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There is no A.I.

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Re: There is no A.I.

#241

Post by stabbles »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #61
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…

And even if something capable of all the aspects of human cognition were created with no internal resemblance to cognition, so what, it still works. There's a reason it's called "artificial" intelligence, not "natural intelligence identical to human brains except in silicon instead of neurons". It's like when the wheel was invented saying it's not "true" transportation because it doesn't involve legs, or when the pho…

I agree that you shouldn't dismiss an airplane by the fact that it doesn't flap its wings, but we also don't call them artificial birds. The debate is around the word 'intelligence', which is misleading.

Re: There is no A.I.

#242

Post by Lio »

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)…

> 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.

When discussing what corporations might do it's always worth remembering United Fruit Company and the origins of the phrase "Banana Republic"[1]. United Fruit company was still doing this within living memory.

Alternatively you could look at the current crop of sportswear companies. When given the choice between "made by forced labour" and $5 more the market goes with cheap every time.

In the absences of legal restraints corporations will most definitely optimise away democracy and human rights in favour profits.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

Re: There is no A.I.

#243

Post by nanidin »

Lio wrote: post #237
Joeri wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many times have you read about someone locked out of their account and having no recourse except taking it to HN and hoping a human on the inside reaches out? Imagine if that was every corporation, and some of them had zero humans on the inside.

Whilst it's interesting to imagine every company being run by the most aggressively rent seeking MBA-like AI, I don't think that will ever be the entire market. I would guess it all comes down to risk. The future won't be uniform, it'll be poorly defused, just like then present. People will make a value judgement on the types of corporations they want to deal with. The sort of company that no has employees will by ne…

The Chinese eBay seller brought to mind the concept of the Chinese Room[0] and how it is a reflection of current LLM’s. Perhaps also influenced by a recent read of Blindsight.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Re: There is no A.I.

#244

Post by FredPret »

bell-cot wrote: post #234
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…

I don't think that scenario actually works. Reason: the superficial, "sounds like a person" AI's don't actually have what it takes to sustain a huge, high-tech society. OTOH, letting the idle rich "move" to the matrix could be a good thing...

Advocating casual class genocide. Nice.

Re: There is no A.I.

#245

Post by danielbln »

westoncb wrote: post #79
TechBro8615 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Intent can be created by a combination of prompting and incorporating the model into a feedback loop of some kind: it has something it was tasked with (via prompting), and the feedback provides info on to what extent the task has been completed; as long as the task is incomplete it may generate more responses. To crank it up a notch, the assigned task could involve generating itself subtasks which are handled in the…

We're well onto that road with autonomous agents, see BabyAGI, Auto-GPT and LoopGPT.

Re: There is no A.I.

#246

Post by FredPret »

poppycock wrote: post #95
anonylizard wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

The former empires are shadows of their former selves and had to undergo significant reforms. Nobody knows or cares who the king of Belgium is anymore.

Re: There is no A.I.

#247

Post by radarsat1 »

I've had a pet concept for some time that I don't often see repeated so I'll put it in this thread: discussions like these are always searching for what is "really" intelligent, how to define or detect AGI, etc.

I think a lot of this can be sidestepped by realizing that when you go beyond simple game playing intelligence, the next useful definition isn't "is it real?!?" but rather: "does it act intelligently?". And to the point, actions and interaction are fundamentally social, and so it reminds me that there are different kinds of intelligence and what a lot of people are looking for in AGI is social intelligence.

And, personally, I don't believe we'll have "social AI" until AI is able to live with us in some form, perhaps embodied or not, in society, as an independent entity with its own identity and memories. This means an ability to perceive, and, probably, to act, whether it means as a robot or not.

An interesting aspect of this is that to achieve social intelligence, a robot just has to act socially and not be someone people want to shut off. Notably, it doesn't even need to pass the Turing test -- look at movies like Star Wars where robots function in society in tandem with people -- no one is under the impression that the droids are not robots, nor do they consider them particularly smart, but they do, kind of, consider them as "people".

I think this is artificial intelligence. It's artificial, the argument about whether it's "truly" thinking or not doesn't matter -- what matters is, does it act intelligently? In other words, as long as it is perceived as intelligent, it may as well be called intelligent, as far as I can tell. We're not there yet, but LLMs sure feel closer than we've been up to now.

Re: There is no A.I.

#248

Post by Myrmornis »

To me it seems that the author is focusing too much on the ability of the recent crop of "AIs" to generate interesting creative content -- poems, essays, images, etc, and forgetting (or hasn't recognized) how good something like GPT4 is at formulating a _correct_ answer to a given problem. This is also an attitude I've seen among non-technical friends; I think there's a bit of a divide at the moment between people who've seen it perform like a human on technical challenges vs people who've just asked it to write song lyrics or create interesting images.

Re: There is no A.I.

#249

Post by aerhardt »

preommr wrote: post #160
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

I’ve seen many of the very best AI scientists (Hinton, Hasabis, Lecun, etc) say that we need philosophers and ethicists deeply involved on this topic urgently. I think a guy like Lanier, who knows CS fundamentals but has been talking about the ethics and impact of different digital creations for decades, is a pretty good guy to have on team humanity, no?

Re: There is no A.I.

#250

Post by SanderNL »

kazinator wrote: post #38

GPT4 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 rem…

It can also “talk shop” with lawyers, doctors..

Are we all vain? I guess we are, but I find this take to be a bit too simplistic.

I do agree programmers are arrogant and think everything they do requires vast amounts of intelligence.

I’n not sure what your point is. I am honestly curious. You think having coders as major advocates for your product is somehow a brilliant strategy? If anything, this will work against it.

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