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There is no A.I.

newyorker.com

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Re: There is no A.I.

#51

Post by b33j0r »

ethanbond wrote: post #47
b33j0r wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just can’t accept that we might solve ourselves. People are understandably desperate to understand their experiences as more than an encoding of a thing that might be explained. And all of our surprising wins and awful mistakes had explainable reasons, dammit; it wasn’t just a misfiring of trained statistical networks!

Or we just don't know how brains work very well and we shouldn't act like we do.

Not that I disagree. It just seems like some of society’s reaction is to slow down on researching the very question.

Re: There is no A.I.

#52

Post by monero-xmr »

sordina wrote: post #15
monero-xmr wrote: post #7

It is possible that AI can perfectly replicate human intelligence. But because it is purely digital, I cannot kill it - I can delete it, copy it, recreate it, and so on but never kill it. Only biological organisms can die. Therefore no matter what happens, there is a distinction between human intelligence and AI. I can destroy an AI creature and the only penalty should be property damage (if relevant).

So if you lost the weights how is that not killing the AI? Is it because it lacks the death experience? If so what about bitrotting the weights incrementally and degrading its inputs?

The AI is digital. It is 1s and 0s and lives in discrete changes.

Living creatures are not digital.

Re: There is no A.I.

#53

Post by toss1 »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #30
toss1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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

Exactly!

We should hope, but hope is not a method for attaining success; that requires a sound plan and work...

Re: There is no A.I.

#55

Post by throwaway8503 »

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

And a roommate of Richard Stallman at one point, AFAIR.

  the easiest way to mismanage a technology is to misunderstand it
Indeed.

His idea of attaching provenance to source of information used in models is a good one, and one that already has rumblings of legal weight behind it (see the various articles about copyright claims in response to GPT/Copilot).

I worry a bit that his argument is too centred on digital information creation. Though I suppose that's the novelty of the most recent pieces of technology called AI - they affect information workers, people who already use a computer interface for some large percentage of their work. Still, the topic of /physical work/ : fieldwork, factorywork, servicework, seems one or more steps removed from LLMs. The management of that work may be affected, but the work itself has already (it seems to me) gone through its first computer-revolution shock.

Edit: I'll add that the whole article has a 90s-Wired feel to it, which is refreshing to see. There's been something of a slowdown in tech-revolutions for the past decade, and it's not original to say that we may be at the start of a new one.

Re: There is no A.I.

#56

Post by freitzkriesler2 »

rolodato wrote: post #37

My 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…

It's just starting, https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-image-china-video-game-layof...

The internet took 10 years to develop into a mature ecosystem where normies could utilize it with cease.

Re: There is no A.I.

#57

Post by blazespin »

atdrummond wrote: post #21
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 sm…

It's absolutely ludicrous nonsense. It's like saying someone invented the idea of 'wondering what would happen if the sun blew up'.

VR is a trivial idea that pretty much everyone has thought about at some point. It's implementation is hard to do, and if I had to point to anyone there, it'd be Carmack who's probably done the most.

Re: There is no A.I.

#58

Post by gsatic »

Wikipedia is quite amazing in terms of that social collaboration he is talking about.

For example, during the recent pentagon leaks I was watching that Wikipedia page evolve day by day. It was much more interesting and faster than any news org covering the issue. Plus it was quite diverse.

1. Cuz of the sheer number of ppl that were drawn in and were focusing on it.

2.There were experienced editors making sure things didnt get to crazy, info had decent sources, filtering out crap etc

3. There were domain experts showing up from all over

So we get a constantly evolving real time decent summary of the subject. Strip away the real time aspect, which is really not a big requirement for most knowledge ppl look up, and it does feel ChatGPT is producing something similar as a wiki page. So in a sense it seems to have generalised the above steps.

Re: There is no A.I.

#59

Post by semireg »

This article depresses me in how wrong it is. It’s like reading about someone in Ancient Greece writing about how fire works. I’m almost certain we are doomed - which one could argue is a rather conservative philosophical opinion.

Re: There is no A.I.

#60

Post by rufus_foreman »

>> the black-box nature of our current A.I. tools must end. The systems must be made more transparent. We need to get better at saying what is going on inside them and why

But humans can't do that either. I have opinions, preferences, ideas, and if you ask me to tell you exactly why or where they came from I can't tell you. I mean I have an idea, some idea, but I can't really tell you.

To you, I am a black box.

Are you going to tell me, "you must be made more transparent"?

There is A.I. but it scares people (like me).

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