only if there is a benefit to doing so. If it was simply a case of "nature can optimize really well" then we would expect to find many species at or near the limit of intelligence, not just one. Other species did not have the evolutionary pressure to cause as high of intelligence to be selected for. It is very reasonable to think that we also did not have the evolutionary pressure necessary to cause us to have even higher intelligence than we do.

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

#170

Post by red75prime »

chobeat wrote: post #122
ru999gol wrote: post #88

> The penultimate premise is if we create an artificial intelligence, whether it's an emulated human brain or a de novo piece of software, it will operate at time scales that are characteristic of electronic hardware (microseconds) rather than human brains (hours). I never understood that argument, why would that be true? If I train a state of the art convnet it takes days on the most efficient hardware I can efford,…

And even if you defy computational constraints, it will still be constrained by physical limitations. You can experience the world just so quickly. Stuff needs time to happen and you being faster than stuff won't be any help after a while.

> Stuff needs time to happen and you being faster than stuff won't be any help after a while.

Yeah, another problem for superintelligence to tackle, while it waits for stuff to happen.

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