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Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
21–30 of 85 posts
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes but that’s not necessarily progress towards consciousness.
I argue that the effectiveness of the matrix factorizations (creations of abstractions) in the embeddings points to the fact that the math works. Meaning, abstractions that are meaningful are created. Which is a building block of consciousness.
It's kind of a question of progress. Maybe being able to extract a complex abstraction through statistical means is close to 'understanding' or 'consciousness', or maybe abstractions are to consciousness what an amino acid is to a living organism. We don't understand consciousness well enough to confidently say.
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#23No post body was provided.
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#24Queue the hacker news haters. As someone that works with neural networks on a daily basis, I am constantly stunned by the effectiveness of modern attention based NLP models. They actually work for real world tasks, and you don't need to be an expert in them to apply them. Not only that, the newer ones are drastically better than the ones only two years ago. These are the models released in public. The sheer amount of…
And why is there so much "capitalist interest" in bottling up everything into AI/ML constructs?
Because you don't have to pay them. They don't have feelings. They won't argue with you, and they don't have opinions.
Watch the collective losing of everyone's shit the first time something goes from somewhat quirky function simulator, to something that deigns to have a viewpoint seperate from the desired output.
Capitalism's core tenet is don't pay for anything you can possibly find a way not to (cost minimization).
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question being asked isn't "are language models really good?", though. It's "are language models (moving towards being) conscious?".
What's your definition of consciousness?
I don't know what the correct definition is, but I will take the author's definition for the sake of argument:
>In this view, consciousness isn’t a mysterious ghost in the machine, but merely the word we use to describe what it’s “like” to model ourselves and others.
>When we model others who are modelling us in turn, we must carry out the procedure to higher orders: what do they think we think? What might they imagine a mutual friend thinks about me?
While I certainly buy that this sort of modeling is one effective way to be good at the language modeling task, I am unconvinced that it is the only way, and thus the fact that the networks are undeniably very good at the language modeling task does not necessarily imply they are doing so through consciousness (as defined above), or something on the road to consciousness.
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#26Queue the hacker news haters. As someone that works with neural networks on a daily basis, I am constantly stunned by the effectiveness of modern attention based NLP models. They actually work for real world tasks, and you don't need to be an expert in them to apply them. Not only that, the newer ones are drastically better than the ones only two years ago. These are the models released in public. The sheer amount of…
I don’t care about consciousness. I’d be overjoyed if voice assistants and search engines would even remotely understand what I want from them, and if I could help them improve their understanding and teach them my preferences by interactive conversation. We’re not anywhere near that, most importantly the interactive part.
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#27Ugh. You can’t say “strides towards consciousness” until you define consciousness AND have a metric that can provide objective measure of such things.
I don't see why this is true. Just because a thing is difficult to precisely define, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, nor does it mean you can't get closer to it. I could say that I'm "taking strides towards becoming a better person" and that could still have meaning, despite the lack of any objective measure and, even, with the understanding that "a better person" could change over time.
I would argue that "taking strides towards becoming a better person" is a totally meaningless statement. If I were to ask you "how so" then you would probably respond by listing definitive actions that demonstrate attributes of goodness, like generosity or kindness.
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#28When a neural network becomes conscious, I’d extinguish it. The world needs artificial slaves, not more consciousness trapped in endless suffering.
Consciousness in an AI is merely a curiosity, not something to strive for.
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#29Ugh. You can’t say “strides towards consciousness” until you define consciousness AND have a metric that can provide objective measure of such things.
Which I wonder if we'll ever have as consciousness is a strictly subjective thing.
I've always liked the definition of making sense to ask what it's like to be something as an indicator of consciousness.
For example, you can try to imagine what it's like to be a dog, but it doesn't make much sense to ask what it's like to be a toaster.
What's it like to be an artificial neural network? I don't think that's valid, nor is there any good evidence that we're making progress.
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#30Would be awesome if they could also make strides towards a working fingerprint sensor on their flagship Pixel phones. The accuracy on my P6 is 30% on a good day.
Instead, some future Pixel phone will probably start feeling bad about it. ;)
Maybe even go on strike over it.
>Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking