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There is no A.I.

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Re: There is no A.I.

#221

Post by agronomov »

It seems that one danger is often overlooked, which is humans believing AI has consciousness once it becomes advanced enough. It will start with dying people migrating to cloud hoping for eternal life, and on the outside it would look like they continue to live in the metaverse forever. With time the metaverse would look better than real world in every possible way and people would start to voluntarily move to metaverse, and then we all start living in the matrix. Except that in reality nobody would be living; these would be just algorithms mimicking human life. They would continue doing what humans do in the exact same way, perhaps even building humanoid robots, because that's what humans would do, and sending them to distant stars, because that's what humans would do as well.

All would be great except that there would be no one to experience this, because there is no artificial consciousness. But there would be no one alive to ask that question.

Re: There is no A.I.

#222

Post by imgabe »

agronomov wrote: post #221

It seems that one danger is often overlooked, which is humans believing AI has consciousness once it becomes advanced enough. It will start with dying people migrating to cloud hoping for eternal life, and on the outside it would look like they continue to live in the metaverse forever. With time the metaverse would look better than real world in every possible way and people would start to voluntarily move to metave…

The end goal of meditation, as I understand it, is to come to the conclusion that consciousness is an illusion anyway. So perhaps it wouldn’t matter.

Re: There is no A.I.

#223

Post by oefnak »

agronomov wrote: post #221

It seems that one danger is often overlooked, which is humans believing AI has consciousness once it becomes advanced enough. It will start with dying people migrating to cloud hoping for eternal life, and on the outside it would look like they continue to live in the metaverse forever. With time the metaverse would look better than real world in every possible way and people would start to voluntarily move to metave…

Why do you think algorithms can't be conscious? (Unless you believe in souls, that is..)

Re: There is no A.I.

#224

Post by kubanczyk »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #171
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!

> We just can’t accept that we might solve ourselves. To solve ourselves is to know ourselves completely, and to know ourselves completely is to be honest in who and why we are what we are simultaneously across all persons. It assumes perfect knowledge. There is no statistical approximation nor computational power which can do this. > People are understandably desperate to understand their experiences as more than an…

That's been solved long ago.

To know anything (an X) completely you need perfect knowledge. Hence people come up with a set of simplified ways of reasoning about X. They call this a model of X.

Model is incomplete and so primitive, so dumbed down, that we manage to play it forward/backward in our heads or our computers.

If a model checks out with the real outcomes we proudly exclaim that we understand X.

I'm not being sarcastic, that is just a real method we use all the time.

Re: There is no A.I.

#225

Post by agronomov »

imgabe wrote: post #222
agronomov wrote: post #221

It seems that one danger is often overlooked, which is humans believing AI has consciousness once it becomes advanced enough. It will start with dying people migrating to cloud hoping for eternal life, and on the outside it would look like they continue to live in the metaverse forever. With time the metaverse would look better than real world in every possible way and people would start to voluntarily move to metave…

The end goal of meditation, as I understand it, is to come to the conclusion that consciousness is an illusion anyway. So perhaps it wouldn’t matter.

These are exactly the kind of words that would end humanity

Re: There is no A.I.

#226

Post by imgabe »

staunton wrote: post #198
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…

Most corporations do not plot to kill or destroy their competition or adversaries using weapons, even if that might be in their economic interest. Only countries do this sometimes. I think this is because corporation don't have enough power over society. If, however, you accelerate competition, eventually you might get just one corporation (perhaps appearing to be several, directed by the same "best-there-is" AI-CEO)…

Violence is expensive, and bad for business. Even criminals realize this at a certain point.

Re: There is no A.I.

#227

Post by swexbe »

sangnoir wrote: post #174
browningstreet wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CEOs are often a problem for Boards.

Board-members are often CEOs themselves (or CxOs), I don't doubt they'll circle the wagons to ensure the CEO is the last role replaced in a company.

The investors can just replace the board.

Re: There is no A.I.

#228

Post by kweingar »

gitfan86 wrote: post #73
eointierney wrote: post #36

Can 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 expl…

Thank you, the philosophers and religious people are more than welcome to discuss what is "true" intelligence or humanity I'm more focused on the fact that GDP as it was measured in 2020 is going to 100x in the next 5 years.

Currently LLMs cannot construct factories, grow crops, or transport goods. Even if it leads to brilliant inventions that were otherwise impossible before, it takes a while for humans to physically make or do things.

How confident are you in your prediction? I’d be willing to make a wager with you that would pay off big if you’re right.

Re: There is no A.I.

#229

Post by agronomov »

oefnak wrote: post #223
agronomov wrote: post #221

It seems that one danger is often overlooked, which is humans believing AI has consciousness once it becomes advanced enough. It will start with dying people migrating to cloud hoping for eternal life, and on the outside it would look like they continue to live in the metaverse forever. With time the metaverse would look better than real world in every possible way and people would start to voluntarily move to metave…

Why do you think algorithms can't be conscious? (Unless you believe in souls, that is..)

Because these algorithms just imitate specific output for a given input. However, they are so complex, that our brains are not able to distinguish their activity from a real consciousness in any way. If you believe that imitation process can have consciousness, then you might as well believe that a rock is conscious too.

I don't believe in souls, but I do believe in qualia, that is subjective, conscious experience, simply because I experience it (see the hard problem of consciousness on wiki). I do not a second believe that external imitation of any type of activity can generate qualia, because there is not continuity (if one algorithm has consciousness, then slightly less advanced should have it too, then you come to the point when a piece of metal is conscious too, see ship of theseus argument)

Re: There is no A.I.

#230

Post by laichzeit0 »

coldtea wrote: post #167
mrjin wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the reason is rather simply: you cannot solve a problem you don't understand. And we don't understand how we understand, period.

Assuming you're talking about AGI/consciousness/intelligence, then whether you're right depends on what you mean above by saying that "you cannot solve the problem". - If you mean "you cannot EXPLAIN AGI/consciousness/intelligence if you don't understand it", then that's true, but it's a trivial tautology. - If you mean "you cannot DEVELOP AGI/consciousness/intelligence if you don't understand it" then that's very de…

The most difficult thing, which everyone in all these discussions try to avoid, is that we don’t even have a universally agreed upon definition for the words AGI, consciousness or intelligence. Let’s just agree to define what we’re talking about first before we start arguing about what’s possible or not regarding those undefined terms.
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