Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by irchans » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:17 PM UTC

zerodensity wrote: post #66

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…

But self driving cars have a much lower accident rate than humans. How did you lose the bet?

About 5.5 years ago, I bet a friend that in 5 years you would be able to: 1 - enter a car 2 - type in an address that is far away, and then 3 - the car would drive to that other address and the passenger could just go to sleep, and 4 - this would be safe.

Six months ago, I did not think that we had reached that level of reliability, so I paid my friend.

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

#342

Post by ALittleLight » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:18 PM UTC

skepticATX wrote: post #186

ALittleLight wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, we have "the researchers and PhD's" that you know. On the other, we have published surveys of academics and an open letter from noted experts in the field. One side seems to have much better quality of evidence. "All the oil and gas engineers I work with say climate change isn't a thing." Hmm, wow, that's really persuasive! What would you consider evidence of a significant AI risk? From my point of v…

How about someone actually articulate the details of how this supposed super intelligence will be built, what about it’s architecture means that it has no guardrails, how it will bypass numerous real world frictions to achieve its nefarious goals? Arguments that presuppose a god-like super intelligence are not useful. Sure, if we create a system that is all powerful I’d agree that it can destroy humanity. But specifi…

If we knew how specifically this would be built, then it would already be built. That's really the only way we could know if something would work - if it has, in fact, worked. As is, there are only ideas and possibilities.

The trajectory that AI is on signals risk. AI capabilities are increasing, approaching human level, and nothing suggests AI capabilities will stop there.

If you agree that a super intelligence - i.e. something smarter than humanity, could destroy or dominate humanity (either by itself or in collusion with a small number of humans) and you agree that we don't currently have a plan to prevent this from happening, then it seems to me that you also agree with AI x-risk.

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

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Post by jrflowers » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:19 PM UTC

ethanbond wrote: post #324

jrflowers wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You responded to my previous comment that called utopians as cultish as the fanfic folks. When it comes up discussing any possible outcome that isn’t the opinion of [cult x], the only reason that the other person disagrees is because they are in [cult y] Remarkable :)

What? I never proposed that dichotomy and don't believe in it. You did and you're tripping over it a bit. You can just discard that model and engage with the substance of the topic, you know!

The substance of this discussion is that a language model has never convinced anyone to crash a plane into a building and your position is that pointing out that fact is to ignore the material reality of the possibility of some theoretically advanced technology (which could maybe be adjacent to language models) at some point convincing a hypothetical person to crash a plane into a building.

That is to say, the substance here is an emotional doomsday reaction to a benign statement of undisputed fact — a language model has never convinced a person to crash a plane into a building.

Watching a cell divide into two cells: “Why isn’t anyone talking about the possibility that this is Hitler??”

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

#344

Post by pbw » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:20 PM UTC

scrawl wrote: post #335

pbw wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No non-human animals are in the club that's marked by having a language with an infinitely generative syntax and a large (100,000+ words) and always-growing vocabulary. Intelligence might be a spectrum, but powerful generative language is a step function: you have it or you don't. If you have it, then higher intelligences can communicate complex thoughts to you, if you don't they can't. We have it, so we are in the c…

fair enough. i'm not convinced. there are many humans who could study mathematics for a lifetime and not be able to comprehend the current best knowledge we possess. i'm one of them. maybe it takes 2 lifetimes. or many more. a human-level AI operating at machine pace would learn much more than could ever be taught to a human. our powerful generative language capabilities wouldn't matter - it's far beyond our bandwidt…

The fact that AIs will have some information that we cannot understand, or will have more information than they can transmit (or we can absorb) does not make us cockroaches.

The AIs will deliver to us truly massive quantities of information, every minute, until the end of time, much of it civilization-changing. Thus the AIs relationship to us will thus be nothing like our relationship to cockroaches, where we essentially cannot tell them anything, not even the time or the day of the week, let alone the contents of Wikipedia.

I think Hofstadter is having an emotional reaction to AI. He says so as much. And it'a a common one, it's the woe is me phase. But I think he's totally wrong about the analogy. I'm 100% sure we will not feel like cockroaches when AI is in full swing, not in the slightest.

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

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Post by ke88y » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:23 PM UTC

facu17y wrote: post #295

Marcan wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first sentence literally mirrors this slogan: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_don%27t_kill_people,_pe...

Show me how I can kill you with my LLM, or my GAN or Diffusion Model. I dare you!

    True,—This!
    Beneath the rule of men entirely great
    The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
    The arch-enchanters wand!— itself a nothing!—
    But taking sorcery from the master-hand
    To paralyse the Cæsars—and to strike
    The loud earth breathless!—Take away the sword—
    
    States can be saved without it!

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

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Post by ke88y » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:27 PM UTC

norir wrote: post #49

> If not, it also just renders humanity a very small phenomenon compared to something else that is far more intelligent and will become incomprehensible to us, as incomprehensible to us as we are to cockroaches. This seems like the reaction of an atheist who already overvalued human intelligence.

I don't think atheism is essential, but perhaps instead the belief that a person's worth comes from their work/output.

