by the same author: http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html
There is no A.I.
31–40 of 523 posts
Re: There is no A.I.
#32This 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…
I try to remember that it doesn't matter if the algorithms are really AI or just cosplaying. If the end result is something that can behave like a malicious AI, whether or not it's aware may not matter so much. Maybe it's worse really since it's really not aware of what it does.
Re: There is no A.I.
#33For 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 sm…
His thinking seems much clearer than most of the discourse around this technology.
But I think that a better way of thinking about these systems is an imperfect world model analogy. Not a made-of-people analogy.
These models are not made of people. People helped gathering data about the world around us. And that data allowed to build a world model. Which includes models of people, along with everything else.
And it’s a world model, not a human civilization model. Data goes through the funnel of The Pile and the likes, but ultimately the predictive model is of the universe, not that of humans.
Re: There is no A.I.
#34For 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?
Descartes "evil demon" from 1641 says Wikipedia is the philosophical idea in all it's forms short of "but with a computer"
Anyone got anything earlier? Wouldn't surprise me.
Re: There is no A.I.
#35For 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
> As a full time philosopher in the CTO’s office at MSFT
Is that like Shingy, the AOL digital prophet?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/crystal-ball-3
Re: There is no A.I.
#36Can we just backronym AI to Approximate Intelligence and carry on?
There are so many dangers and possibilities of AI that are fascinating, and none of them are even remotely as interesting as those of actual animal and human intelligence.
It's as if AI is held up as a mirror to our stupidity, and the Turing Test is how we measure ourselves against our models of computation. I'm really weirded out by the fear and exploitation being demonstrated.
There's more to reality, and intelligence, than mathematical models we currently use and pretend to understand.
“Why should I refuse a good dinner simply because I don’t understand the digestive processes involved?”
— Oliver Heaviside
Re: There is no A.I.
#37My cynical AI opinion is that if it truly was revolutionary, we would be seeing private companies or governments use it internally to massively boost their productivity or achieve otherwise impossible feats. Instead, all we're seeing are consumer products or half-baked integrations that are another way to further centralize data collection.
Talks about all-powerful, malevolent AI or requesting to halt AI development just sounds like baiting for regulary capture to me. If AI research or use is deemed dangerous, it becomes even harder for startups or individuals to compete with established companies.
Also, I am not concerned about an all-powerful AI in the slightest. Humanity is excellent at oppressing others, and I have no doubt we'd be equally good at oppressing a true AI as well.
Re: There is no A.I.
#38GPT4 appears very intelligent when you discuss program code with it. It simply crazy; it can write SNOBOL4 code to extract a field from /etc/passwd.
When you discuss other things, it goes off the rails a lot more. For instance, I have had it quote some passages of classic English poetry to me, stating blankly that those passages contain certain words. The passages did not contain any traces of those words or even remotely similar words. In that situation, GPT4 was being dumber than /bin/grep, which can confirm that some piece of text doesn't contain a string.
GPT4 is deliberately trained as a coding technician, so that it will convince programmers who will become its advocates.
1. Programmers are vain and believe that everything they do requires great intelligence. (Not just some of it.)
2. GPT4 can "talk shop" with programmers, saying apparently intelligent things, perform complex refactorings, and intuit understanding of a piece of code with minimal context based on meaningful identifier names, and so on.
3. Thus, some programmers will falsely conclude that it's highly intelligent, like them.
To be sure, what the technology does is unmistakably a form intelligence. It solves complex problems of symbol manipulation and logic, in flimsy contexts. To deny that it is artificial intelligence is silly.
AI /= AGI
That's not where the goalposts are for the definition of AI.
Computers playing chess is AI. Google Assistant is AI. An expert system from 1990 is AI.
Re: There is no A.I.
#39All 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…
Correlation is not causation. It feels more like smarter automation to me.
Re: There is no A.I.
#40Just another poor person in a stage of grief. LLMs are effective at both memorization and reasoning. They are inevitable in the same way trains were inevitable. Let's just figure out how best to use these and move forward as we always have.