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AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

economist.com

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Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#111

Post by jrm4 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #8

AI is technology that does not exist yet that can be speculated about. When AI materializes into existence it becomes normal technology. Let's not forget there has been times when if-else statements were considered AI. NLP used to be AI too.

One, I doubt your premise ever happens in a meaningfully true and visible way -- but perhaps more important, I'd say you're factually wrong in terms of "what is called AI?"

Among most people, you're thinking of things that were debatably AI, today we have things that are AI (again, not due to any concrete definition, simply due to accepted usage of the term.)

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#112

Post by jrm4 »

aredox wrote: post #32

The potentially "explosive" part of AI was that it could be self-improving. Using AI to improve AI, or AI improving itself in an exponential growth until it becomes super-human. This is what the "Singularity" and AI "revolution" is based on. But in the end, despite saying AI has PhD-level intelligence, the truth is that even AI companies can't get AI to help them improve faster. Anything slower than exponential is pr…

This is brilliant and I can't believe I haven't heard this idea before.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#113

Post by barnacs »

chpatrick wrote: post #99
barnacs wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's only able to answer the question because it has been trained on all text in existence written by humans, precisely with the purpose to mimic human language use. It is the humans that produced the training data and then provided feedback in the form of reinforcement that did all the "thinking". Even if it can extrapolate to some degree (altough that's where "hallucinations" tend to become obvious), it could n…

Humans are also trained on data made by humans. > it could never, for example, invent a game like chess or a social construct like a legal system. Those require motivations like "boredom", "being social", having a "need for safety". That's creativity which is a different question from thinking.

I guess our definition of "thinking" is just very different.

Yes, humans are also capable of learning in a similar fashion and imitating, even extrapolating from a learned function. But I wouldn't call that intelligent, thinking behavior, even if performed by a human.

But no human would ever perform like that, without trying to intuitively understand the motivations of the humans they learned from, and naturally intermingling the performance with their own motivations.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#114

Post by utyop22 »

hermitcrab wrote: post #86
mindcrime wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People constantly assert that LLMs don't think in some magic way that humans do think, It doesn't matter anyway. The marquee sign reads "Artificial Intelligence" not "Artificial Human Being". As long as AI displays intelligent behavior, it's "intelligent" in the relevant context. There's no basis for demanding that the mechanism be the same as what humans do. And of course it should go without saying that Artificia…

Aircraft don't fly like birds, submarines don't swim like fish and AIs aren't going to think like a human.

Do these comparisons actually make sense though?

Aircraft and submarines belong to a different category and of the same category, than AI.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#115

Post by elbasti »

chpatrick wrote: post #19
el_nahual wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a name: Large Language Models, or "Generative" AI. It doesn't think, it doesn't reason, and it doesn't listen to instructions, but it does generate pretty good text!

[citation needed] People constantly assert that LLMs don't think in some magic way that humans do think, when we don't even have any idea how that works.

It's not some "magical way"--the ways in which a human thinks that an LLM doesn't are pretty obvious, and I dare say self-evidently part of what we think constitutes human intelligence:

- We have a sense of time (ie, ask an LLM to follow up in 2 minutes)

- We can follow negative instructions ("don't hallucinate, if you don't know the answer, say so")

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#116

Post by jackphilson »

measurablefunc wrote: post #89
wvbdmp wrote: post #4

Okay, so AI isn’t exceptional, but I’m also not exceptional. I run on the same tech base as any old chimpanzee, but at one point our differences in degree turned into one of us remaining “normal” and the other burning the entire planet. Whether the particular current AI tech is it or not, I have yet to be convinced that the singularity is practically impossible, and as long as things develop in the opposite direction…

If you use non-constructive reasoning¹ then you can argue for basically any outcome & even convince yourself that it is inevitable. The basic example is as follows, there is no scientific or physical principle that can prevent the birth of someone much worse than Hitler & therefore if people keep having children one of those children will inevitably be someone who will cause unimaginable death & destruction. My recom…

Irrelevant but I like this pattern of using Gemini (or AI outputs in general) as sources. Please continue to do so and I encourage any readers to also adopt this pattern. I will also try to implement this pattern.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#117

Post by utyop22 »

aredox wrote: post #32

The potentially "explosive" part of AI was that it could be self-improving. Using AI to improve AI, or AI improving itself in an exponential growth until it becomes super-human. This is what the "Singularity" and AI "revolution" is based on. But in the end, despite saying AI has PhD-level intelligence, the truth is that even AI companies can't get AI to help them improve faster. Anything slower than exponential is pr…

Said another way, will a firm suddenly improve radically because they hired a thousand PhDs folks? Not quite.

Many things sound good on paper. But paper vs reality are very different. Things are more complex in reality.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#118

Post by utyop22 »

lioeters wrote: post #97
aredox wrote: post #32

The potentially "explosive" part of AI was that it could be self-improving. Using AI to improve AI, or AI improving itself in an exponential growth until it becomes super-human. This is what the "Singularity" and AI "revolution" is based on. But in the end, despite saying AI has PhD-level intelligence, the truth is that even AI companies can't get AI to help them improve faster. Anything slower than exponential is pr…

> improving itself in an exponential growth That seems like a possibly mythical critical point, at which a phase transition will occur that makes the AI system qualitatively different from its predecessors. Exponential to the limit of infinity. All the mad rush of companies and astronomical investments are being made to get there first, counting on this AGI to be a winner-takes-all scenario, especially if it can be h…

What world domination though? If such a thing ever existed for example in the US, the government would move to own and control it. No firm or individual would be allowed to acquire and exercise that level of power.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#119

Post by CuriouslyC »

jrm4 wrote: post #108
CuriouslyC wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agents are going to change everything. Once we've got a solid programmatic system driving interface and people get better about exposing non-ui handles for agents to work with programs, agents will make apps obsolete. You're going to have a device that sits by your desk and listens to you, watches your movements and tracks your eyes, and dispatches agents to do everything you ask it to do, using all the information i…

This isn't likely to happen for roughly the same reason Hypercard didn't become the universal way for novices to create apps.

I probably spend 80% of my time in front of a computer driving agents, challenge accepted :)
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