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Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

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Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#71

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

jengleton wrote: post #26
zaphar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the comparison was to AI as a super intelligence. AI doesn't have to be a super intelligence to be AI or to be dangerous.

That's fair. I interpreted the comparison as being between "AI implemented as a property of human organizations" and "AI implemented as a powerful search algorithm". While corporations can certainly be dangerous, they're still made of people and thus are unlikely to want to do things like "convert the entire mass of the solar system into dollar bills" (and even if they did, they'd have a hard time doing it). A suffic…

> While corporations can certainly be dangerous, they're still made of people and thus are unlikely to want to do things like "convert the entire mass of the solar system into dollar bills"

I'm assuming this is satire, since that's apparently exactly the goal of corporations.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#72

Post by bryanrasmussen »

jengleton wrote: post #5

Robert Miles has an interesting response to the claim that corporations are AIs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5pUA3LsEaw To paraphrase: yes, corporations function as agents, but their maximum performance is limited by the capabilities of their employees. A corporate AI may have a much broader set of skills than any single person, and may be able to tackle many concurrent tasks, but as an "intelligent agent" its d…

Corporations have multiple decision making nodes that each can have the intelligence level as a smart human, thus more smart human level decisions can be undertaken by a corporation than can be undertaken by a smart human. At the same time corporations can process much more data, store more data, and do more interesting things with data than the smartest human alone could do.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#73

Post by phs318u »

jengleton wrote: post #26
zaphar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the comparison was to AI as a super intelligence. AI doesn't have to be a super intelligence to be AI or to be dangerous.

That's fair. I interpreted the comparison as being between "AI implemented as a property of human organizations" and "AI implemented as a powerful search algorithm". While corporations can certainly be dangerous, they're still made of people and thus are unlikely to want to do things like "convert the entire mass of the solar system into dollar bills" (and even if they did, they'd have a hard time doing it). A suffic…

> If a corporation can't re-structure itself into being much smarter than the smartest human, its intelligence is fundamentally limited, and therefore so is the risk.

The assumption here is that risk correlates to intelligence. That doesn't seem to be borne out in history. Risk (the likelihood of bad outcomes) can be emergent, and arise from well-meaning, reasonably (not super) intelligent people operating within a simple framework.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#74

Post by grawprog »

jengleton wrote: post #5

Robert Miles has an interesting response to the claim that corporations are AIs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5pUA3LsEaw To paraphrase: yes, corporations function as agents, but their maximum performance is limited by the capabilities of their employees. A corporate AI may have a much broader set of skills than any single person, and may be able to tackle many concurrent tasks, but as an "intelligent agent" its d…

By that logic, wouldn't any organization, team or group of people doing things together be an ai?

Corporations aren't the only kind of grouping of people together one or more purposes as a unit. This definition also seems to ignore the 'artificial' part of artificial intelligence.

If we're going to stretch the definition of ai that thin, wouldn't a school of fish or a flock of birds be considered 'ai'? Or at least an ant colony or bee hive?

What about forests? They form vast networks of interdependent nodes through mycorrhizae that connect the roots of all the trees and shrubs in the forest. It's used to pass nutrients and information in the form of electrical and chemical signals throughout the network.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network

In what way does a corporation fit the definition of an ai that all these other things do not?

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#75

Post by free_rms »

dragonwriter wrote: post #68
free_rms wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. Most of the mainstream media ran headlines predicting 99% chance of a Hillary win and a few of them sniped at Nate Silver for giving Trump a 30% chance (stupid tech bros). A single contrarian take doesn't undermine that trend.

> Most of the mainstream media The mainstream media and the intellectual class have very little overlap.

The intellectual class media I should say, then. NYT, Washington Post, etc.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#76

Post by fiblye »

free_rms wrote: post #66
jrumbut wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very untrue, even if we take nobody as a little overstatement, half of the election prediction models had him above 10% chance of winning (FiveThirtyEight had him at 29%, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential... ). WBUR, Boston's NPR news station, published in their blog "Cognoscenti" an article titled "Why Donald Trump will Win in November" in May of 2016 ( https://www.wbur.org/cognosc…

Eh. Most of the mainstream media ran headlines predicting 99% chance of a Hillary win and a few of them sniped at Nate Silver for giving Trump a 30% chance (stupid tech bros). A single contrarian take doesn't undermine that trend.

