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AGI is far from inevitable

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Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#231

Post by Closi »

etempleton wrote: post #216
Closi wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo's first real driverless ride on a public road was less than 10 years ago. Now they are doing 100k rides a week. I think your original post just overestimates the 'normal' pace of change - Taking 10 years to go from the first ride to 100k rides a week is no time at all in the scheme of things. Airplanes are an example of an insanely fast technological adoption, and they still took 30 years to go from the wright…

I am not debating the transformative nature of self-driving cars or if it will become common place. I think it is huge. I guess my point is that is just one application of machine learning / AI. To automate such a complex task with our current approach to AI, that humans do easily, one will need to spend trillions of dollars and therefore the benefit, such as with self-driving cars, needs to be significant. I suspect…

Same with computers though - back in the 60's problems had to be sufficiently valuable to solve in order to justify compute resource to them. For the initial computers, the 'prize' was Enigma and winning the war.

Now we can use compute resource for memes.

Costs will come down, so the required benefit will be lower.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#232

Post by qgin »

joaogui1 wrote: post #223
jjk166 wrote: post #193

> ‘There will never be enough computing power to create AGI using machine learning that can do the same, because we’d run out of natural resources long before we'd even get close,’ I would say the counter-example that proves this statement false is in the author's skull, but perhaps that's overly presumptuous.

Are you implying that our brain learns through Machine Learning?

In the very vaguest sense of the word, absolutely. Not that there is a literal transformer algorithm, but there is some evolved learning algorithm in the neurons of the brain that is at least somewhat a distant cousin of what we’re doing today.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#233

Post by jjk166 »

joaogui1 wrote: post #223
jjk166 wrote: post #193

> ‘There will never be enough computing power to create AGI using machine learning that can do the same, because we’d run out of natural resources long before we'd even get close,’ I would say the counter-example that proves this statement false is in the author's skull, but perhaps that's overly presumptuous.

Are you implying that our brain learns through Machine Learning?

Tautologically. Machine learning is a blanket term for a wide range of approaches that allow machines to mimic the brain's capability to learn, at least in function if not form.

The brain may employ wildly different machine learning algorithms from those currently in vogue, but whatever algorithms the brain is using must be machine learning algorithms. Unless of course you define machine in this case to be something which isn't the brain, in which case they're just learning algorithms. Regardless, an architecture exists to match the brain's capabilities with not only finite but surprisingly limited hardware.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#234

Post by castigatio »

Hercuros wrote: post #217
castigatio wrote: post #124

Whatever you think about AGI, this is a dumb paper. So many words and references to say - what. If you can't articulate your point in a few sentences you probably don't have a point. There are all kinds of assumptions being made in the study about how AI systems work, about what people "mean" then they talk about AGI etc. The article starts out talking about white supremacy and replacing women. This isn't a proof. Th…

I don’t think speculation about AGI is possible on a rigorous mathematical basis right now. And people who do expect AGI to happen (soon) are often happy to be convinced by much poorer types of argument and evidence than presented in this paper (e.g. handwaving arguments about model size or just the fact that ChatGPT can do some impressive things).

Indeed - its pretty absurd.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#235

Post by castigatio »

falcor84 wrote: post #197
castigatio wrote: post #124

Whatever you think about AGI, this is a dumb paper. So many words and references to say - what. If you can't articulate your point in a few sentences you probably don't have a point. There are all kinds of assumptions being made in the study about how AI systems work, about what people "mean" then they talk about AGI etc. The article starts out talking about white supremacy and replacing women. This isn't a proof. Th…

I thought you were exaggerating, but wow, they really did. > Among the more troublesome meanings of ‘AI’, perhaps, is as the ideology that it is desirable to replace humans (or, specifically women) by artificial systems (Erscoi et al., 2023) and, generally, ‘AI’ as a way to advance capitalist, kyriarchal, authoritarian and/or white supremacist goals (Birhane & Guest, 2021; Crawford, 2021; Erscoi et al., 2023; Gebru &…

I now challenge you to use it appropriately in casual conversation tomorrow.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#236

Post by castigatio »

hmcq6 wrote: post #224
somedude895 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kyriarchy I've honestly stopped looking up these modern terms when I come across them because lately any that I've looked up were made up to serve a political or social agenda (always the same one), and reading them always turns out to be a waste of time that has me roll my eyes.

