[stub for offtopicness] (in this case, thinkiness)
This article doesn’t really show anything near what the title assets.
Using secondary school maths to demystify AI
181–190 of 264 posts
Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you feel about Business Intelligence as a term?
Same way I feel about 'Military Intelligence' :-). Both of those phrases use the 'information gathering and analysis' definition of intelligence rather than the 'thinking' definition.
Like the old saying:
Military justice is to justice as military music is to music
Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Statements like "it is bound by the laws of physics" are not "verifiable" by your definition, and yet we safely assume it is true of everything. Everything except the human brain, that is, for which wild speculation that it may be supernatural is seemingly considered rational discussion so long as it satisfies people's needs to believe that they are somehow special in the universe.
I think what many are saying is that of all the things we know best, it's going to be the machines we build and their underlying principles. We don't fully understand how brains work, but we know brains don't function like a computer. Why would a computer be assumed to function like a brain in any way, even in part, without evidence and just hopes based on marketing? And I don't just mean consumer marketing, but mark…
What has it got to do with anything whether brains function like computers? This is only relevant if you define thinking as something only the brain can do, and then nothing that doesn't work like a brain can think. This would be like defining flight as "what birds do" and then saying airplanes can't fly because they don't work like birds.
And then what do you even mean by "a computer?" This falls into the same trap because it sounds like your statement that brains don't function like a computer is really saying "brains don't function like the computers I am familiar with." But this would be like saying quantum computers aren't computers because they don't work like classical computers.
Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see the relevance of that argument (which other responders to your post have pointed out as Searle's Chinese Room argument). The pen and paper are of course not doing any thinking, but then the pen isn't doing any writing on its own, either. It's the system of pen + paper + human that's doing the thinking.
The idea of my argument is that I notice that people project some "ethereal" properties over computations that happen in the... computer. Probably because electricity is involved, making things show up as "magic" from our point of view, making it easier to project consciousness or thinking onto the device. The cloud makes that even more abstract. But if you are aware that the transistors are just a medium that replic…
Your view is missing the forest for the trees. You see individual objects but miss the aggregate whole. You have a hard time conceiving of how exotic computers can be conscious because we are scale chauvinists by design. Our minds engage with the world on certain time and length scales, and so we naturally conceptualize our world based on entities that exist on those scales. But computing is necessarily scale independent. It doesn't matter to the computation if it is running on some 100GHz substrate or .0001Hz. It doesn't matter if its running on a CPU chip the size of a quarter or spread out over the entire planet. Computation is about how information is transformed in semantically meaningful ways. Scale just doesn't matter.
If you were a mind supervening on the behavior of some massive time/space scale computer, how would you know? How could you tell the difference between running on a human making marks with pen and paper and running on a modern CPU? Your experience updates based on information transformations, not based on how fast the fundamental substrate is changing. When your conscious experience changes, that means your current state is substantially different from your prior state and you can recognize this difference. Our human-scale chauvinism gets in the way of properly imagining this. A mind running on a CPU or a large collection of human computers is equally plausible.
A common question people like to ask is "where is the consciousness" in such a system. This is an important question if only because it highlights the futility of such questions. Where is Microsoft Word when it is running on my computer? How can you draw a boundary around a computation when there are a multitude of essential and non-essential parts of the system that work together to construct the relevant causal dynamic. It's just not a well-defined question. There is no one place where Microsoft Word occurs nor is there any one place where consciousness occurs in a system. Is state being properly recorded and correctly leveraged to compute the next state? The consciousness is in this process.
Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like these conversations really miss the mark: whether an LLM thinks or not is not a relevant question. It is a bit like asking “what color is an Xray?” or “what does the number 7 taste like?” The reason I say this is because an LLM is not a complete self-contained thing if you want to compare it to a human being. It is a building block. Your brain thinks. Your prefrontal cortex however is not a complete syste…
Why do people call is "Artificial Intelligence" when it could be called "Statistical Model for Choosing Data"? "Intelligence" implies "thinking" for most people, just as "Learning" in machine learning implies "understanding" for most people. The algorithms created neither 'think' nor 'understand' and until you understand that, it may be difficult to accurately judge the value of the results produced by these systems.
The term was coined in 1955 to describe "learning or any other feature of intelligence" simulated by a machine [1]. The same proposal does list using natural language as one of the aspects of "the artificial intelligence problem"
It's not a perfect term, but we have been using it for seven full decades to include all of machine learning and plenty of things even less intelligent
1: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmo...
Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then prove to me you are thinking, lest we assume you are a philosophical zombie and need no rights or protections. Sometimes, because of the consequences of otherwise, the order gets reversed
Well first of all I never claimed that I was capable of thinking (smirk). We also haven't agreed on a definition of "thinking" yet, so as you can read in my previous comment, there is no meaningful conversation to be had. I also don't understand how your oddly aggresive phrasing adds to the conversation, but if it helps you: my rights and protections do not depend on whether I'm able to prove to you that I am thinkin…
If I say I'm innocent, you don't say I have to prove it. Some facts are presumed to be true without burden of evidence because otherwise it could cause great harm.
So we don't require, say, minorities or animals to prove they have souls, we just inherently assume they do and make laws around protecting them.
Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people genuinely can't remember what they did an hour ago, but to be very clear you're implying that an LLM can't "remember" something from an hour, or three hours ago, when it's the opposite. I can restart a conversation with an LLM 15 days later and the state is exactly as it was. Can't do that with a human. The idea that humans have a longer, more stable context window than LLM's, CAN or is even LIKELY to…
The Turing test was passed in the 80s by Eliza it doesnt mean anything
Why doesn't it mean anything?
Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI
#188Provocative title with a much more reasoned lede. I'm pretty sure a set of workshops isn't ACTUALLY going to solve a problem that philosophers have been at each other's throats for for the past half century. But BOY does it get people talking! Both sides of the debate have capital-O Opinions, and how else did you want to drum up interest for a set of mathematics workshops. O:-)
Yes, that word 'think' is a hell of a distraction. We've replaced that bit of the title with a less provocative / more interesting phrase from the article.
Hopefully we can talk about the actual math and stuff (although the article doesn't go into much of that).
Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like these conversations really miss the mark: whether an LLM thinks or not is not a relevant question. It is a bit like asking “what color is an Xray?” or “what does the number 7 taste like?” The reason I say this is because an LLM is not a complete self-contained thing if you want to compare it to a human being. It is a building block. Your brain thinks. Your prefrontal cortex however is not a complete syste…
The part that's most infuriating is that we don't have to speculate at all. Any discussion or philosophizing beyond the literal computer science is simply misinformation. There's absolutely no similarity between what computer hardware does and what a brain does. People will twist and stretch things and tickle the imagination of the naive layperson and that's just wrong. We seriously have to cut this out already. Anth…
Similarity of the hardware is absolutely irrelevant when we're talking about emergent behavior like "thought".
Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI
#190[stub for offtopicness]
(in this case, thinkiness)