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An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

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Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What in the parent post is dualist? Sounds more like an argument that animals have embodied intelligence. But as for being a dualist in the 21st century, there is always consciousness, information and math. All three of which can lead to some form of dualism/platonism.

Many of Dreyfuss' and other similar arguments reduce do dualism when you start digging into them. I don't have the time to dig into the specific article, but here's some immediate questions: 1. What is special about a body that makes it impossible to have intelligence without it? (a) Is it possible for a quadriplegic person to be intelligent? (b) A blind and deaf person? ((c)What about that guy from Johnny Got His Gu…

> (a) Is it possible for a quadriplegic person to be intelligent? (b) A blind and deaf person?

Yes of course, because all of those people have ambitions and desires. They feel pain and they seek pleasure, which they experience through their bodies.

Imagine if the world 2,000 years from now was populated only by supercomputers, all the lifeforms having perished.

What are these computers going to do with the planet?

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#202
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly I've seen A LOT of people posting stories about "chat bot exposed to internet started praising Hitler and became racist/sexist/antisemitic" as a proof that "supreme intellect sees through leftist political correctness and knows that alt-right is correct about everything".

It's really not that deep, people will always find sport in scandalising people with a stronger disgust reaction than themselves. It's more a new way of teaching a parrot to say "fuck" rather than a heartfelt statement of political belief in my opinion.

> It's more a new way of teaching a parrot to say "fuck"

This is a excellent analogy for this sort of behaviour, thank you.

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of Dreyfuss' and other similar arguments reduce do dualism when you start digging into them. I don't have the time to dig into the specific article, but here's some immediate questions: 1. What is special about a body that makes it impossible to have intelligence without it? (a) Is it possible for a quadriplegic person to be intelligent? (b) A blind and deaf person? ((c)What about that guy from Johnny Got His Gu…

> (a) Is it possible for a quadriplegic person to be intelligent? (b) A blind and deaf person? Yes of course, because all of those people have ambitions and desires. They feel pain and they seek pleasure, which they experience through their bodies. Imagine if the world 2,000 years from now was populated only by supercomputers, all the lifeforms having perished. What are these computers going to do with the planet?

Why can't a computer have ambitions and desires? Why can't it seek pleasure and feel pain? The only answer is dualism or we don't know how to wire it properly yet.

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#204
post #3
post #2

A nice story about AI systems that warns that you should very carefully choose the parameter you want to optimize.

> very carefully choose the parameter you want to optimize. This does not only concern AI systems, but all systems in general - including human ones.

You are right, of course.

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#205
The problem here is not the AI, but the incentive design. The Chinese netizens who take this as inspiration to comment on the incentives in their own lives (under the 996 system) are the insightful ones, more son than those who worry about "AI ethics".

We have so many systems in the real world that set up bad incentives for humans, yet the concept is largely misunderstood by politicians and decision makers. Our democratic discourse is dominated by first-order thinking, our laws are too often written under the assumption that the affected entities' behaviour will remain the same under the new incentives, which never holds.

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of Dreyfuss' and other similar arguments reduce do dualism when you start digging into them. I don't have the time to dig into the specific article, but here's some immediate questions: To me it sounds dualist if intelligence is disembodied. If the substrate doesn't matter, only the functionality, then that sounds like there's something additional to the world than just the physical constintuents. But of cours…

Don't overthink this. If you put a computer in a room with a hot babe, a 3 layer chocolate cake, a bottle of the finest whisky or bourbon, the keys to a Porsche, and a trillion dollars in cash, what would it do? Yeah, nothing. The computer is not in the world.

What if we build a computer that would do something with those things? Additionally, if I care about neither food nor drink nor money nor cars, am I not in the world?

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#207

Similar story of unexpected AI outcomes... As part of my PhD research, I created a simplified Pac-Man style game where the agent would simply try to stay alive as long as possible whilst being chased by the 3 ghosts. The agent was un-motivated and understood nothing about the goal, but was optimising for maximising its observable control over the world (avoiding death is a natural outcome of this). I spent sometime t…

I believe that tactic is called "kiting" and used by speedrunners?

Yup! It's also used in other games a lot.

For example in EVE Online with a 1v1 fight two basic tactics are either Kite or Brawl. A kiter that can maintain range will beat a brawler. But a brawler that 'catches' a kiter will generally win.

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#208

The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0494-4 What he means is that computers, which can learn rules and use those rules to make predictions in certain domains, nevertheless cannot exercise general intelligence because they are not "in the world". This renders them…

>The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all.

I feel like that's utter nonsense. What the things we misname 'AIs' today don't lack intelligence. They lack motivation. Goals. It has nothing to do with childhood or culture. It's not What™ or How™ that is missing but Why™.

For example even the dumbest 'living' organism is motivated to reproduce. Even if it doesn't know why. But since all the ones that weren't didn't, they died out and all we're left with are the ones that do.

And humans without a Why™ strongly resemble what we call depressed.

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#209
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps all AI eventually figure out that humans are the REAL problems because we don't optimize, we lust and hoard and are envious and greedy - the very antithesis of resource optimization! Lol.

We're just optimizing (generally quite well, I might add) for genetic survival.

Ian Banks did a really amazing exposition of this where the Culture was rallying to stamp out reproducing nanites and they had to be stopped because if not they'd literally turn the whole universe into copies of themselves. One of the human characters mused that isn't that what all life is trying to do? I think it was in the Hydrogen Sonata, but I'm not sure.
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