The 99% number so often paraded as a sign of failure wasn't a 99% chance of being president. It was a 99% chance of winning the popular vote.

That prediction was correct, and by a decently large margin. But losers often become president because of the electoral college (it's happened 5 times already), and losers will continue to benefit for years to come.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#77

Post by IggleSniggle »

Stierlitz wrote: post #50
ALittleLight wrote: post #19

I found a couple errors early on that dissuaded me from continuing to read. One was the idea that the author could rule out the singularity because he wasn't aware of progress toward self-motivated AI that would be something like our own intelligence. This seems like a limited view to me because we wouldn't need self-motivation at all in AI to hit the singularity. Humans can supply the self motivation. Suppose I'm us…

@ALittleLight: “.. One was the idea that the author could rule out the singularity ..” Your consciousness uploaded and then downloaded into a synthetic human like body isn't ever going to be you. As the man said “transhumanism is a warmed-over Christian heresy”.

I find the notion of a coherent self / consciousness to be hogwash anyway. The "self aware" "conscious" brain is a wholistic entity, with what you ate yesterday causing moods that alter your train of thought etc etc, with multiple competing interests vying to control the larger organism to their own ends.

The Ship of Theseus is the warmed-over Christian heresy. A brain is an organism with a symbiotic tight coupling to a meat bag, and the brain itself a similar cooperation by accident.

An organism can develop that builds new tight "synthetic" couplings; it isn't sci-fi. It's partially released today. It's just that we are so normalized to the interfaces of smart phones, keyboards, monitors, steering wheels, and so on that we didn't notice it's arrival.

More exotic, more tightly coupled interfaces also exist today (there exist direct-to-brain interfaces that provide a new sensory feedback loop that you brain can adapt to), they're just not as competitive currently with thousands of years of neural optimization of hands/eyes/nose/touch.

Why would you want to do this? Who knows. Why do we want to do anything? Maybe a person wants to be part machine as a lizard-brain driven reaction to a low-oxygen office environment that sees no viable way out.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#78

Post by nojs »

The comparison between corporations optimising for profit to algorithms optimising for engagement, and the associated mispriced externalities in both cases being similar, is interesting. But otherwise this reads as a cookie-cutter rant about evil corporations and *ist AI without much deeper insight.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#79

Post by aasasd »

loa_in_ wrote: post #57
autokad wrote: post #10

>"Science fiction is written by people embedded within a society with expectations and political assumptions that bias us towards looking at the shiny surface of new technologies rather than asking how human beings will use them, and to taking narratives of progress at face value rather than asking what hidden agenda they serve." And be prepared for the most agenda ridden text you have read in a long time.

That's absolutely not what I associate science fiction with. Stanisław Lem for example couldn't be further from taking shiny technology at face value

Lem was disgusted at contemporary Western science fiction for the exact reason of it being techno-fetishistic. He was in opposition to sci-fi mainstream, not in it.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#80

Post by jhomedall »

Stierlitz wrote: post #50
ALittleLight wrote: post #19

I found a couple errors early on that dissuaded me from continuing to read. One was the idea that the author could rule out the singularity because he wasn't aware of progress toward self-motivated AI that would be something like our own intelligence. This seems like a limited view to me because we wouldn't need self-motivation at all in AI to hit the singularity. Humans can supply the self motivation. Suppose I'm us…

@ALittleLight: “.. One was the idea that the author could rule out the singularity ..” Your consciousness uploaded and then downloaded into a synthetic human like body isn't ever going to be you. As the man said “transhumanism is a warmed-over Christian heresy”.

Why would it not be you?

If I replace a single one of your neurons with a mechanical replacement, are you still you? What if I replace half? All?

If you walk across a room, are you still you? What if I break you down, and reassemble you at the other side of the room, using the same atoms? What if I only use half the original atoms? What if I freeze you, move you across the room, and then dethaw you?

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