Live data from Hacker News

The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

newyorker.com

31–40 of 1001 posts

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#31
post #21

This reads like 2022 hype. It's like people stil do not understand that there's a correlation between exaggerating AI's alleged world-threatening capabilities and AI companies' market share value – and guess who's doing the hyping.

Tell me about one other industry which talked about how dangerous it is to get market share

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#32
post #17

Well, I think because we know how the code is written, in the sense that humans quite literally wrote the code for it - it's definitely not thinking, and it is literally doing what we asked, based on the data we gave it. It is specifically executing code we thought of. The output of course, we had no flying idea it would work this well. But it is not sentient. It has no idea of a self or anything like that. If it mak…

What’s crazy to me is the mechanism of pleasure or pain. I can understand that with enough complexity we can give rise to sentience but what does it take to achieve sensation?

This is the "hard problem of consciousness". It's more important than ever as machines begin to act more like humans, but my takeaway is we have no idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#33

So happy to see Hofstadter referenced! He's the GOAT in my opinion for "thinking about thinking". My own thinking on this is that AI actually IS thinking - but its like the MVB of thinking (minimum viable brain) I find thought experiments the best for this sort of thing: - Imagine you had long term memory loss so couldn't remember back very long You'd still be thinking right? - Next, imagine you go to sleep and lose…

my favourite sport is watching people trying to exclude the possibility of AI thinking/becoming sentient/self-aware/whatever-nebulous-magical-term-you-like. Every single time they manage to exclude a whole section of humanity, because everything that AI "can never do", there are living, breathing people who can't do it either.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#34

So happy to see Hofstadter referenced! He's the GOAT in my opinion for "thinking about thinking". My own thinking on this is that AI actually IS thinking - but its like the MVB of thinking (minimum viable brain) I find thought experiments the best for this sort of thing: - Imagine you had long term memory loss so couldn't remember back very long You'd still be thinking right? - Next, imagine you go to sleep and lose…

> you're in a coma

Coma -> unconscious -> not thinking

That's like saying you're thinking while asleep. Are you really?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#35
I've shared this on YN before but I'm a big fan of this piece by Kenneth Taylor (well, an essay pieced together from his lectures).

The Robots Are Coming

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/kenneth-taylor-robots-...

"However exactly you divide up the AI landscape, it is important to distinguish what I call AI-as-engineering from what I call AI-as-cognitive-science. AI-as-engineering isn’t particularly concerned with mimicking the precise way in which the human mind-brain does distinctively human things. The strategy of engineering machines that do things that are in some sense intelligent, even if they do what they do in their own way, is a perfectly fine way to pursue artificial intelligence. AI-as-cognitive science, on the other hand, takes as its primary goal that of understanding and perhaps reverse engineering the human mind.

[...]

One reason for my own skepticism is the fact that in recent years the AI landscape has come to be progressively more dominated by AI of the newfangled 'deep learning' variety [...] But if it’s really AI-as-cognitive science that you are interested in, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that it may take a bit more than our cool new deep learning hammer to build a humanlike mind.

[...]

If I am right that there are many mysteries about the human mind that currently dominant approaches to AI are ill-equipped to help us solve, then to the extent that such approaches continue to dominate AI into the future, we are very unlikely to be inundated anytime soon with a race of thinking robots—at least not if we mean by “thinking” that peculiar thing that we humans do, done in precisely the way that we humans do it."

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#36

Well, I think because we know how the code is written, in the sense that humans quite literally wrote the code for it - it's definitely not thinking, and it is literally doing what we asked, based on the data we gave it. It is specifically executing code we thought of. The output of course, we had no flying idea it would work this well. But it is not sentient. It has no idea of a self or anything like that. If it mak…

We do not write the code that makes it do what it does. We write the code that trains it to figure out how to do what it does. There's a big difference.

I think the discrepancy is this:

1. We trained it on a fraction of the world's information (e.g. text and media that is explicitly online)

2. It carries all of the biases us humans have and worse the biases that are present in the information we chose to explicitly share online (which may or may not be different to the experiences humans have in every day life)

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#37

The definitions of all these words have been going back and forward and never reached any 100% consensus anyways, so what one person understands of "thinking", "conscious", "intelligence" and so on seems to be vastly different from another person. I guess this is why any discussion around this ends up with huge conversations, everyone is talking from their own perspective and understanding, while others have differen…

You’ve got the nail on the head. We can’t answer whether AI is conscious etc unless we can agree on a definition of what that means exactly, which we don’t seem to be able to do.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#38

Well, I think because we know how the code is written, in the sense that humans quite literally wrote the code for it - it's definitely not thinking, and it is literally doing what we asked, based on the data we gave it. It is specifically executing code we thought of. The output of course, we had no flying idea it would work this well. But it is not sentient. It has no idea of a self or anything like that. If it mak…

Now convince us that you’re sentient and not just regurgitating what you’ve heard and seen in your life.

By what definition of "sentience"? Wikipedia claims "Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations" as an opening statement, which I think would be trivial depending again on your definition of "experience" and "sensations". Can a LLM hooked up to sensor events be considered to "experience sensations"? I could see arguments both ways for that.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#39

Well, I think because we know how the code is written, in the sense that humans quite literally wrote the code for it - it's definitely not thinking, and it is literally doing what we asked, based on the data we gave it. It is specifically executing code we thought of. The output of course, we had no flying idea it would work this well. But it is not sentient. It has no idea of a self or anything like that. If it mak…

Your brain is just following the laws of chemistry. So where is your thinking found in a bunch of chemical reactions?
Post reply on HN