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There is no A.I.

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Re: There is no A.I.

#261

Post by amelius »

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…

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

Hell, in time AI will replace customers!

Re: There is no A.I.

#262

Post by hyperthesis »

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…

And legally, corporations are already "artificial persons".

Re: There is no A.I.

#263

Post by zild3d »

stabbles wrote: post #241
atleastoptimal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personally, I prefer almond milk in my cereal

Re: There is no A.I.

#264

Post by ilkke »

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…

I can't seem to find the source but I remember William Gibson arguing in an interview some years back that corporations were already artificial intelligence, organisms even, serving their own interests and survival rather than the benefit of any person who is part of it

Re: There is no A.I.

#265

Post by genezeta »

gitfan86 wrote: post #132
tuatoru wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP is measured both as production and as consumption. The figures have to be the same, within a "statistical discrepancy". The consumption is final consumption: goods and services used by households. You are asserting that households will each have 100 times the income that they do now (and be spending the same proportion of income as they do now). Edit: I believe that if most companies, or even a significant minori…

I'm saying that many things that cost $100 in 2020 will cost less than $1 for the exact same thing in 2028. It is already happening in 2023. How much would it cost in 2020 to get a 2000 word essay written at a 10th grade level? What is the cost of the same service today? When a service costs goes down 99% that 99% goes directly into GDP growth.

> many things ... a 2000 word essay written at a 10th grade level

That is one thing, not many. And it's also a fairly specific thing. I don't know about the general population but personally my need to acquire such an essay is fairly low. I haven't had the need to buy one in the last fifty years, probably never.

Re: There is no A.I.

#266

Post by AltruisticGapHN »

What the hell, we are looking at essentially millions of matrix multiplications done on powerful GPUs. And we're told this is what the brain does. Which is supremely stupid, since as Bernardo Kastrup has emphasized many times, our brains are completely UNLIKE those systems.

The hubris in Big Tech right now is truly pathetic and imho a sign of a real disconnect with a sense of meaning and purpose to human life.

In fact recently I was listening to a podcast with Donald Hoffman,. where he mentioned brain studies done on people with split brains etc and how these people did not even have a single consciousness. So even the assumption that we have like one "AGI" program running in our brain is not at all what goes on in our brain.

Likewise Iain McGilchrist pointed out how the left and right brain hemispheres are two kind of attentions to the world, and almost two different type of consciousness in us.

I quit listening to Rupert Spira many years ago but I found this interaction between him and Donald Hoffman really insightful. DOnald mentions the brain studies in this podcast:

The Convergence of Science and Spirituality | Donald Hoffman & Rupert Spira

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rafVevceWgs

Re: There is no A.I.

#267

Post by afro88 »

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…

But out of all the programmers I know, there are only certain ones that are embracing it, and the rest are still stuck in "I tried it and the code wasn't exactly what I wanted - it's all hype" land. And I think for one of the reasons you say: programmers are vain and believe everything they do requires great intelligence. A lot are still missing the forest from the trees.

Re: There is no A.I.

#268

Post by pastacacioepepe »

nologic01 wrote: post #251
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…

The elephant in the room is the concept of the State. Bad corporations flurish in the shadow of bad government. Governments are supposed to safeguard the interests of the many. Over decades they used collective resources to advance the research that made IT/AI possible. They granted corporates (private interests) the license to operate, a financial system to oil them, a security system to protect them. If current IT…

Corporations lobby and bribe governments officials to keep the status quo as is. Egg or chicken first?

With your framing of the issue, I wonder what would be the solution. Smaller government? That just gives more power to corporations.

Re: There is no A.I.

#270

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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…

Why would "the markets" provide that option? AI corporations will be phenomenally successful predatory value-extractions machines. Shareholders will vastly prefer them over more humane corporate structures.

This already happens. It's why PayPal, YouTube, Amazon, and the rest can shut down small-fry business accounts with no come-back. They're monopolies and they don't care. Because they don't need to.

The next stage will be shareholders using AI to make their investment choices. This will - automatically, with no recourse - drive money towards AI corporations while starving human-run businesses of investment.

Essentially AI is just an amplifier of existing economic and political trends - a programmable automated economic predator. Because many of those trends are dysfunctional and insane, we're going to have a lot to deal with.

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