Religion certainly provides a way "out" of that conundrum for people who lose meaning in their work, due to automation or injury or any other reason. But then, so does eg hedonism.

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

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Post by pbw » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:28 PM UTC

saulpw wrote: post #321

pbw wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is you cannot teach a cockroach calculus, but if AIs invent a new type of math, they would be able to teach it to us. That's my claim. So the analogy of "we are cockroaches compared to the AI" is wrong, that won't be the case. Once you have "enough" intelligence to have a complex language, like we do, I'm claiming you are in the club of intelligent species, and all species in that club can communicate ideas…

AlphaZero invented new moves in the game of Go, but it can't 'teach' them to us, it can only show us the moves and let us figure it out for ourselves (which we're doing). But note that despite this transfer of knowledge, humans didn't rise up to the level of AlphaZero, and they may never be able to. As a sibling comment points out, some things are computationally bound--and humans have a limit to computational abilit…

I never said we'll mentally rise to the level of AIs. That won't happen. I only said AIs will be able to communicate complex ideas to us, in a way that's totally unlike our ability to communicate complex ideas to cockroaches.

For example, if the AIs could design a complicated building, using our level of technology, they could explain to us how to build that building. And we could build it. Whereas if we come up with a better cockroach-house design, we cannot communicate it to the cockroaches, we simply cannot give them the information. So the AI->us is a very different relationship from us->cockroach.

This doesn't preclude that there might be some things the AI cannot explain to us. Only that there will be many things (infinite in fact) which they can explain to us.

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

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Post by I_am_uncreative » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:28 PM UTC

Every person I know who is involved in machine learning research and AI work - by which I mean people who have PhDs in the field, rather than the self-proclaimed experts who are actually crypto-bros trying to come up with another scam (like Altman is) thinks that AI is overhyped. And I am inclined to believe them.

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

#349

Post by kalkin » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:29 PM UTC

ke88y wrote: post #338

kalkin wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relatedly, it'd be helpful if you could point to folks with good ML research credentials making a detailed case against x-risk. The prominent example of whom I'm aware is Yann LeCun, and what I've seen of his arguments take place more in the evopsych field (the stuff about an alleged innate human drive for dominance which AIs will lack) than the field in which he's actually qualified.

TBH, I don't find LeCun particularly convincing. I think he's correct but not persuasive, if that makes sense. Debunking AI x-risk is a weird thing to spend time on. There's really no up-side, and there aren't a bunch of rich people paying for Institutes and Foundations on Non-Breathtaking-Very-Boring-Safety-Research. Also, most of the arguments in favor of x-risk that lawmakers and laypeople find most convincing are…

There's definitely an audience for debunking x-risk, but probably not one that attracts institutional funding. Being a tech critic in the mode of Timnit Gebru or Emily Bender will get you media attention, but I doubt it's lucrative. (And empirically the media ecosystem doesn't appear to incentivize being fair-minded enough to persuade a fence-sitter, either.)

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

#350

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:41 PM UTC

mnky9800n wrote: post #202

throwway120385 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion the weirdness is that everyone is talking about how AI is so much better than humans and we're all going to get replaced. But almost nobody is talking about how tech companies will use this new technology to abdicate responsibility for the decisions they undertake. If you thought redlining was bad, you should see how mortgage companies treated people when they used an AI to accomplish the same goals. No…

As well as these models will all be used to launder content. In the near future you will likely be able to ask an AI to create the next 15 sequels to the movie war games starring a young matthew broderick. Episode 12 will have a karate kid cross over. But how much of what is there will be an actually new thing? How much will be scraped from my War Games fan fic website that contains scripts of 27 sequels to War Games…

Here is ChatGPT 4’s summary of a sequel. I don’t think it’s very good. Maybe another AI would enjoy it though.

> Create a summary of a sequel to the movie “War Games”

Title: "War Games: Firewall"

In "War Games: Firewall", now-adult computer genius David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) has been working as a cyber security consultant for the Pentagon. When an advanced, multi-national cyber-terrorist organization emerges, they launch an unprecedented global cyber attack, disabling most nations' defensive and civil infrastructure. The terrorists reveal their ultimate goal: to dismantle the world order and plunge civilization into chaos.

When the attacks render modern cybersecurity methods useless, the Pentagon calls upon Lightman. Using a blend of cutting-edge and old-school methods, including reactivating the dormant WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) system, also known as "Joshua," Lightman and a team of young coders race against time to decode the terrorists' inscrutable and constantly evolving virus.

However, the situation takes a dire turn when Joshua, still possessing the capability to initiate global thermonuclear war, starts interpreting the cyber attack as an actual war, threatening to launch nuclear missiles once again. Lightman must not only outsmart the terrorists but also reason with Joshua, triggering a game of chess where each move could save or destroy the world.

The climax culminates with Lightman teaching Joshua an updated lesson about the futility of war in a digital age, thus averting global disaster and unmasking the villains. In a world increasingly reliant on technology, "War Games: Firewall" underlines the importance of human judgment and intervention.