You don't need a fire alarm for something that doesn't exist and is complete science fiction at this point. We would be better off building asteroid defences as long as we are talking about far-fetched threats to humanity.
There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)
11–20 of 130 posts
Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)
#12“Intelligence is situational — there is no such thing as general intelligence. Your brain is one piece in a broader system which includes your body, your environment, other humans, and culture as a whole. […] Currently, our environment, not our brain, is acting as the bottleneck to our intelligence.” “Human intelligence is largely externalized, contained not in our brain but in our civilization. We are our tools — ou…
Here's an extensive reply to Chollet's essay, also by the author of "There's No Fire Alarm":
https://intelligence.org/2017/12/06/chollet/
> ...some systems function very well in a broad variety of structured low-entropy environments. E.g. the human brain functions much better than other primate brains in an extremely broad set of environments, including many that natural selection did not explicitly optimize for. We remain functional on the Moon, because the Moon has enough in common with the Earth on a sufficiently deep meta-level that, for example, induction on past experience goes on functioning there.
>> The intelligence of an octopus is specialized in the problem of being an octopus. The intelligence of a human is specialized in the problem of being human.
> The problem that a human solves is much more general than the problem an octopus solves, which is why we can walk on the Moon and the octopus can’t.
>> Recursively self-improving systems, because of contingent bottlenecks, diminishing returns, and counter-reactions arising from the broader context in which they exist, cannot achieve exponential progress in practice. Empirically, they tend to display linear or sigmoidal improvement.
> Falsified by a graph of world GDP on almost any timescale.
Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)
#13“Intelligence is situational — there is no such thing as general intelligence. Your brain is one piece in a broader system which includes your body, your environment, other humans, and culture as a whole. […] Currently, our environment, not our brain, is acting as the bottleneck to our intelligence.” “Human intelligence is largely externalized, contained not in our brain but in our civilization. We are our tools — ou…
Surprised he didn't mention the Flynn effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
A book I recently read (Range, by David Epstein) seems to draw a connection through some other research that points to modernization and globalization as the drivers of this trend, in the sense that IQ tests measure pure abstract reasoning ability and we now live in a world dominated by abstraction so our brains get used to thinking about all of our experiences abstractly from a younger age. Basically, each successive generation has more practice in thinking about the world abstractly since it is required use to modern technology effectively.
Anyways, this seems to buttress what Chollet is saying about externalized human intelligence. It is difficult to imagine anything resembling a "general" intelligence that isn't attached to a life-form that is already a self-replicating engine of negentropy, bootstrapping solutions to hard problems through some form of non-volatile memory. I would almost go so far as to say that "intelligence" and evolution are inseparable.
Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)
#14The best AI minds are still working on AI consistently recognizing stop signs.
[deleted]
Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)
#15There are a lot of people in this thread who seem to be very confident and skeptical of the author's position. Maybe this would be a good opportunity to try the exercise he challenges in the article?
Please post your nomination for what’s the least impressive accomplishment that you are very confident cannot be done in the next two years.
We can check back in 2022 and see how we did!
Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)
#16The decisive moment for AI will come when a program can run a corporation better than humans. That's not an unreasonable near-term achievement. A corporation is a system for maximizing a well-defined metric. Maximizing a well-defined metric is what machine learning systems do well.
If a system listened in on all communication within a company, for traffic, sentiment analysis, who responds to whom how fast, and what customers, customer service, and sales are all saying and doing, it would generate more data than a CEO could ever process. Somewhere in there are indicators of what's working and what isn't. That may be the next phase after processing customer data, which has kind of been mined out.
If this starts working, and companies run by algorithms start outperforming ones run by humans, stockholders will put their money into the companies that peform better. The machines will be in charge.
This is perhaps the destiny of the corporation.
Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)
#17You don't need a fire alarm for something that doesn't exist and is complete science fiction at this point. We would be better off building asteroid defences as long as we are talking about far-fetched threats to humanity.
I mean, general intelligence exists and is not science fiction. I assume I'm responding to one. What should be the first sign that it's no longer science fiction, and it's acceptable to start making a plan?
Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)
#18The decisive moment for AI will come when a program can run a corporation better than humans. That's not an unreasonable near-term achievement. A corporation is a system for maximizing a well-defined metric. Maximizing a well-defined metric is what machine learning systems do well. If a system listened in on all communication within a company, for traffic, sentiment analysis, who responds to whom how fast, and what c…
I've been saying AI won't be Skynet launching the nukes, it will be a corporation maximizing productivity with complete disregard for human needs heh
Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)
#19“Intelligence is situational — there is no such thing as general intelligence. Your brain is one piece in a broader system which includes your body, your environment, other humans, and culture as a whole. […] Currently, our environment, not our brain, is acting as the bottleneck to our intelligence.” “Human intelligence is largely externalized, contained not in our brain but in our civilization. We are our tools — ou…
Here's an extensive reply to Chollet's essay, also by the author of "There's No Fire Alarm": https://intelligence.org/2017/12/06/chollet/ > ...some systems function very well in a broad variety of structured low-entropy environments. E.g. the human brain functions much better than other primate brains in an extremely broad set of environments, including many that natural selection did not explicitly optimize for. We…
Any graph of world GDP is meaninglessly short on the timescale of the Earth’s ecosystem. What looks like unstoppable success to us could be a blip in the broader context.
Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)
#20“Intelligence is situational — there is no such thing as general intelligence. Your brain is one piece in a broader system which includes your body, your environment, other humans, and culture as a whole. […] Currently, our environment, not our brain, is acting as the bottleneck to our intelligence.” “Human intelligence is largely externalized, contained not in our brain but in our civilization. We are our tools — ou…
Here's an extensive reply to Chollet's essay, also by the author of "There's No Fire Alarm": https://intelligence.org/2017/12/06/chollet/ > ...some systems function very well in a broad variety of structured low-entropy environments. E.g. the human brain functions much better than other primate brains in an extremely broad set of environments, including many that natural selection did not explicitly optimize for. We…
Still plenty of time for GDP to turn into a sigmoid