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There is no A.I.

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Re: There is no A.I.

#151

Post by coldtea »

wefarrell wrote: post #117
Animats wrote: 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 will always need a charismatic human being to be the figurehead of an organization, so I don’t think AI will ever replace CEOs. They will wind up making the important decisions though.

What we'll probably wont need or have will be masses of consumers. Without those you don't need charismatic CEOs either. Stock markets and charismatic CEOs are a pre-A.I. concern.

Re: There is no A.I.

#152

Post by coldtea »

crabmusket wrote: post #128
puzzledobserver wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you see a connection between limited liability and AI, or are you going in the direction of "free gifts to corporations"? I'm trying to understand how limited liability interacts with AI and corporations.

If people running corporations are personally responsible (with no "limited liability" protections) they can't just play fast and loose letting AI make decisions.

Re: There is no A.I.

#153

Post by earthboundkid »

harry8 wrote: post #34
ShamelessC wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. https://iep.utm.edu/evil-new/

Descartes explicitly wrote about automatons and telling them apart from people using language and reasoning as sign posts (“the Turing test” three hundred years before Turing).

Re: There is no A.I.

#154

Post by coldtea »

sclarisse wrote: post #126
counttheforks wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Corporations have rights because they are owned by humans and those humans have rights. Corporations are just a convenient way to do things together, like conduct a business and own property. Corporate personhood is just a legal abstraction to represent those peoples’ rights, a facade pattern that lets multi-person groups neatly fit in existing laws that might discuss individuals. Corporations like Citizens United ca…

>Corporations have rights because they are owned by humans and those humans have rights.

One does not really follow from another. Washing machines are also "owned by humans" but they don't get rights.

>Corporations are just a convenient way to do things together, like conduct a business and own property. Corporate personhood is just a legal abstraction to represent those peoples’ rights, a facade pattern that lets multi-person groups neatly fit in existing laws that might discuss individuals.

Doesn't really follow either. Why would it need to be "corporate personhood" and not just a "corporate law"? Why did "personhood" have to enter the picture?

Re: There is no A.I.

#155

Post by AmericanChopper »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #122
wefarrell wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will always need a charismatic human being to be the figurehead of an organization, so I don’t think AI will ever replace CEOs. They will wind up making the important decisions though.

Neither Tim Cook or Jeff Bezos comes across as particularly charismatic. I would say they are in their positions because of their vision and execution, despite not being particularly charismatic. So, if an AI CEO can execute better than human CEOs, it will dominate.

They evidently meet some definition of charisma in their ability to influence the people around them. That said, I give you the least charismatic flag wave in Formula 1 history:

https://youtu.be/3aG5HEih-O4

Re: There is no A.I.

#156

Post by jackmott42 »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #115
ravenstine wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It statistically outputs the next probable value of text. There is a lot of math related text in the CommonCrawl (likely the biggest source of it's training). That is all the company who owns it claims that it does. There is no calculation, therefor no basic arithmetic being done correctly.

emergent behavior does happen with neural networks. It is correct to say that GPT 4 doesn't do math correctly, but it may be incorrect to say a large language model can't in principle.

Re: There is no A.I.

#158

Post by coldtea »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #65
tracerbulletx wrote: post #27

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…

I generally agree with you, but I think this argument overlooks the lack of an obvious reward function in large language models. GPT-N has no survival instinct, because there is no existential threat of death, no fitness function to optimize to extend its survival at any cost. Without this need to survive, there can be no motivation, and without motivation there can be no intent. And without intent, can there truly b…

>Without this need to survive, there can be no motivation, and without motivation there can be no intent.

I'm not sure that's as clear cut as you make it sound.

For example curiocity could be a fine engine for motivation as well, even if you don't care if you'll survive or not.

Re: There is no A.I.

#159

Post by coldtea »

Swizec wrote: post #50
xz0r wrote: 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.

>Elevators used to be proof that machines can think

Did they? When? By who?

Re: There is no A.I.

#160

Post by preommr »

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

I don't see anything there that uniquely qualifies him to be an expert on this matter.

- He popularized the term 'virtual reality' in the late 80s,

- Did a bunch of stuff with music

- Spent a whole lot of time warning against social media

- Spent a whole lot of time warning against what I consider to be the best parts of the internet like Wikipedia

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