So I had a random thought earlier. At one point, the cessation of the heartbeat signified death. But now we have CPR. Now 'brain death' is often considered to signify death.. but could/can we 'restart' the brain as we do the heartbeat with CPR?
Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman
61–70 of 101 posts
Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
Not really. This is pretty much a definition of a positive feedback loop.
To give a very simplified example, imagine that a mind of IQ N is able to create, at best a mind of IQ N+10. So say, the smartest human alive has 150 IQ. He goes and creates an AI that has 160 IQ, which then goes on to create a 170-IQ AI, ad infinitum.
Of course you could argue the relationship is different. Maybe the ith mind can create at best an N+(1/2)^i mind, at which point the whole series will hit an asymptote, a natural limit caused by diminished returns. But it would be one hell of a coincidence if humans were close to that natural limit.
So basically, what we need to do to potentially start intelligence explosion is to figure out how to make a general AI that is just a little bit smarter than us. Which seems entirely possible, given that we can use as much hardware as we like, making it both larger and faster than human brains.
Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I know. Indistinguishability in that sense is not a transitive relation. Imagine e.g. that we have detectors which can distinguish As from Cs, but no detectors which can distinguish As from Bs or Bs from Cs. There is no contradiction in that scenario. In contrast, there is no consistent scenario in which A = B and B = C but A != C.
Imagine that we have bunch of As, Bs and Cs in one place. Start testing every one against another. You'll quickly discover two groups - An A tests positive with other As and Bs, but tests negative with Cs. A C tests negative with As, but tests positive with Bs and other Cs. B is the one that tests positive with everything. Here, I distinguished them all. Doesn't that contradict your argument about indistinguishabilit…
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Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I know. Indistinguishability in that sense is not a transitive relation. Imagine e.g. that we have detectors which can distinguish As from Cs, but no detectors which can distinguish As from Bs or Bs from Cs. There is no contradiction in that scenario. In contrast, there is no consistent scenario in which A = B and B = C but A != C.
Imagine that we have bunch of As, Bs and Cs in one place. Start testing every one against another. You'll quickly discover two groups - An A tests positive with other As and Bs, but tests negative with Cs. A C tests negative with As, but tests positive with Bs and other Cs. B is the one that tests positive with everything. Here, I distinguished them all. Doesn't that contradict your argument about indistinguishabilit…
Yeah, that strategy would work in the scenario I sketched, but it's easy to change it so that you couldn't do that. Just say we have As, Bs, Cs and Ds and that all pairings are indistinguishable except As with Ds.
Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman
#65AI is a simulation (artificial). Even if you did the acrobatics of saying there could be II (inorganic intelligence), there's nothing to suggest self-awareness could transfer from organic to inorganic, and there's no way to distinguish between a simulation being self-aware, and having the "appearance" of being self-aware, so I don't see how anyone could claim to have made a self-aware machine.
If you believe that people have spirits, then the question is also moot. But if you don't believe that people have spirits, there's no way to prove that your memories transferred into anything other than a simulation of yourself. If you consider yourself "you", then something else would not be "you", even if it had the appearance of being "you".
Even if you believe that consciousness arises from the synapses, and is therefore a simulation or illusion to begin with, there's still no way to prove that you would "transfer".
You can't say "there is a singularity" - you can only hope, if that's what you hope for. Others hope there is a god. It's a matter of faith both ways, and a reflection of wanting to escape death.
I don't think there's any harm in believing in the singularity for entertainment value, but as for providing a door to immortality, I think the main danger is simply distraction. While all the effort and discussion and research is spent on something there is no way of proving -- in the meantime, 20,000 children die each day from preventable diseases.
Even if you are a rational egoist, I invite you to consider what you'd do if a child was dying right in front of you. Would you help them? The fact is children are at arm's length, courtesy of our mobile devices, with which we could place more attention on relieving suffering than in trying to achieve immortality by flipping a coin on an unproven allegation.
So the fact is, because we could choose to act, rational egoists included, we are genocidal in our indifference. The first step in facing this is to admit it, and then to try and take steps to do something about it.
I invite anyone who seriously considers a singularity to set it down, and put some effort into the relief of suffering. When we have preventable diseases and poverty figured out, then let's revisit the singularity. I'd enjoy working on it then.
Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine that we have bunch of As, Bs and Cs in one place. Start testing every one against another. You'll quickly discover two groups - An A tests positive with other As and Bs, but tests negative with Cs. A C tests negative with As, but tests positive with Bs and other Cs. B is the one that tests positive with everything. Here, I distinguished them all. Doesn't that contradict your argument about indistinguishabilit…
Yeah, that strategy would work in the scenario I sketched, but it's easy to change it so that you couldn't do that. Just say we have As, Bs, Cs and Ds and that all pairings are indistinguishable except As with Ds.
But at this point I have to ask, how do you define identity? I'm pretty sure that I could use the strategy I outlined above to separate our objects into three groups - As, Ds and the rest. So how do you define that Bs are not Cs, if there is no possible way for telling the difference?
Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that strategy would work in the scenario I sketched, but it's easy to change it so that you couldn't do that. Just say we have As, Bs, Cs and Ds and that all pairings are indistinguishable except As with Ds.
But at this point I have to ask, how do you define identity? I'm pretty sure that I could use the strategy I outlined above to separate our objects into three groups - As, Ds and the rest. So how do you define that Bs are not Cs, if there is no possible way for telling the difference?
I'd define identity as the smallest relation holding between all things and themselves.
If you want, you can redefine identity in terms of some notion of indistinguishability, but then you'll end up with the odd consequence that identity is not transitive. In other words, you'd have to say that if A is identical to B, B is identical to C, and C is identical to D, it doesn't necessarily follow that A is identical to D.
There are even semi-realistic examples of this, I think. Suppose that two physical quantities X and Y are indistinguishable by any physically possible test if the difference between X and Y < 3. Then i(1, 2), i(2,3), i(3,4), but clearly not i(1,4).
Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
That's a very bad argument. Indistinguishability doesn't entail identity. One obvious way to show this is to note that only the latter is a transitive relation. In other words, if A = B and B = C, then A = C; but if A is indistinguishable from B and B is indistinguishable from C, it doesn't follow that A is indistinguishable from C.
Identity isn't what we're measuring here, it's "humanness" or "consciousness" -- things that are behaviorally distinguishable. Up to an abstract categorical similarity.
Thus they only need to be indistinguishable up to some feature of similarity that allows them to be classified in the same group. That's why, for example, we don't have to worry about "A is the same as B except that it is 2 meters to the left."
Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 brai…
> 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?
I don't even know that other humans are conscious entities. At least not with the level of rigor you seem to be demanding I apply to this hypothetical robot. However, if you and I were to agree upon a series of test that, if passed by a human, we would assume for the sake of argument that that human was a conscious entity, and if we then subjected your robot to those same tests and it also passed, then I would also assume the robot was also conscious.
You might have noticed I made a hidden assumption in the tests though, which is that in establishing the consciousness or not-consciousness of a human they do not rely on the observable fact that the subject is a human. Is that reasonable?
Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tangent, but... we're not there with music. We're pretty much there with the cost of copying/distributing music. And we're partway there with the falling cost of production tools, and wider affordable/free availability of instructional materials. But creating music -- particularly creating good music -- still takes a significant investment of time in the immediate act of creation and another order of magnitude of tim…
Not necessarily. As a counterexample, people (many of whom are very creative and talented) put staggering amounts of time and dedication into playing and becoming skilled at video games for no reason other than personal entertainment. Videos of people playing games are freely available and no profit is typically expected. A similar phenomenon might be observed with music, where players of music dedicate large amounts…
The cases you're describing either involve someone who spends some other portion of their time (probably "full-time") on money making activities, or someone who has an external means of support (trust fund, savings, fortune they earned earlier, family, whatever).
In the former case it's pretty much as I originally described. Sure, if they're dedicated and don't have any other time sinks like a family, you may still get some music from them, but significantly less or lower quality music than you'd get from them if they could spend full-time on it.
In the latter case.... it's true enough that people in this position have the privilege of studying and creating music full-time without any expectation of payment. They have all the money they need, they're free to spend their time as they wish. Of course, saying this is our economic model means that most of our music has to come from people in this position, mostly kids, retirees, and those with rich family or other benefactors.
And depending on your tolerance for how undemocratic that's likely to be, maybe that's OK. Though I think that if one accepts a picture of the world painted in the article where an increasing number of people aren't even needed by any of our market, civic, or social institutions, the prospect of having them also sidelined in music and other letters gets a little more troublesome.
(And as another tangent: while I enjoy video games myself -- even some very difficult ones that require big investments of skill -- I'd be very careful about drawing larger lessons about skills from them. One of the reasons we enjoy these games is that their practice-reward cycles are often significantly shorter than many comparable real-world skills.)