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There is no A.I.

newyorker.com

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Re: There is no A.I.

#21

Post by atdrummond »

williamtrask wrote: post #4

For those who don’t know about the author, he is most well known a founder of the field of virtual reality. As a full time philosopher in the CTO’s office at MSFT, and the originator of concepts like data dignity, he’s uniquely qualified to write this kind of piece. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier

Jaron has an amazing publicist. I challenge anyone to read Wikipedia’s history of VR (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#History) and assess him to fairly be called a founder. There was serious work being done for over a decade before he even started his firm; VPL never came close to being a standard and the VR tech today has hardly any relation to his “post symbolic” language.

He’s certainly a very smart and interesting guy but my alarm bells go off when his supposed achievements are used as justification for the piece being valid rather than… well, any of the arguments he made.

Re: There is no A.I.

#23

Post by zarzavat »

majormajor wrote: post #17
thejarren wrote: post #8

This article initially seems to be arguing over semantics, saying that AI isn't AGI, which most people would agree with. Then talks about data dignity, which is interesting but a bit of a tangent. My understanding of the concern over AGI, or even an all-powerful "AI" isn't that it's not truly self-aware, but rather that it's motives are not in line with humanity's motives. It doesn't matter if it trains on data by hu…

My read is that the author doesn't think today's tools are particularly close to AGI that has its own motives, or that it's at all useful to characterize these tools as "having motives" at all. There are those who disagree with how close we are to "AGI" with today's LLMs, but as an outsider, the author seems pretty well-qualified in his position at MS Research compared to some of the less-informed prognosticators. Ev…

Why would AGI need to have its own motives? AGI = artificial, general intelligence. Meaning intelligence that is generally applicable to all domains. AGI doesn’t mean building an artificial human with all human quirks.

Re: There is no A.I.

#24

Post by toss1 »

thejarren wrote: post #8

This article initially seems to be arguing over semantics, saying that AI isn't AGI, which most people would agree with. Then talks about data dignity, which is interesting but a bit of a tangent. My understanding of the concern over AGI, or even an all-powerful "AI" isn't that it's not truly self-aware, but rather that it's motives are not in line with humanity's motives. It doesn't matter if it trains on data by hu…

>>It doesn't matter if it trains on data by humans if it still doesn't have the moral compass of a human.

True, and I'm not sure that even the moral compass of humans is entirely trustworthy. The quick version is what happened to Tay in the hands of random humans, and the larger context is the fact that the authoritarianism and racism are still very active threats in the arc of history. In 10,000 years of civilization, they still haven't been eliminated. Not sure how even training on human works would eliminate it...

Re: There is no A.I.

#25

Post by ggm »

Don't like Lanier, massive self publicist but he's doing gods work here, having a voice, being heard and speaking truths.

So dislike of the individual aside, like what I'm reading this time.

Re: There is no A.I.

#27

Post by tracerbulletx »

All of these arguments seem to think that the brain isn't also generating a statistical ordering of semantic words and actions. Obviously the brain has a way more complex network of subsystems with various specialties than the artificial models we have today and is able to generalize language, math, and positional reasoning and mix it with the older parts of the brain for reward and training mechanisms and it can do it in real time, but it kind of seems like modern models are showing so much flexibility at different tasks and so much generality it's feeling like they have something in common with the building blocks of the brain that might get us there.

Re: There is no A.I.

#28

Post by ShamelessC »

williamtrask wrote: post #4

For those who don’t know about the author, he is most well known a founder of the field of virtual reality. As a full time philosopher in the CTO’s office at MSFT, and the originator of concepts like data dignity, he’s uniquely qualified to write this kind of piece. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier

> the philosopher who first conceived the idea of virtual reality

What does that even mean?

Re: There is no A.I.

#29

Post by ncr100 »

Summary (very high level): The article is about purposeful action.

It points out how AI, among other technologies, is being designed by us types here on HN & our employers, and consumed by our users, to serve the ends of the technologies themselves.

> If society, economics, culture, technology, or any other spheres of activity are to serve people, that can only be because we decide that people enjoy a special status to be served.

My take: We do seriously need to decide on the limits for AI. Then, as a tech maker culture, push requirements into the AI field.

I agree with the author that we should anticipate our users' desires to protect their information, and also to respect the rights of the originators of the model data our AIs are trained in. For AI, it will be damaging for us (techies) to do like we usually do, and blindly run up against the wall of Regulation and Societal blow-back as we zealously expand & apply our new toy inventions, since AI is dramatically impactful to all human labor.

Motivating questions: When should any given AI be disassembled? How should this happen?

[Meta tip: read this article from the end paragraph to the beginning]

Re: There is no A.I.

#30

Post by coffeebeqn »

toss1 wrote: post #24
thejarren wrote: post #8

This article initially seems to be arguing over semantics, saying that AI isn't AGI, which most people would agree with. Then talks about data dignity, which is interesting but a bit of a tangent. My understanding of the concern over AGI, or even an all-powerful "AI" isn't that it's not truly self-aware, but rather that it's motives are not in line with humanity's motives. It doesn't matter if it trains on data by hu…

>>It doesn't matter if it trains on data by humans if it still doesn't have the moral compass of a human. True, and I'm not sure that even the moral compass of humans is entirely trustworthy. The quick version is what happened to Tay in the hands of random humans, and the larger context is the fact that the authoritarianism and racism are still very active threats in the arc of history. In 10,000 years of civilizatio…

I’m not sure what other works an AI would be trained on. I guess we should hope they’re wiser than us humans
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