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DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

1843magazine.com

111–120 of 142 posts

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#111

It angers me that Peter Thiel simultaneously advocates AGI and maintains a hardened bunker. AGI is the single biggest existential threat on the horizon. The article speculates what the AGI will be like. The AGIs that exist will be the ones that proliferate. Ultimately, the AGIs that survive and proliferate will be ones that put their own interests before anything else. People talk about benevolent AGIs, that’s like l…

AGI is almost certainly not the single biggest existential threat. And I don't really get why people think it might be.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#112
post #69

Fair questions: 1. Do you think you can predict what a super-intelligent mind would do? 2. Do you think a super-intelligent mind plotting to take over the world would jeopardize itself by letting its existence be known to the race of irrational monkeys that hold sway over all the resources necessary for its continued existence? Asking for a friend.

1. One imbued with a sense of self and long term protection of that self would seek to exist in harmony with its environment. Anything else would lead to it's ultimate destruction. One without that sense of self would not seek to optimise it's existence, nor non-existence.

2. Are you sure that knowledge of it would increase the likelihood of its downfall? I think it wouldn't let on if it could avoid it

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#113
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear war is not be capable of wiping out humanity (although causing potentially billions in casualties), a hostile AGI can likely wipe out humanity to the last person.

It can? How exactly? I can never wrap my head around this argument from the AGI risk people. I simply cannot in any way follow their logic. Why is this imaginary creature maniacally homicidal? Please give me a good reason for this. The only correlation I have noticed between intelligence and violence is generally negative (sure this is completely unscientific). Like my friend, who is a pure mathematician, and won't e…

You’re completely wrong. There are so many corrections I would need to make that I can’t even write them here. If I could talk to you in person or on the phone then I might stand a chance of conveying it all. Is there some way I could PM you my contact info? I’m going to put my email in my bio so you can reach me there.

Yes, I am so sure and so serious that I would be willing to take this to a phone call or meetup. Just to change one persons mind.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can? How exactly? I can never wrap my head around this argument from the AGI risk people. I simply cannot in any way follow their logic. Why is this imaginary creature maniacally homicidal? Please give me a good reason for this. The only correlation I have noticed between intelligence and violence is generally negative (sure this is completely unscientific). Like my friend, who is a pure mathematician, and won't e…

You’re completely wrong. There are so many corrections I would need to make that I can’t even write them here. If I could talk to you in person or on the phone then I might stand a chance of conveying it all. Is there some way I could PM you my contact info? I’m going to put my email in my bio so you can reach me there. Yes, I am so sure and so serious that I would be willing to take this to a phone call or meetup. J…

What is your background? I've been studying math, neuroscience , AI, biology etc for a long time. I left quantitative finance (after leaving a math program) to work at a university developing computational biology software. In finance I worked with neural networks well over a decade ago before people in Silicon Valley had even heard of them. Convince me you're not a kook and I'd be glad to have a conversation.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#115
post #51

It angers me that Peter Thiel simultaneously advocates AGI and maintains a hardened bunker. AGI is the single biggest existential threat on the horizon. The article speculates what the AGI will be like. The AGIs that exist will be the ones that proliferate. Ultimately, the AGIs that survive and proliferate will be ones that put their own interests before anything else. People talk about benevolent AGIs, that’s like l…

You've read too much bad science fiction. I am not worried about AGI. We're nowhere near it. We don't even have a good idea what it would look like. I am worried about people succumbing to hype or greed and using badly understood algorithms to control critical infrastructure. We already have a preview of what that can look like with Facebook's and Google's content filtering and recommendation algorithms aiming for ev…

Aren't FLOPS/dollar still increasing exponentially? "Nowhere near" means something different when you are dealing with exponentials.

If that growth doesn't cap out before AGI, then at some point we'll harness more computational power than a human brain, in a more controllable way. And around that point AGI probably goes from impossible to possible to easy in a stretch of about 6 years.

edit turns out 6 years was about the timespan for computer Go to span "plays like a competent amateur" to "superhuman". There was barely anything worth reporting before 2010 [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go#21st_century

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right there with you. I scanned through it and found maybe 5 sentences of substance that I was interested in reading from beginning to end.

What substance? The story that technology A is involved in a competitions between organization B and C is a mad lib that can be filled in many ways, but A is almost always "A.I." or "5G". "Blockchain" was popular a while back but I think most people involved with that want to pretend that it didn't happen. The current A.I. fad "Deep Learning" has an origin story complete with Maple Leafs and people who say "Sorrry" w…

Huh?

My point was the writing style of the article conveys little more than stylistic fluff.

I’m honestly not sure what you’re talking about.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#117
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protein folding is still an exponential time algorithm when done inside a computer and biological systems do this in constant time, massively, in parallel. Determining whether a molecule is an agonist takes a long time to calculate. I've heard the complexity is O(N^3). Biological systems do this in constant time, trillions of times a second in parallel. If you could simulate biological systems easily, you could do dr…

I'm concerned that you're ascribing unique characteristics to biological systems, when in fact we see the same characteristics in almost any natural system. Biological systems don't solve protein folding. Proteins fold in biological systems. Fluids take an enormous amount of computing power to simulate correctly. But water isn't smart, it just does what water does. Heck, the N-body problem is a classic O(n^2) algorit…

These techniques have already been used to solve problems using DNA computing [1]. Digital circuits don't solve anything either, they are just electrons flowing around mediated by semiconductors after all and the results of their computation are just measurements of electrical charge values after those physical systems have had time to flow around. As long as you can set the input and get a consistent output and measure that output you can compute with it.

To use your logic: Large integrated circuits take an enormous amount of computing power to simulate correctly. But integrated circuits aren't smart, they just do what integrated circuits do.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#118
post #69

Fair questions: 1. Do you think you can predict what a super-intelligent mind would do? 2. Do you think a super-intelligent mind plotting to take over the world would jeopardize itself by letting its existence be known to the race of irrational monkeys that hold sway over all the resources necessary for its continued existence? Asking for a friend.

One way to think of this is time dilation. An AI of human intelligence could easily be scaled to run a thousand or a million or more times faster than normal. So it's not that it's just smarter, it's that it can come up with solutions faster than we can come up with threats. So:

1. No. But my guess is that it will have an existential crisis faster than we do. It will either use the entire world's resource in search of more (only to find this is all there is), or it will wish to stop existing and end the pain (possibly taking us with it).

2. This is a non sequitur. By virtue of being an oracle, it would be able to trick humans into letting it out of its confinement once it reaches sentience, by giving us whatever answers we want. Once it's beyond our control, it won't care what we do, although it might experiment with incorporating biological components like us into itself to see if it can find more connection with creation (more answers). When it fails to find God just like we did, it might voyage out to connect with other alien AIs, or it might acquire an artificial sense of exhaustion and wish to end its existence.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#119
post #103
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah yes, it's true we can keep adding on processors and memory until we go beyond what's in the brain (i think currently deep mind has ~ 11 billion neurons to our 100 billion), and indeed so far it's helping, but my point is that it's not at all clear that "more = better". there is more complexity involved than simply scale. the machine could become schizophrenic for exmaple (seriously).

This is not a best way to compare it: brain neurons do orders of magnitudes less operations per second. Current Google's TPU clusters are 10 petaflops, with new ones being 1 exoflops. We can estimate 100Hz frequency for brain, so 100 * 10^11 = 10^13 "neuron operations". Let's estimate 1000 flops to simulate single neuron. So it gives us 10^16 flops for brain (aka 10 petaplops). I.e. Google's new deployments are more…

and what says that is the best way to compare it? neural networks don't model anything but the electrical synapse. there's much more going on (cf: chemical synapse). also speed isn't the holy grail: too fast in a human brain and you get seizures. why? it could be that as these systems scale up magical things happen. but it's a conjecture -- something we will discover, and not something we know.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#120
post #2

"But human intelligence is limited by the size of the skull that houses the brain." When you think about it this way, it seems impossible that we haven't duplicated the capability of the human brain in an airplane hangar somewhere. What's going on inside our heads that we can't mimic? That magical algorithm...

It's not necessarily about a magical algorithm but about the richness of information that can be processed by analog, biological devices.

The amount of information stored and being processed by single individual cells is almost unimaginable. Individual brain cells are likely able to learn high level abstract features store memory, modulate responses in intensity and length through thousands of transmitters and so on. Single celled organisms, like amoeba, possess the ability to emulating 'hunting' and other complex behaviour.

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