Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

edge.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 101 posts

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#31

Post by ForHackernews »

Retra wrote: post #27
ForHackernews wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, they cannot possibly exist I don't understand how you can be so confident of this. How are you defining consciousness? How are you measuring it? What makes you believe with such emphatic certainty that I am a conscious being and not a p-zombie? (or, if you prefer, a bot that easily passes the Turing test) > They are not unrelated ideas, and in fact, the ability of an organism to survive is closely tied to…

>I don't understand how you can be so confident of this. [...] How are you measuring it? What makes you believe with such emphatic certainty that I am a conscious being and not a p-zombie? Because p-zombies are self-contradictory. The definition of a p-zombie is a contradiction. It's like saying "suppose 1 = 2 and 1 != 2. Call this a p-zombie quality." When you suppose that the behavior of a thing is separate from th…

> yet measurably identical in all aspects

> behavior is the activity that you measure, and you can measure brain activity.

You've shifted your definition of "behavior" now. I thought we were talking about behaviors that impact survival and are acted on by natural selection, not minute differences in MRI scans. For purposes of the thought experiment, I certainly don't care if the p-zombie has a slightly different brain-wave. Let's say they're permanently sleepwalking, then.

I really feel like you're hand-waving at supposed contradictions here, rather than engaging with why this is a difficult problem. If you firmly reject the idea of a p-zombie, let's leave that aside for now.

Do you believe that it would be possible, in principle, to build a robot that looked and acted extremely similar to a human being? It could carry on conversations, make decisions, defend itself against antagonists, etc. in a similar manner to a human being? In your view, would such a robot be necessarily a conscious entity?

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#32

Post by vectorjohn »

decisiveness wrote: post #29

I'm doubtful of the prediction that humans will eventually become useless or superfluous. Common jobs today that only humans can do will undoubtedly be accomplished by machines in the future, but that doesn't mean humans will become obsolete. As long as the universe and time exist as we know it humans will never be perfect. And just like humans, AI will always have bugs, as its root creator will always be a flawed hu…

A lot of baseless assumptions here.

"its root creator will always be a flawed human"

"But since a human can never create AI to create AI better than a human..."

This is your premise. I don't think, and a lot of smart people don't think, this is true. The thing that gets people really worried or excited is that they think it IS possible to make an AI that can create better AI. And it's a positive feedback loop that goes nobody knows how far.

There is no reason, unless you believe in magic, to think AI can't be as smart as humans. But if you go that far, there's no reason to think it can't be smarter. And if it can do that, it can make better AI than humans can.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#33

Post by shasta »

fuligo wrote: post #2

Computers are very, very, very far from being like humans, especially when it comes to consciousness. The problem is different, that the system, the military and economic and political system doesn't really need consciousness. Consciousness is a poorly defined concept with many unfortunate connotations, but let's assume in this context it's the same as self-awareness. I assert it's very likely that nature didn't evol…

"Self awareness is a byproduct of an intelligence that can reason about itself" looks like a tautology to me. I've heard similar theories proposed that extend to broader notions of consciousness, but I don't find the argument very compelling. It's very easy to see why self-awareness is required in nature: intelligence won't do any good for an organism unless it is self aware and has a survival instinct. That pressure clearly doesn't apply to man made machines.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#34

Post by mattbettinson »

vinceguidry wrote: post #20

The thought of being able to abolish death as soon as you have a working BCI by running one's mind on silicon hardware is, if not ludicrous, at least really really far out. So, you hook your brain up to a computer, and get basic input and output. Great, you now have an upgraded keyboard / mouse. It doesn't get any better no matter how many capabilities you add. Direct memory access, changing the contents of programs…

Buddhists say a loss of identity can lead to the greatest bliss one can experience. I think the future is going to get really weird.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#35

Post by karmacondon »

When people in the 1940s looked into the future they saw flying cars, spaceships and cities in the clouds. When we look into the future today we see AI, a post-labor economy and the end of death itself. I'm not sure if technological progress has increased, but we're definitely dreaming bigger.

I think that predictions from the past can be instructive in two ways. First, most of it didn't come to pass. We still don't have flying cars or cloud cities, and common commercial space travel is still decades away. The second thing that might be of note is how positive the past vision of the future was compared to our current ideas about the future. We're so dystopian and negative in 2015. We'll have self aware supercomputers, but we're worried that they'll kill us. Robots will be able to do anything a human can do, but we're worried that we'll all be unemployed while a few get rich. We'll have the ability to live forever, but we're worried that will only be a privilege for the rich people who control the robots, and then only if the robots don't decide to kill us all.

Putting these two things together, I can only think to quote Packer's QB Aaron Rogers: "R-E-L-A-X" [0]. Odds are that most of these revolutionary technologies are far away, and won't turn out to be as evil as we imagine. The beginning of the 20th century was a time of tumultuous change. The automobile, household electricity, recorded music and movies, communism and the end of aristocracies. Everything was changing and people were optimistic about the future. Now we're on the other end of the pendulum. Outside of communications and the internet, there haven't been a lot of big technological or political changes and people are feeling generally negative about everything. Hopefully the early 21st century will produce big ideas that will have us all feeling inspired again. I wish I had some grand conclusion or takeaway from all of this, but I think the key is that this too shall pass and we should all try to enjoy the journey.

