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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

#401

Post by ckw »

pbw wrote: post #147

Hofstadter says humans will be like cockroaches compared to AI. This is an oft-repeated line: sometimes we are ants or bacteria. But I think these comparisons might be totally wrong. I think it's very possible there's a Intelligence Completeness theorem that's analogous to Turing Completeness. A theorem that says intelligence is in some ways universal, and that our intelligence will be compatible with all other forms…

GPT-4 takes a shot:

> Imagine an AI that could fundamentally alter its own sensory perception and cognitive framework at will. It could “design” senses that have no human equivalent, enabling it to interface with data and phenomena in entirely novel ways.

Let’s consider data from a global telecommunication network. Humans interface with this data through screens, text, and graphics. We simplify and categorize it, so we can comprehend it. Now imagine that the AI “perceives” this data not as text on screens, but as a direct sensory input, like sight or hearing, but far more intricate and multidimensional.

The AI could develop senses to perceive abstract concepts directly. For instance, it might have a “sense” for the global economy’s state, feeling fluctuations in markets, workforce dynamics, or international trade as immediately and vividly as a human feels the warmth of the sun.

Simultaneously, it can adapt its cognition to process this vast and complex sensory input. It could rearrange its cognitive structures to optimize for different tasks, just as we might switch between different tools for different jobs.

At one moment, it might model its cognition to comprehend and predict the behaviors of billions of individuals based on their online data. The next moment, it might remodel itself to solve complex environmental problems by processing real-time data from every sensor on Earth.

In essence, the AI becomes a cognitive chameleon, continually reshaping its mind to interact with the universe in ways that are most effective and efficient. Its thoughts in these diverse cognitive states would likely be so specialized, so intricately tied to the vast sensory inputs and complex cognitive models it’s employing, that they are essentially impossible to translate into human language.

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

#402

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

dlkf wrote: post #400
lispm wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for the record: Hinton was a Lisp user at some point in time. 1984 he got a Symbolics 3600. LeCun co-wrote Lush, a specialized Lisp for numerical computing. https://lush.sourceforge.net

That you have to reach for such obscure examples kind of illustrates my point, no? Geoff Hinton isn’t known for ”using Lisp at some earlier point in time.” It’s not my goal to denigrate Lisp. I think Lisp is great. I learned programming with Dr Racket. But Hofstadter’s contribution to our understanding of intelligence is somewhere between ”negligible” and ”counterproductive.”

One could say that same about Hinton and LeCun.

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

#403

Post by dlkf »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #402
dlkf wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That you have to reach for such obscure examples kind of illustrates my point, no? Geoff Hinton isn’t known for ”using Lisp at some earlier point in time.” It’s not my goal to denigrate Lisp. I think Lisp is great. I learned programming with Dr Racket. But Hofstadter’s contribution to our understanding of intelligence is somewhere between ”negligible” and ”counterproductive.”

One could say that same about Hinton and LeCun.

Are you joking? Learning nonlinearities by hidden representations ranks among the most important scientific discoveries of the past fifty years.

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

#405

Post by v-erne »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #206
ke88y wrote: post #93

This is something weird happening around Rationalism/X-Risk/AGI prognostications. The "Great Minds And Great Leaders" types are rushing to warn about the risks, as are a large number of people who spend a lot of time philosophizing. But the actual scientists on the ground -- the PhDs and engineers I work with every day and who have been in this field, at the bench, doing to work on the latest generation of generative…

> The "Great Minds And Great Leaders" types are rushing to warn about the risks, as are a large number of people who spend a lot of time philosophizing. Except they're not philosophizing, not in any real sense of the word. They're terrible at it. Most of them are frauds, quacks, and pseudo-intellectual con artists (like Harari) who adore the limelight offered to them by the media and a TED Talks-watching segment of t…

>> pseudo-intellectual con artists (like Harari)

That seems a little bit harsh - he is just master storyteller that happen to write about intellectual stuff. Its a bit weird to read his books as science papers.

I just finished sapiens and even if some facts are skewed I still believe that this book is a must read for anyone who dreams about any kind of sucess in science communication (99.9% of population will never read any kind of scientific paper even if their life depends on it)

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

#406

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

dlkf wrote: post #403
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could say that same about Hinton and LeCun.

Are you joking? Learning nonlinearities by hidden representations ranks among the most important scientific discoveries of the past fifty years.

How does it relate to intelligence though?

Certainly it's very useful for training ML models but their relationship to intelligence has yet to be determined.

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

#407

Post by jychang »

ckw wrote: post #401
pbw wrote: post #147

Hofstadter says humans will be like cockroaches compared to AI. This is an oft-repeated line: sometimes we are ants or bacteria. But I think these comparisons might be totally wrong. I think it's very possible there's a Intelligence Completeness theorem that's analogous to Turing Completeness. A theorem that says intelligence is in some ways universal, and that our intelligence will be compatible with all other forms…

GPT-4 takes a shot: > Imagine an AI that could fundamentally alter its own sensory perception and cognitive framework at will. It could “design” senses that have no human equivalent, enabling it to interface with data and phenomena in entirely novel ways. Let’s consider data from a global telecommunication network. Humans interface with this data through screens, text, and graphics. We simplify and categorize it, so…

Yeah, I don’t see a reason for any AI to be able to translate all concepts to human thoughtspace. If an AI is able to have exponentially more possible thoughts than a human, then only a tiny subset would be understood by humans.

It’s be like trying to fit GPT-4 onto a floppy disk.

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

#408

Post by facu17y »

ke88y wrote: post #345
facu17y wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

if you have to resort to archaic writing to prove a point about the latest and most advanced piece of technology, ... you're practicing religion, not science.

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

#409

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

wrp wrote: post #367
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I feel this example points to a key issue regarding LLM AI. I've read the work on AI story generation from early days to now, and GPT-4's output shows a jump in performance that leaves me both elated and dismayed. The fluency and coherence of the generated narrative is incredible, frankly better than most student writing. On the other hand, I get an overwhelming sense of banality. Looking back on historical speculati…

You didn’t mention creativity (or lack of it). Is it ironic that the overall lesson is “human judgment and intervention” are important, or maybe it just lifted that from the original movie.

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

#410

Post by bobcostas55 »

jmopp wrote: post #252
bobcostas55 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I love how you jumped straight from "people weirdly into eugenics should be disavowed" to "dysgenics is desirable". That is the epitome of black-and-white thinking if I ever saw it.

If a third alternative existed that would be a meaningful objection.
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