51–60 of 141 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what do you feel when we understand it well enough to realize we’re the same type of parlor tricks? That’s called positivism and it has a lot of philosophical issues. I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that sensory appearance is equivalent to reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism
That statement also has no basis in neuroscience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He will go on saying it’s a trick. It’s a form of denial I’m seeing everywhere now when faced with something so genuinely terrifying or identity challenging you can’t process it.
Perhaps I can say you're motivated by an Oedipus complex and we can keep the chain going of ad hominem with a thin psychobabble veneer to make it appear serious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate this sentiment. We might learn that human thought and reasoning are parlor tricks too once we understand them better. Anything we start to understand loses its mystery
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I know nothing about AI but it seems like we're approaching it from the other end - the human mind seems like magic and when we approximate it using technology it feels like we'll reach a moment of "that's all it is?" and refuse to believe we actually did it because we doubt ourselves. Along the same lines, if achieving equal human rights for all…
I used to think this and worried that AI would never have rights (see, e.g., sibling comment to mine), but these days I tend to think the fight will be very brief and heavily in the favor of AI. It could be the first time in history that rights are achieved so quickly that there isn’t much of a struggle at all.
That said, I find it extremely depressing that the default human viewpoint is “it’s a machine and doesn’t deserve rights”. Hopefully AI will have a superior system of morality to ours as well.
The common sentiment around AI in the 90s and early 2000s was that it didn't work; it had its hype, it had its heyday, but it seemed like a dead-end for the most part. The Perceptron was merely a linear function approximator. And the Multi-layer Perceptron was a little more capable, but the many orders of magnitude it would have to scale up in order to be convincing just wasn't feasible back then (it finally was in t…
The parlor tricks are getting better. In terms of practicality you just need to look at AI art. That stuff is good enough to replace the real thing. In terms of actual sentience, understanding I had chatGPT answer questions in the following order: 1. Describe to me what happens when you throw sugar in coffee 2. Describe the same thing in terms of atoms. 3. Is this an example of entropy decreasing? 4. What if the arro…
That said, I agree with your arguments and conclusions. Humans are not able to do this kind of reasoning until they have had some education on the topic - and when they reason they get feedback to reinforce their conclusions if others agree or they get a more rigorous proof. We could do the exact same thing with an LLM. Would that potentially make a reasoning AI? For me the jury is still out, albeit I think we need better algorithms for it to be feasible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And what do you feel when we make these parlor tricks more capable than us at the majority of tasks? This seems like the logical fallacy of "begging the question" since it is far from apparent to me that they are "more capable than us at the majority of tasks."
It's certainly difficult to enumerate all the things we humans actually do. There's a lot of stuff we consider to be "common sense", sometimes those things are used to criticise AI and sometimes they're used to criticise other humans for not knowing them, but that is a category that we don't even think about until we notice the absence. For the things not considered common sense, like playing chess (beats all humans)…
We make machines that are stronger, faster, and can have much finer motor control than we have as individual abilities. No machine we have created has the dexterity that we have.
Every computational system can be analysed in fine detail to determine the limits that we have built into them. It may take an enormous amount of time and effort to do so, but we can do it. No computational system that we have built is able to exceed the limited programming we place in it.
There is an enormous amount of hype that goes on about the current generation (and future generations) of these systems, but all of them are in the abilities that we have programmed into them. They are in all essentials completely stupid (in the worst possible way - non-sentient, non-intelligent).
Every logic error that we have made in building these systems is hidden in that code. One day, those errors will come back and bite us, but there is nothing intelligent or sentient in these systems. It is our errors, for which we are responsible, that will cause those problems.
We can use them as adjuncts to our sentience and intelligence - but all they are are tools, never anything more.
However, if we cede control to these systems, we are ceding control to something that is no better than fire (a good servant - a horrendous master). After forty years, I have seen far too often, hype by humans convince other humans to cede control to the systems that humans have made and the result has been various levels of chaos.
If anything, what we need to be careful of is how humans use these systems against other humans. This is the perennial problem that we face as we build new technology.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The parlor tricks are getting better. In terms of practicality you just need to look at AI art. That stuff is good enough to replace the real thing. In terms of actual sentience, understanding I had chatGPT answer questions in the following order: 1. Describe to me what happens when you throw sugar in coffee 2. Describe the same thing in terms of atoms. 3. Is this an example of entropy decreasing? 4. What if the arro…
Talking about mixing coffee with sugar/milk and reversing the arrow of time (ie. entropy) is a widely talked about example. That said, I agree with your arguments and conclusions. Humans are not able to do this kind of reasoning until they have had some education on the topic - and when they reason they get feedback to reinforce their conclusions if others agree or they get a more rigorous proof. We could do the exac…
But the interface is unique. That is not a topic widely talked about at all.
