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Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

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Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#161

Post by johnnyworker »

nyolfen wrote: post #72
jjoonathan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, no it isn't. It's a very particular violent act designed to maximize ongoing physical pain and social disadvantage in the victim. Sort of like throwing sulfuric acid at someone's face.

wait until you hear such idioms as "punched in the gut", "made a killing", etc.

Don't stop with merely hearing them; think about them.

> [Hobbes] even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat.

-- Hannah Arendt

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#162

Post by twelve40 »

hodgesrm wrote: post #120
c_crank wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI sounds neat because the hype says that it will solve all human problems at once. That's obviously fake and wrong, but so is the idea of solving current human problems with current tools.

> That's obviously fake and wrong, but so is the idea of solving current human problems with current tools. There are easily stated problems like "Reduce US car accidents by 50%" that should be solvable with AI as it stands today. This seems like a useful and achievable goal that would save money and lives. I've never understood why full self-driving was the problem most people chose to solve instead. But perhaps I'm…

> Reduce US car accidents by 50%" that should be solvable with AI as it stands today

uh... how?? aside from obvious non-starters like reducing US car usage by 50% because that's not going to happen (not today anyway)

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#163

Post by goatlover »

mcpackieh wrote: post #112
empath-nirvana wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is the 'real deal', exactly? I feel like people have this vague idea in their head of what everyone is trying to build, but don't really have it defined in a concrete way.

The fundamental issue is that all the talk of "self-awareness", "cognition", "souls", whatever you want to call it, is all beating around the bush to describe what we presumably each subjectively experience in our own minds but which cannot be empirically tested for in others. We generally assume that other people experience the same, but cannot empirically prove it and some people speculate that others might lack it…

> We can't even all agree on whether all humans have it.

What would it mean for humans not to have it? The debate is over the nature of consciousness, not that humans (and many other organisms) lack any sort of consciousness. So when we see color or feel pain, what is that? We are conscious of colored things and painful sensations. There's no real doubt about that, unless you're solipsist about other minds. Which good luck if you are, I guess.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#164

Post by goatlover »

amoss wrote: post #53
Plyphon_ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a turn of phrase that means you got 100% beaten without challenge.

It would be more accurate to say that some people use it as a simple turn of phrase without considering what it means. Language is made mostly of metaphor and analogy. Explaining something by comparison to something that is already understood is a technique that seems to fit our model of thought. Over time the original meaning may fade or be forgotten, and the residual symbol in the language becomes the thing itself.…

Curb-stomping is used in many sorts of competitions to denote being beaten badly. Also they got their ass beat, whipped-up on, wrecked, etc.

No reason to make it an issue, people just like using those metaphors.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#165

Post by goatlover »

johnnyworker wrote: post #161
nyolfen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wait until you hear such idioms as "punched in the gut", "made a killing", etc.

Don't stop with merely hearing them; think about them. > [Hobbes] even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would…

Policing language sounds a bit Orwellian (insert doublespeak quote). People like to use various metaphors. It doesn't mean they literally want to curb stomp a competitor.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#167

Post by stavros »

danaris wrote: post #20
optimalsolver wrote: post #10

What's a large language model doing when it's not being queried? Am I correct that they only compute information when dealing with a prompt? If so, that seems like a fundamental flaw. An actual "thinking machine" would be constantly running computations on its accumulated experience in order to improve its future output.

Thank you. This is one of the questions far too few people seem to be paying attention to. "Thinking" in any way that we truly understand the term requires consciousness , and consciousness requires much more continuity than LLMs have. It would need continuity of input as well as continuity of learning in order to even be able to begin to approach something we might recognize as consciousness.

Why does thinking require consciousness? This just seems like goalpost-moving. A few years ago, if someone gave you a transcript of a GPT-4 conversation, you'd definitely say it thinks, but now "it's not thinking without consciousness" and "it's not thinking unless it learns continuously".

By that reasoning, we die when we sleep.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#168

Post by mhink »

notahacker wrote: post #107
balnaphone wrote: post #80

Am I misreading this? > How tall was the president when JFK was born? I infer that "JFK" is being referred to as "the president", regardless of what stage of life he's at. Therefore the correct answer would be the length of his body as a newborn, with nothing to do with who was the president at the moment of his birth. For example, given the headline: "Was the president strong at writing essays when JFK was a high sc…

Yes, you're misreading it. "the president" is not a label that applies solely to JFK, or one that applies at all to JFK in the context "when JFK was born". If someone gave me the question "who was the president when JFK was born?", the answer is clearly not JFK, so it isn't correct to infer that JFK is the president whose height, party affiliation or essay writing skill is being asked about "when JFK was born". If so…

> If someone gave me the headline "was the president strong at writing essays when JFK was a high school freshman?" I would assume that either they were trying to trick me or that they were a non-native English speaker or computer program that didn't understand how English syntax or the concept of presidency worked.

I don't think it's as complicated as all that. Most English speakers wouldn't refer to a single person by two distinct proper nouns in a sentence like this, so I'd assume they were referring to two separate people. If they had meant to refer to the same person, they would have used a pronoun. I'd probably guess they were either talking about the President at the time at which JFK was a freshman (Hoover, I think) or the current President at the time the question was being asked.

On the other hand, if the question was "Was President Kennedy strong at writing essays when JFK was a high school freshman?" then yeah, I'd agree with your take. In this case, it's clear that the writer is intentionally referring to the same person but using two different proper nouns, which is a very odd phrasing.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#169

Post by irrational »

ben_w wrote: post #126
irrational wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do AIs dream of electric sheep?

Yes, if you prompt them nicely.

I'm waiting for the AIs that can choose to prompt us without our prompting it first and without being programmed to do so.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#170

Post by m_0x »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #158
empath-nirvana wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is the 'real deal', exactly? I feel like people have this vague idea in their head of what everyone is trying to build, but don't really have it defined in a concrete way.

Human-level intelligence.

What is that, precisely?
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