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Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk

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Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk

#81

Post by spookie »

pipo234 wrote: post #31
detourdog wrote: post #15

I have more fear of the people running the system than any AI. I also think that AR/VR is more scary than AI. My fear is how poorly rendered AR/VR can be more positive interaction than interactions with the people that surround the observer.

Might have completely missed something, but I thought AR/VR was (and still is) a solution looking for a problem. Have they finally stumbled into something people want to do with them, beyond games and porn?

I believe in a lot of potential for the area, primarly from AR. As for the VR side of things, I've seen people go through therapy in VR after loosing the ability to walk IRL, and being able to go into a forest again meant the world for them. The field tends to attract a lot of the... hype people to it, and it gives off a bad image as a whole. Nevertheless, its a pretty liberating research field.

Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk

#82

Post by detourdog »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #37
Kiro wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's a positive interaction, then what is your fear?

That it's a negative interaction pretending to be a positive one.

The "fear" is that people instinctively gravitate towards comfort and the easy accessibility of the comfort could be detrimental. Anyone that used the web pre and post ads can watch a useful tool degrade to the lowest common denominator.

If people love their phones so much imagine if they rarely saw anything else. Maybe they constantly only see 80% of the world most of the time they are awake.

I don't think it is society ending future. I would rather people perform virtual coups.

Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk

#83

Post by Smaug123 »

irchans wrote: post #54

Hofstadter said, "Well, maybe as important as the wheel." If AI significantly surpasses humanity in cognitive ability, then I think it will have a much bigger impact than the wheel. (I loved GEB and DH's other writings.) LLMs have really improved a lot of the last two years and they have shown many unexpected capabilities. I am guessing that they will get some more good input (text mostly), a lot more compute, and al…

(Hofstadter was quoting Geoff Hinton when he said that. What he himself compared the advance to was "fire".)

Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk

#84

Post by mecsred »

pipo234 wrote: post #60
CuriouslyC wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AR will take off like crazy when they develop lightweight, clear goggles than can display color with a range of opacities. A million jobs are begging for HUDS that guide the worker, but the current equipment isn't there yet.

> A million jobs are begging for HUDS that guide the worker [..] I have a pretty dull, comfortable desk job and lack the imagination to come up with any. Can you name some? (I've been wrong before when I was skeptical when everyone was hyped about iPad, Deep Learning, etc. so please convince me about Apple Vision, Mark's metaverse, or google's glasses and paint what might be in 5 years.)

This is something I've worked on so I can comment a bit. The most popular use case I've seen so far is AR manuals, with the sell that you can have technicians up to speed on a piece of equipment without needing human coaching or training. I was shown a demo in the context of robotics recently where you look at a robot and explanations of signals in the wiring harness were shown, hydraulic connections, wear parts, etc. It was visually pretty impressive but quite telling that the two most interested people were my manager and the CEO. The engineers just kinda sat looking at each other with a non verbal "Must have been a fun project to build huh? I'll stick to PDFs".

Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk

#85

Post by Smaug123 »

iamleppert wrote: post #25

" ...In my book," pretty much sums it up. Literally everyone who seems to pontificate on a Chat bot and new Photoshop features has a book and can't seem to help but mention it. Replace "book" with literally anything else and you can see it's completely about ego and money at the end of the day. He's probably getting ready to announce he accepted a position from one of these recently funded AI companies and whatever h…

You should consider reading Gödel, Escher, Bach. It is an astonishing book.

Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk

#86

Post by SoftTalker »

substation13 wrote: post #67
CuriouslyC wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AR will take off like crazy when they develop lightweight, clear goggles than can display color with a range of opacities. A million jobs are begging for HUDS that guide the worker, but the current equipment isn't there yet.

Stacking shelves in a supermarket is a perfect example. 1000s of products means that a bit of experience is required to know where everything goes in order to quickly stack. With a HUD, workers become productive much faster (and are more inter-changeable) - which is something large enterprises love.

A shelf stacking robot is even better at knowing where things go and won't get a backache and file a worker's comp claim.

Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk

#87

Post by lolinder »

DennisP wrote: post #62
detourdog wrote: post #15

I have more fear of the people running the system than any AI. I also think that AR/VR is more scary than AI. My fear is how poorly rendered AR/VR can be more positive interaction than interactions with the people that surround the observer.

As long as the AI is less generally intelligent than people, it makes sense to be more afraid of the people. Once the AI is more intelligent than the smartest people, it's more sensible to be most afraid of the AI.

The implication of OP's statement is that they don't believe that AGI is on the horizon, and I'm inclined to agree.

This feels a lot like the hype surrounding self-driving cars a few years back, where everyone was convinced fully autonomous vehicles were ~5 years away. It turned out that, while the results we had were impressive, getting the rest of the way to fully replacing humans was much, much harder than was generally expected.

Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk

#88

Post by detourdog »

detourdog wrote: post #15

I have more fear of the people running the system than any AI. I also think that AR/VR is more scary than AI. My fear is how poorly rendered AR/VR can be more positive interaction than interactions with the people that surround the observer.

It took me 3 days to really understand the demos. I definitely plan on checking it out. I see many uses.

Does anyone know how easy it would be translate American Sign Language? That must be goal if it's not already done.

Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk

#89

Post by Animats »

"And so it makes me feel diminished. It makes me feel, in some sense, like a very imperfect, flawed structure compared with these computational systems that have, you know, a million times or a billion times more knowledge than I have and are a billion times faster. It makes me feel extremely inferior."

Although he did real work in physics, Hofstadter's fame comes from writing popular books about science which explain things others have done in more saleable words. That particular niche is seriously threatened by GPT-4. No wonder he's upset.

Large language models teach us that absorbing large amounts of text and then blithering about some subject that text covers isn't very profound. It's just the training data being crunched on by a large but simple mechanism. This has knocked the props out from under ad copy writing, punditry, and parts of literature and philosophy. That's very upsetting to some people.

Aristotle wrote that humans were intelligent because only they could do arithmetic. Dreyfus wrote that humans were intelligent because only they could play chess. Now, profundity bites the dust.

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