[0] This is a references from sports news that might be out of place here. If you didn't get it, it's ok. Move along, nothing to see here.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#36

Post by decisiveness »

vectorjohn wrote: post #32
decisiveness wrote: post #29

I'm doubtful of the prediction that humans will eventually become useless or superfluous. Common jobs today that only humans can do will undoubtedly be accomplished by machines in the future, but that doesn't mean humans will become obsolete. As long as the universe and time exist as we know it humans will never be perfect. And just like humans, AI will always have bugs, as its root creator will always be a flawed hu…

A lot of baseless assumptions here. "its root creator will always be a flawed human" "But since a human can never create AI to create AI better than a human..." This is your premise. I don't think, and a lot of smart people don't think, this is true. The thing that gets people really worried or excited is that they think it IS possible to make an AI that can create better AI. And it's a positive feedback loop that go…

"There is no reason, unless you believe in magic, to think AI can't be as smart as humans."

AI can be as smart or smarter than most humans in many ways, but I think it's a very real possibility that its development path won't render the human mind useless. They key difference between AI and humans is AI has the power to iterate and learn from its mistakes much faster than humans without fatigue. The methods of which it learns are created by humans. To assume the creation of AI with "a positive feedback loop that goes nobody knows how far" without humans first understanding how seems more of a belief in magic to me.

"I don't think, and a lot of smart people don't think, this is true."

When it comes to predictions, smart people can be wrong. I could be wrong or they could be wrong, and they may be smarter than me, but I'm smart enough to know this is true.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#37

Post by hammerandtongs »

vinceguidry wrote: post #20

The thought of being able to abolish death as soon as you have a working BCI by running one's mind on silicon hardware is, if not ludicrous, at least really really far out. So, you hook your brain up to a computer, and get basic input and output. Great, you now have an upgraded keyboard / mouse. It doesn't get any better no matter how many capabilities you add. Direct memory access, changing the contents of programs…

I actually agree with your view of the BCI being a long process.

I think you are too flippant and dismissive of what he was saying about this in the context of the many different things he was talking about.

You are essentially quibbling over his simple presentation of what most people know will be a very complex process.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#38

Post by TeMPOraL »

rivd wrote: post #14
fuligo wrote: post #2

Computers are very, very, very far from being like humans, especially when it comes to consciousness. The problem is different, that the system, the military and economic and political system doesn't really need consciousness. Consciousness is a poorly defined concept with many unfortunate connotations, but let's assume in this context it's the same as self-awareness. I assert it's very likely that nature didn't evol…

The word "Consciousness" is almost like the word "God". Many people seem to know what it is, no one can actually define it, and it has never been measured, located or proven to exist. Maybe we should stop using it altogether.

I wouldn't go as far as stopping to use it altogether, but when discussing things it might be worth a while to taboo it [0]. It's a very helpful trick; [1] explains it nicely.

[0] - http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationalist_taboo

[1] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/nu/taboo_your_words/

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#39

Post by reasonattlm »

karmacondon wrote: post #35

When people in the 1940s looked into the future they saw flying cars, spaceships and cities in the clouds. When we look into the future today we see AI, a post-labor economy and the end of death itself. I'm not sure if technological progress has increased, but we're definitely dreaming bigger. I think that predictions from the past can be instructive in two ways. First, most of it didn't come to pass. We still don't…

People in the 1940s were riding the top of an energy revolution, an enormously rapid upward trend in energy production that, had it continued unabated, would today see us with the output of a nuclear powerplant generated by threads in our clothing for a dollar or two. They didn't foresee information technology, for the most part. They foresaw solar system-wide travel and simple mechanical computing devices like slide rules coexisting.

Of course it proved harder than expected to keep that curve going, and we got the infotech future rather than the high power future. We're probably better off for that, given that medicine is driven by infotech, not power.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#40

Post by TeMPOraL »

ForHackernews wrote: post #23
Retra wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

P-zombies don't exist, so they are not a counterexample to anything. In fact, they cannot possibly exist, so they don't even point to the possibility of anything interesting. >There's no reason to believe that consciousness is a necessary feature for an organism to respond to its environment in a survival-enhancing way. The reason to believe this is that systems with "consiousness" are a strict superset of systems wi…

> In fact, they cannot possibly exist I don't understand how you can be so confident of this. How are you defining consciousness? How are you measuring it? What makes you believe with such emphatic certainty that I am a conscious being and not a p-zombie? (or, if you prefer, a bot that easily passes the Turing test) > They are not unrelated ideas, and in fact, the ability of an organism to survive is closely tied to…

I think the TL;DR of the argument against p-zombies goes like this: if you have two things that are by definition indistinguishable by any possible measurement even in principle, they are by this very definition the same. Since there is, by definition, no way to tell if someone is a p-zombie or not, the introduction of the term "p-zombie" doesn't make any sense at all, and therefore why would you ever do that?

The people who argue p-zombies often do this because they want to keep consciousness as something fundamentally different than the material world, something inaccessible to science. But it's wrong. Even magic is accessible to science. By the very definition and idea of science, anything that has any causal influence on the observable universe can be studied and is in the domain of science.

Post reply on HN