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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

181–190 of 683 posts

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#181

The language around AGI is proof, in my mind, that religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion. A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes still endures.

People always create god, even if they claim not to believe in it. The rise of belief in conspiracy theories is a form of this (imagining an all powerful entity behind every random event), as is the belief in AGI. It's not a totalizing solution to all woes. It's just a way to convince oneself that the world is not random, and is therefore predictable, which makes us feel safer. That, after all, is what we are - predi…

The existential dread from uncertainty is so easily exploited too, and the root cause for many of societies woes. I wonder what the antidote is, or if there is one.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#182

The idea of replicating a consciousness/intelligence in a computer seems to fall apart even under materialist/atheist assumptions: what we experience as consciousness is a product of a vast number of biological systems, not just neurons firing or words spoken/thought. Even considering something as basic as how fundamental bodily movement is to mental development, or how hormones influence mood ultimately influencing…

Conflating consciousness and intelligence is going to hopelessly confuse any attempt to understand if or when a machine might achieve either.

(I think there's no reasonable definition of intelligence under which LLMs don't possess some, setting aside arguments about quantity. Whether they have or in principle could have any form of consciousness is much more mysterious -- how would we tell?)

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's a world where a water use tax is levied such that 1) it's enough for datacenters to notice and 2) doesn't immediately bankrupt all golf courses and beef production, because the water use of datacenters is just so much smaller .

We definitely shouldn’t worry about bankrupting golf courses, they are not really useful in any way that wouldn’t be better served by just having a park or wilderness. Beef, I guess, is a popular type of food. I’m under the impression that most of us would be better off eating less meat, maybe we could tax water until beef became a special occasion meal.

Water taxes should probably be regional. The price of water in the arid Southwest is much higher than toward the East coast. You might see both datacenters and beef production moving toward states like Tennessee or Kentucky.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#185
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again, the key thing here is to ask how MUCH value we get per liter of water used. If data centers and farms used the same amount of water we should absolutely be talking about their comparative value to society, and farms would win. Farms use thousands of times more water than data centers.

Once again, you are ignoring my (implied) argument: Humans NEED food, the output of agriculture. Humans do not NEED any of LLMs' outputs. Once everyone is fed, then we can talk about water usage for LLMs.

We produce enough food for everyone already, and then waste a huge amount of it. Our food problem isn't about producing more, it's about distributing what we have.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#186

The language around AGI is proof, in my mind, that religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion. A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes still endures.

People always create god, even if they claim not to believe in it. The rise of belief in conspiracy theories is a form of this (imagining an all powerful entity behind every random event), as is the belief in AGI. It's not a totalizing solution to all woes. It's just a way to convince oneself that the world is not random, and is therefore predictable, which makes us feel safer. That, after all, is what we are - predi…

It's just a scam, plain and simple. Some scams can go on for a very long time if you let the scammers run society.

Any technically superior solution needs to have a built in scam otherwise most followers will ignore it and the scammers won't have incentive to prosthelytize, e.g. rusts' safety scam.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. People are critical of farmland and golf courses, too. But Farmland at least has more benefit for society, so they are more vocal on how it's used.

The problem is more one of scale: a million liters of water is less than half of a single Olympic-sized swimming pool. A single acre of alfalfa typically requires 4.9 - 7.6 million liters a year for irrigation. Also, it's pretty easy to recycle the data center water, since it just has to cool and be sent back, but the irrigation water is lost to transpiration and the recycling-by-weather process. So, even if there's…

> The problem is more one of scale:

I think the source is the bigger problem. If they take the water from sources which are already scarce, the impact will be harsh. There probably wouldn't be any complaints if they would use sewerage or saltwater from the ocean.

> Also, it's pretty easy to recycle the data center water, since it just has to cool

Cooling and returning the water is not always that simple. I don't know specifically about datacentres, but I know about wasting clean water in other areas, cooling in power plants, industry, etc. and there it can have a significant impact on the cycle. At the end it's a resource which is used at least temporary, which has impact on the whole system.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#188

The idea of replicating a consciousness/intelligence in a computer seems to fall apart even under materialist/atheist assumptions: what we experience as consciousness is a product of a vast number of biological systems, not just neurons firing or words spoken/thought. Even considering something as basic as how fundamental bodily movement is to mental development, or how hormones influence mood ultimately influencing…

I don't see a strong argument here. Are you saying there is a level of complexity involved in biological systems that can not be simulated? And if so, who says sufficient approximations and abstractions aren't enough to simulate the emergent behavior of said systems?

We can simulate weather (poorly) without modeling every hydrogen atom interaction.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#189

It is ultimately a hardware problem. To simplify it greatly, an LLM neuron is a single input single output function. A human brain neuron takes in thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs, to the point that some inputs start being processed before they even get inside the cell by structures on the outside of it. An LLM neuron is an approximation of this. We cannot manufacture a human level neuron to be s…

Assuming you want to define the goal, "AGI", as something functionally equivalent to part (or all) of the human brain, there are two broad approaches to implement that.

1) Try to build a neuron-level brain simulator - something that is a far distant possibility, not because of compute, but because we don't have a clear enough idea of how the brain is wired, how neurons work, and what level of fidelity is needed to capture all the aspects of neuron dynamics that are functionally relevant rather than just part of a wetware realization

OR

2) Analyze what the brain is doing, to extent possible given our current incomplete knowledge, and/or reduce the definition of "AGI" to a functional level, then design a functional architecture/implementation, rather than neuron level one, to implement it

The compute demands of these two approaches are massively different. It's like the difference between an electronic circuit simulator that works at gate level vs one that works at functional level.

For time being we have no choice other than following the functional approach, since we just don't know enough to build an accurate brain simulator even if that was for some reason to be seen as the preferred approach.

The power efficiency of a brain vs a gigawatt systolic array is certainly dramatic, and it would be great for the planet to close that gap, but it seems we first need to build a working "AGI" or artificial brain (however you want it define the goal) before we optimize it. Research and iteration requires a flexible platform like GPUs. Maybe when we figure it out we can use more of a dataflow brain-like approach to reduce power usage.

OTOH, look at the difference between a single user MOE LLM, and one running in a datacenter simultaneously processing multiple inputs. In the single-user case we conceptualize the MOE as saving FLOPs/power by only having one "expert" active at a time, but in the multi-user case all experts are active all the time handling tokens from different users. The potential of a dataflow approach to save power may be similar, with all parts of the model active at the same time when handling a datacenter load, so a custom hardware realization may not be needed/relevant for power efficiency.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#190

> And this is all fine, because they’re going to make AGI and the expected value (EV) of it will be huge! (Briefly, the argument goes that if there is a 0.001% chance of AGI delivering an extremely large amount of value, and 99.999% chance of much less or zero value, then the EV is still extremely large because (0.001% * very_large_value) + (99.999% * small_value) = very_large_value). This is a strawman. The big AI n…

That's still Pascal's Wager but with different (better) probabilities.

What is the definition of Pascal's Wager in your mind?
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