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There is no A.I.

newyorker.com

91–100 of 523 posts

Re: There is no A.I.

#91
post #50
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correlation is not causation. It feels more like smarter automation to me.

> It feels more like smarter automation to me. Yep. Elevators used to be proof that machines can think. Then compilers, and chess, and go, and search, and … The problem with AI is that as soon as it works, we stop thinking about it as “artificial intelligence” and it becomes “just automation”. Then AI moves to the next goalpost.

But compilers, chess, go and search are all proof that computers could think. We've been discovering as we scale up the hardware that those things appear to be converging to human intelligence with minor tweaks (turns out tree search for chess needed to be combined with matrices and we're most of the way there). ChatGPT can out-reason many people I know and can out-argue a fair number of comments I see on the internet.

If we took this comment at face value we're ending up with a definition of "think" that can't reason, play games or recall information - or it would be outdone by machines. Thinking obviously isn't very important!

Re: There is no A.I.

#92
The author's whole approach to AI is focusing on the supervised learning aspects of AI but ignoring the likelihood that future advancements in AI will come from reinforcement learning - much as how AlphaGo was first bootstrapped on human play but then improved through self play.

On another note, this was amusing: "Many of my friends and colleagues are deeply impressed by their experiences with the latest big models, like GPT-4, and are practically holding vigils to await the appearance of a deeper intelligence. My position is not that they are wrong but that we can’t be sure". Is this supposed to be reassuring?

Re: There is no A.I.

#93
post #87

I'd wager that intelligence is nothing but a reified concept. Something which doesn't innately exist other than as an abstract concept which we have defined, to help us explain complex nature, without the need of fully understanding the underlying complexity giving rise to that nature. Like how cave men used the concept of "gods" for a satisfying explanation for why it rains - we use intelligence to ascertain why som…

In the end we will find out that AI is not that intelligent and since it is so close to mimicking us it will say the same thing about our own intelligence.

Re: There is no A.I.

#94
post #68

The elephant in the room in these discussions of AI is the concept of the corporation. Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are things corporations already do. Deceptive marketing, exploiting customer information, conspiring to keep prices high, creating distractions from things companies are doing, setting up monopolies, lying to customers - the usual. With AI, this can be automated. Most of this is…

This then is the perfect historic opportunity to revist granting personhood to corporations. p.s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood Almost all such legal framings have been motivated by the legal difficulties of applying laws to organized groups of individuals. For example, entering into contracts is legally between two parties. Presumably, the sheer amount of legal reworking necessary to actually cr…

I never really understood this. Can a company go to prison or get the death penalty?

Re: There is no A.I.

#95

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…

"we would be seeing private companies or governments use it internally " What world are you living in, where this isn't happening? Every private company that can use it is using it, Microsoft themselves must be using Copilot. Governments are lining up to train their own LLMs. Commercial and consumer use are not mutually exclusive, in any case. Also "Humanity is excellent at oppressing others, and I have no doubt we'd…

The empire may no longer around but the UK and the Commonwealth still are. They are thriving. France is still around, and despite the protests, is still a wealthy nation. Belgium is still going strong. The US is the richest country in the world. Turkey is still kicking. Despite Nanjing, Japan's economy is to die for.

Re: There is no A.I.

#96
post #68

The elephant in the room in these discussions of AI is the concept of the corporation. Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are things corporations already do. Deceptive marketing, exploiting customer information, conspiring to keep prices high, creating distractions from things companies are doing, setting up monopolies, lying to customers - the usual. With AI, this can be automated. Most of this is…

> Once AI systems can outperform CEOs, investors and boards will insist they be in charge.

I doubt it. You know who sits on those boards? The executives of other companies.

Re: There is no A.I.

#97
post #68

The elephant in the room in these discussions of AI is the concept of the corporation. Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are things corporations already do. Deceptive marketing, exploiting customer information, conspiring to keep prices high, creating distractions from things companies are doing, setting up monopolies, lying to customers - the usual. With AI, this can be automated. Most of this is…

We should not try to achieve consumer protection via laws, like GDPR, that bureaucratically regiment private interaction.

Consumer protection should be promoted through technological means, e.g the EU could have funded development of fingerprintless browser technologies, zero-knowledge proof based identity verification, etc, instead of through GDPR.

Re: There is no A.I.

#98

Ray Kurzweil's most important argument[1] from that one book he wrote two or three times: If AIs can convince us humans they are sentient, we'll believe them. Does that webgpu demo run on anything more than canary yet? In any case, someone is going to fall in love with one of their browser processes soon. I'll guess by mid-August. More rank speculation: by October, some poor soul will post on SO asking how to retriev…

> In any case, someone is going to fall in love with one of their browser processes soon. I'll guess by mid-August.

We've already got Blake Lemoine

Re: There is no A.I.

#99
post #68

The elephant in the room in these discussions of AI is the concept of the corporation. Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are things corporations already do. Deceptive marketing, exploiting customer information, conspiring to keep prices high, creating distractions from things companies are doing, setting up monopolies, lying to customers - the usual. With AI, this can be automated. Most of this is…

This then is the perfect historic opportunity to revist granting personhood to corporations. p.s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood Almost all such legal framings have been motivated by the legal difficulties of applying laws to organized groups of individuals. For example, entering into contracts is legally between two parties. Presumably, the sheer amount of legal reworking necessary to actually cr…

What about limited liability? It seems to me to be an enormous concession to corporations and their shareholders, and which never seems to be questioned in popular consciousness.

Re: There is no A.I.

#100

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…

Since LLMs can't do arithmetic, one has to think there's more going on, at least in the arithmetic part of the brain, than is going on in LLMs.

Dunno if there's some trickery going on under the hood, but GPT-4 does basic arithmetic correctly.
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