I rolled my eyes when I first saw it but I know thats what people want so I looked into it. > For example, in a context where gender is the primary privileged position (e.g. patriarchy, matriarchy), gender becomes the nodal point through which sexuality, race, and class are experienced. In a context where class is the primary privileged position (i.e. classism), gender and race are experienced through class dynamics.…

I think this is a bit like coming up with words to expand on the concept of poop. Poop is a necessary and useful word. It describes something you get on your shoe. Or something you may have to suddenly rush out to do. However if I became so intensely immersed in the world of poop that I needed to invent new words to describe the subtleties of it - you might not admire my efforts or where I choose to place my attention. We have words like oppression that seem to be understood and to work well. Are we truly doing anything useful by breaking down the idea of oppression into ever more granular descriptions of it? I say - poop works fine.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#237

Post by anon84873628 »

smokedetector1 wrote: post #202
oska wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It comes with all the blindness and limitations of materialist thinking

For some reason materialism is so popular among tech people that it's almost considered foolish/primitive/superstitious to think any other way. Why is that? Is it the fact that programming is a god-like experience that gives one the illusion the mind is as comprehensible as the complex program I wrote in Java? Or is it a shared personality trait of people that get into tech, that they are disconnected from an experie…

I would call the shared personality trait "pragmatism". Since tech people generally recognize that the preponderance of the evidence points towards a purely physical explanation for the human brain.

Even considering the hard problem of consciousness, there's no compelling reason to believe it can't have a physical basis, or can't be replicated in other complex systems.

Going back to the original comment, the perspective that "the earth is a computer that created AGI through humans" is not inherently wrong, though it may be a uselessly broad definition.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#238

Post by BobaFloutist »

castigatio wrote: post #236
hmcq6 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rolled my eyes when I first saw it but I know thats what people want so I looked into it. > For example, in a context where gender is the primary privileged position (e.g. patriarchy, matriarchy), gender becomes the nodal point through which sexuality, race, and class are experienced. In a context where class is the primary privileged position (i.e. classism), gender and race are experienced through class dynamics.…

I think this is a bit like coming up with words to expand on the concept of poop. Poop is a necessary and useful word. It describes something you get on your shoe. Or something you may have to suddenly rush out to do. However if I became so intensely immersed in the world of poop that I needed to invent new words to describe the subtleties of it - you might not admire my efforts or where I choose to place my attentio…

So you don't see the value in differentiating between (valuable) manure, (human) wastewater (which can be tested for public health), stool samples, the concept of bullshit, scatting, guano, pet feces, diarrhea, etc? You think those should be all the same word?

What a narrow worldview.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#239

Post by xpe »

graypegg wrote: post #220
xpe wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core argument has a logical gap; it doesn’t matter if most (present) ML applications need AGI or not. What matters is the value proposition of AGI, independent of how we currently conceive of ML applications. Focus on this question: “Is general intelligence at some level valuable at a particular price point?” General intelligence is generally valuable, so there is a pressure to advance it, whether by improving ca…

That's a fair point I hadn't considered! If intelligence is valuable in humans, and some cost factor of advancing human intelligence can be surpassed digitally like this, (I don't know how you'd measure intellect efficiency, somehow involving calories-in/good-descisions-out or something?) then there's economic incentive. But that feels very far off, even in the current exponential curve of efficiency we're on. Can't…

Some suggestions:

- Don't assume only digital intelligence. - Intelligence is fundamentally valuable to humans. No need to add any caveats.

> But that feels very far off, even in the current exponential curve of efficiency we're on. Can't go on forever.

What exactly feels far off to you?

In many cases, sure, exponential growth can't go on forever, but one has to be careful about spelling out what you mean. What are your axes?

Don't forget that each successive technology may introduce a new growth pattern.

One has to be quite careful in analyzing and forecasting these things.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#240

Post by farrarstan »

castigatio wrote: post #124

Whatever you think about AGI, this is a dumb paper. So many words and references to say - what. If you can't articulate your point in a few sentences you probably don't have a point. There are all kinds of assumptions being made in the study about how AI systems work, about what people "mean" then they talk about AGI etc. The article starts out talking about white supremacy and replacing women. This isn't a proof. Th…

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