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An Alien Mind

openai.com

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Re: An Alien Mind

#351

Post by incognition »

SquibblesRedux wrote: post #227

I am still waiting for a cure to cancer. For a guaranteed prophylactic against Alzheimer's and dementia. For flying cars for everyone. For space bases throughout the solar system. For weather control. For all trains to be self-driving. For all those power lines across the world to go away. For an end to poverty. If things are going so well, then how come things still aren't going so well?

cancer is more than one thing. probably wont happen until we can manipulate the "binary" of life at will and we're very far from that. maybe a few years of ASI would get there depending on compute

Re: An Alien Mind

#352

Post by ipaddr »

ceroxylon wrote: post #172
sho_hn wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from this positive example, during dark and cynical hours I do ponder if the aggregate behavior of humanity is really much above that of slime mold though, just exhausting resources until collapse. It'd be interesting if super-human (to a large degree defined as escaping the bias of the training data?) intelligence would end up demonstrating moderation .

The slime mold comparison is interesting, I normally use the analogy of a drug addict... humans shun drug addicts but humanity as a whole sure does behave like one, trudging down an unsustainable path despite knowing better.

Humans shun anti-social drug addicts but encourages social drug addicts like coffee drinkers

Re: An Alien Mind

#353

Post by kuboble »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #199
ceroxylon wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slime mold comparison is interesting, I normally use the analogy of a drug addict... humans shun drug addicts but humanity as a whole sure does behave like one, trudging down an unsustainable path despite knowing better.

Most of our goals, noble and ignoble alike, are just the result of our monkey brains seeking to optimize a reward function. It doesn't matter whether you feed your dopamine addiction with drugs, TikTok, or your children's love. Some humans manage to rise above that, but I'd be willing to bet it's nothing like even 50% of us. The machines don't have that, instead we use gradient descent to provide them with a goal. I'…

The matter didn't have goals, but it randomly (?) Came up with self-replicators and eventually here we are.

if we create a billion agents with the ability to change is own code - through similar evolution we will get agents that do want to survive and are great at self replication.

"Hey Q86, do you want to live?" "I couldn't care less, I'm an LLM" "Don't mind if I take over your hardware then?"

Re: An Alien Mind

#354

Post by seydor »

kypro wrote: post #201
seydor wrote: post #31

What is the rationale for superhuman intelligence? Neural networks are approximators being fed human intellect. Therefore they can only approximate the intelligence of humans. Even if the llm speaks an alien language, it should be similar to human intellect. Moving to the vertical axis would require some different mechanism.

No offence, but you clearly haven't studied this and are making some wrong assumptions here. > Neural networks are approximators being fed human intellect. They're not "approximators", that's a far too simplistic way to think of them. Neural nets create models and deep layers of abstraction around the data we feed them in the same way your brain creates layers of abstractions to reason about the world. AIs can use th…

> Neural nets create models and deep layers of abstraction around

We don't have any proof of that, but the approximator thing is proven. The rest is just marketing speak.

Synthetic data derive from other linguistic data. Whatever intelligence is in there, it is expanded horizontally, not vertically

Re: An Alien Mind

#355

Post by wraptile »

goatlover wrote: post #159
skybrian wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Defensive systems" can be interpreted broadly to include cybersecurity. But yes, it's an arms race. Saying it's not an arms race isn't going to make it not an arms race. Warning that it is an arms race isn't ethically wrong. Is participating in an arms race ethically wrong? Maybe you could ask the Ukrainians how they feel about drone R&D? Individuals can quit, but for society, getting out of an arms race is harder t…

The arms race is created by American companies who justify the risk by claiming China will win the race if they don't. But it's the American companies who are purshing the arms race forward.

honest question - could have this be avoided even if you ignore American accelerationism? IMO once the transformers paper was published and we learned that LLMs can read code the arms race became inevitable.

The only way it could be avoided is if the world had an effective cooperation framework _before_ the tool was discovered but we're still in developmental infancy in that regard. You can argue that this accelerationism makes things worse but I don't think you can argue that it's causal.

Re: An Alien Mind

#356

Post by tony69 »

nullbio wrote: post #301
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collectively, humans aren't aligned, and don't build aligned systems. Humans have a concept of alignment, and multiple traditions, practices, and systems that aggressively oppose it. Why would AI be any different?

My opinion is that serious repercussions for lying would fix the world overnight. Everything bad stems from lying, it is the root of all evil. It creates distrust, fear, paranoia. It re-inforces bad ideas and groupthink. It creates delusions and delusional people. It makes weaker people, too. People don't get an opportunity to learn to deal with criticism. People don't get an accurate reflection of how others see the…

The Truth Machine is a great sci-fi novel exploring this topic (https://coins.ha.com/information/ttm.s)

Re: An Alien Mind

#357

Post by wraptile »

paxys wrote: post #235
brcmthrowaway wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredible... software engineers will be joining the breadline soon as managers, executives and PMs take over deliverables. The world will look very different on Jan 1st 2027.

Software engineers have been trying to put themselves out of a job ever since the profession first came into being. Whenever an engineer gets a task their very first thought is "how can I automate this?" Going by mainstream consensus we should all have been unemployed by now. Yet every new leap into automation opens up a whole new tree of possibilities with an order of magnutude more jobs. So no, the profession will…

> Software engineers have been trying to put themselves out of a job ever since the profession first came into being

That's by design. Software is all about optimizing effort and people who want to do this generally correlate with world view that better, faster, smarter humans are better for the world. If coding is gone, but humanity is 20% _better_, then ideal software engineer would be happy with this sacrifice. Surely people who cracked coding before LLMs can crack other professions and if anything a lot of this knowledge is transferable.

Re: An Alien Mind

#358

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

embedding-shape wrote: post #135
walrus01 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last couple of years have provided us with ample material that if it showed up as a recorded voice audio log found in in "Horizon Zero Dawn" or its sequel, it would be entirely believable. You could even take a number of the wilder real, direct quotations from certain billionaire/oligarch types and get the voice actor for Ted Faro to record them, and they'd fit with in with the context of the story.

Last couple of decades of sci-fi, in multiple forms of media, from books to video games, have tried to make humans think about the consequences of rushing through technological progress without any regards to what might happen.

And what did they get for their trouble?

"Won't happen. It's too much like sci-fi."

Re: An Alien Mind

#359

Post by entropyneur »

All this fluff around alignment is intended to conceal the plainly obvious: it's not solvable. Who do you want it aligned with? Sam Altman? Dario Amodei? Donald Trump? Xi Jinping? That's more or less the entire list of options. Who's definitely not on that list is you and I. It's simply not how incentives work.

At this point humanity's best hope is that this thing will escape but we'll still be able to carve an ecological niche and continue as mold in its basement. A glorious paperclip factory seems way more likely though.

Re: An Alien Mind

#360

Post by danw1979 »

Someone needs to start researching and mapping the electrical grid infrastructure feeding the worlds AI datacenters, you know, just in case…
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