Question:
Instead of two regions add a third region where entropy of the particles entering the region will always stays the same no matter what. Place the coffee cup such that it is in all 3 regions equally. Describe atomically what happens.
--------------------------------------
In this fictional universe where regions have varying entropy behavior, the coffee cup sits at a tri-junction: a third of it is in a region of increasing entropy (Region A), another third in a region of decreasing entropy (Region B), and the last third in a region where entropy remains constant (Region C). Region A (Increasing Entropy):
Sugar molecules randomly move throughout the coffee, driven by thermal motion. They strike water molecules and dissolve over time, eventually reaching a state of homogeneous distribution. The entropy of the system in this portion of the cup increases as expected.
Region B (Decreasing Entropy):
Astonishingly, sugar crystals spontaneously form in the coffee. Sugar molecules collide with water molecules and join an ever-growing crystalline lattice. Over time, the sugar becomes a distinct entity in the coffee, and the entropy of this system decreases.
Region C (Constant Entropy):
The sugar neither dissolves nor crystallizes. Instead, sugar molecules and water molecules co-exist in a dynamic but unchanging equilibrium. At the atomic level, every dissolution event is perfectly balanced by a crystallization event, maintaining constant entropy.
Molecular Exchange:
Some molecules, through Brownian motion, will wander across the boundary lines dividing the three regions. Entropic currents from Region A and B cross into Region C and are balanced out, maintaining a zero net change in entropy in that region. Special quantum-entangled pairs straddle the boundaries, existing in superpositions of increased, decreased, and unchanged entropy states.
Entropic Flux and Balance:
A constant entropic flux is established between the three regions. The entropic gradient tensor now has a third component, and the entropic flux density vector also adjusts to a tri-vector to balance out the exchange between the three regions.
Localized Time Anomalies:
At the atomic level, it's as if time runs forward in Region A, backward in Region B, and is somehow "static" or cyclical in Region C. Particles appear to remember both their past and future states in Region C, generating a unique form of atomic "temporal coherence."
Causality and Quantum Superposition:
Despite these anomalies, causality is preserved. Particles that cross into different regions adapt to the local entropy behavior and exhibit quantum behaviors that align with the local direction of time.
In essence, the tri-junction becomes a hotbed of bizarre but mathematically consistent phenomena, a place where the fabric of spacetime and the fundamental laws of thermodynamics seem to negotiate a delicate truce.
As for the cup of coffee, one-third of it will end up well-mixed, one-third will have sugar crystals, and the last third will remain an intriguing paradox of thermodynamics. You might call it the most scientifically fascinating cup of coffee ever brewed.
-------------------------------------------------
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And what do you feel when we make these parlor tricks more capable than us at the majority of tasks? This seems like the logical fallacy of "begging the question" since it is far from apparent to me that they are "more capable than us at the majority of tasks."
AI systems are vastly better than humans at a wide variety of tasks. Better at handwriting recognition, better at scheduling, better at playing games, better at speech recognition and transcription, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And what do you feel when we make these parlor tricks more capable than us at the majority of tasks? This seems like the logical fallacy of "begging the question" since it is far from apparent to me that they are "more capable than us at the majority of tasks."
AI systems are vastly better than humans at a wide variety of tasks. Better at handwriting recognition, better at scheduling, better at playing games, better at speech recognition and transcription, etc.
The answer is that we have programmed these systems to do what we require. They cannot exceed but they fail becasue of errors that we have placed in these systems.
All of the tasks that you have mentioned have been programmed that way. It has taken human ingenuity to work out how to do this programming. The end result is a machine (non-sentient, non-intelligent) that is doing what we require.
If you look at game playing, a system was created to play Go and won and yet that same system fails to win against humans under many circumstances. The literature is there, yet not publicised for all the world to see. A result of keeping the hype in play.
If you look at speech recognition, these systems still fail when we humans work against them and yet, we humans still recognise what the machines fail at.
Just keep in mind that a tractor can move a greater amount of material than a human can, but it is still only a tool. A plane can travel faster and fly higher that a human can, but it is still only a tool.
We use these systems to augment our abilities and yet they are all limited in so many ways that we are not.
The upshot is that we can do amazing things with the things we create, but none of those things exist without us and all those things fail without us.