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We need a Butlerian Jihad against AI

erikhoel.substack.com

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Re: We need a Butlerian Jihad against AI

#121

Post by dane-pgp »

onethought wrote: post #82
echelon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Andrew Ng is a luminary, but this isn't a great analogy. Humans aren't adapted to a Mars environment, and there's little incentive for us to move there. AI has so many practical uses that everyone is getting in the game and pushing the envelope. A huge amount of money is being spent on ML, and a wealth of expertise is being developed.

I can teach a human to drive in < 1 day. An AI… so far 10+ years. I agree there is crazy progress and investment, but it’s also not entirely certain how far we can push AI.

How long would it take you to teach a human to beat the world champion at Chess or Go?

Re: We need a Butlerian Jihad against AI

#122

Post by dane-pgp »

29athrowaway wrote: post #48

The paradox is: - Our problems are getting more complex. We need better AI. - Better AI is a threat.

> We need better AI.

I think that's the assumption I would target. Perhaps we could settle for better educated/organised/incentivised humans, or just a simpler world.

Re: We need a Butlerian Jihad against AI

#123

Post by zepto »

javajosh wrote: post #117
at_a_remove wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not physically disfigured, no. But ... constrained. Narrowed. Awaiting a chance to provide answers, but not questions.

By that definition, professional guitarists are disfigured, constrained, narrowed. They go through painful physical changes (callouses, uncomfortable fingerings), and learned to be a guitarist to the exclusion of so much else they could have done or learned. Plus many of them don't even compose music, and just play the music of others - never providing their own musical ideas, only regurgitating the work of others.

Yes?

Re: We need a Butlerian Jihad against AI

#124

Post by brodouevencode »

devindotcom wrote: post #17

Regardless of the merit of this particular piece, the portion of Butler's Erewhon comprising "The Book of the Machines" makes for very interesting and forward thinking reading. You can skip directly to it here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1906/1906-h/1906-h.htm#chap2... But the context in the story is fairly important - it takes place in a society that has essentially already carried out its own Butlerian Jihad a…

Why would it not be scalable? The individual communities should be allowed to make their own decisions. In the US this was the original way of approaching problems (unfortunately this is becoming less and less the case).

Re: We need a Butlerian Jihad against AI

#125

Post by verdverm »

layfellow wrote: post #107
jrochkind1 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is literally no possible future with dignity for all consciousnesses... that'd be pretty depressing.

Ian M. Bank's The Culture universe is such a future, which I think is attainble in a few millennia. Powerful super-human AI minds will eventually and inevitably take over; which I think is fine provided they recognize all sentient beings as equals.

Equal how or in what regard?

Re: We need a Butlerian Jihad against AI

#126

Post by Radim »

jaked122 wrote: post #101
Radim wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've taken a species, the wolf, and made it smarter In what universe is a dog smarter than a wolf? I think you got the correlation between animal domestication and their intelligence backward :)

Yeah, but have you tried getting a wolf to guard a sheep? \They're nowhere near as clever at that

And have you tried getting a dolphin to guard a sheep? :-)

Yet dolphins are generally acknowledged to be smarter than either a dog or a wolf!

In other words, maybe guarding sheep is not the hallmark of intelligence.

Re: We need a Butlerian Jihad against AI

#127

Post by perl4ever »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #80
perl4ever wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The remaining 10% that's 90% of the effort, is interrupting what is being done and changing context. Without this capacity, "AI" is just a tiny shard of a complete mind. I don't think anyone's really started grappling with this yet.

That's really not the 10% I was talking about. We don't need that part to follow some lanes. Or the other way to put it is that all the other code is the first 90%, and then the "remaining 10% that's 90% of the effort" is the object recognition that was supposedly easy.

>We don't need that part to follow some lanes.

We do! I live near a highway and every time I use a particular on-ramp, the tar stripes make my car think it's going off the road. It never learns, and it has no plan B.

It's easy to do the lane-keeping, it's completely terra incognita to decide when to abandon the standard method that works 90% of the time. And what to do next.

Re: We need a Butlerian Jihad against AI

#128

Post by javajosh »

zepto wrote: post #123
javajosh wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that definition, professional guitarists are disfigured, constrained, narrowed. They go through painful physical changes (callouses, uncomfortable fingerings), and learned to be a guitarist to the exclusion of so much else they could have done or learned. Plus many of them don't even compose music, and just play the music of others - never providing their own musical ideas, only regurgitating the work of others.

Yes?

If you're up-in-arms about "soul disfigurement", perhaps it's better to lobby against professional musicianship first before lobbying against the use of hypothetical mentats?

Re: We need a Butlerian Jihad against AI

#129

Post by pmoriarty »

sammalloy wrote: post #16

I think it would be easier to emphasize and teach philosophy and ethics of computer science. The problem is, they can't even do this for business students, so focusing on the existential risk of AI alone is a drop of rain in the ocean. If you follow the topic, of let's say, sustainability, then you know this is a huge blind spot in economics and business. Look at only palm oil production as an example. The current th…

It's easy to teach ethics as an academic subject. It's a lot harder to teach people to be ethical in their life.

Re: We need a Butlerian Jihad against AI

#130

Post by cromwellian »

We don't even have a definition of consciousness or a way to measure it, or even a way to define 'general intelligence', or a meaningful way to measure 'super intelligence'.

And yet we're talking about banning stuff right now which is little more than slightly better statistical regressions?

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