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

The Last Invention of Man

nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 122 posts

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#101

Post by sundaysailor »

21 wrote: post #51
dqpb wrote: post #47

When they shifted their focus toward products that they could develop and sell, computer games first seemed the obvious top choice. Prometheus could rapidly become extremely skilled at designing appealing games, easily handling the coding, graphic design, ray tracing of images, and all other tasks needed to produce a final ready-to-ship product. Moreover, after digesting all the web’s data on people’s preferences, it…

That's one theorized explanation for the Fermi paradox, that highly advanced civilizations upload into their Matrix where they live a life of bliss. I wondered many times if an AI could invent something more viral than "cats", something maybe so viral that it causes your mind to melt (ie, you go insane by the cuteness or whatever)

Christopher Cherniak, The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution (1978), http://themindi.blogspot.in/2007/02/chapter-17-riddle-of-uni...

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#102

Post by edanm »

andrewla wrote: post #24

I think it’s a little absurd that we would make the leap to machine super-intelligence without going through the step of machine low or medium intelligence. If I could write, I’d write a companion story to this called “Omega-1, the artificial super intelligence that wasn’t really that good at things”. They try to have it write mini-AIs to solve MT problems, but it’s slow and inaccurate. They have it write and produce…

"I think it’s a little absurd that we would make the leap to machine super-intelligence without going through the step of machine low or medium intelligence."

Why? The leap from calculators that were worse than humans, to calculators that were much, much better than humans, didn't take too long. No one knows how fast the leap will be from what we currently have, to general intelligence, to super intelligence.

I don't think anyone in the AI safety movement will tell you that we know for sure the leap will be fast. I think they'd say we simply don't know how fast it will be, but the stakes are pretty high so it's worth preparing for.

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#103

Post by edanm »

vonnik wrote: post #74

One of the most annoying things about Bostrom, Tegmark and other amateur sci-fi authors is that they have chosen parables as their medium. Bostrom likes his sparrows and owls[0], Tegmark likes thinly veiled references to DeepMind with Team Omega.[1] Parables are for children and religious flocks. They are also irrefutable. Which makes them a perfect tool for Bostrom/Tegmark, but an inappropriate interjection into mor…

Parables are one of the best ways to get a message across to a lot of people. It's a message worth spreading.

If you want more "technical" thoughts on the project, there are those things too, but most people would never have been exposed to them without the less-technical people making noise.

"The central, gaping hole in their fear-mongering, as Maciej has pointed out, is that they do not define or quantify intelligence, but they're very free with language when they talk about AI surpassing human intelligence."

IMO, this is less of a problem than most people assume. It's usually defined in broad terms as "ability to achieve goals", and that's enough for almost all practical purposes. To insist on a stricter definition is simply unnecessary for their arguments.

Just because we don't understand something, doesn't mean we can't use it or reason about it.

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#104

Post by vostrocity »

Alan_Dillman wrote: post #98

What bugged me was the creation of the server centers. "start building a series of massive computer facilities around the world" The AI can be quick as a wink designing these things, but the supply chains for huge buildings takes a lot of time. Acquiring talent, training operators, construction crews, as well as location scouting, surveying, zone approval, geological testing, and various other tasks takes years. Some…

I interpreted the construction of data centers as happening over the span of a few years, and continuously after that. The whole transformation up to the creation of the Alliance seemed like it would have to happen in half a century, if not longer.

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#105

Post by vostrocity »

leggomylibro wrote: post #3

Didn't the people at Los Alamos think that the atomic bomb's chain reaction might keep going and set the entire atmosphere on fire? And I seem to remember the large hadron collider failing to collapse into a black hole. Sure, AI might destroy civilization and/or upend the primacy of humankind. But if history has taught us anything, it's that we're gonna go ahead and do it anyways if it's possible. It's worked so far.

This article gives a prognosis of AI that does not destroy civilization but makes civilization better.

It is much more comforting than proposals to try to limit AI in my opinion.

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#106

Post by vostrocity »

There are four sticking points in this article that I felt could use farther clarification

- why AI could not be used to innovate on manufacturing, and what that leads to

- the education and intellectual pursuits of humans and how it compares with what AI can do

- that there wouldn’t be competing AIs that would make this transformation much slower (especially if some competing AI fall into the wrong hands)

- that governments would let this transformation take place without retaliation or trying to capture this power

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#107

Post by doktrin »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #30
andrewla wrote: post #24

I think it’s a little absurd that we would make the leap to machine super-intelligence without going through the step of machine low or medium intelligence. If I could write, I’d write a companion story to this called “Omega-1, the artificial super intelligence that wasn’t really that good at things”. They try to have it write mini-AIs to solve MT problems, but it’s slow and inaccurate. They have it write and produce…

Yeah. Maciej wrote a pretty good piece rebutting AI alarmism and kind of alludes to that as one of several points. http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm > With no way to define intelligence (except just pointing to ourselves), we don't even know if it's a quantity that can be maximized. For all we know, human-level intelligence could be a tradeoff. Maybe any entity significantly smarter than a human being…

> pretty good piece rebutting AI alarmism

I only read the text, but I was under the impression it was mainly meant to be a funny Wat-style talk and not a meaningful rebuttal.

If, in fact, this piece is intended as a serious rebuttal then I honestly think it fails. The overwhelming majority of the content is either a funny whataboutism (e.g. Gilligan's Island, pot smoking roommate, the Great Emu War, etc.), or jokes about what could be loosely termed the "AI community".

AI 'alarmism', as I understand it, is not predicated on the idea that super-AI is a certainty - merely that it's a possibility. No point raised in this piece gives me a reason to believe that AGI (or whatever) is either impossible or so unlikely that it can be disregarded.

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#108

Post by cardamomo »

This piece describes a future that is reminiscent of the world created in Zachary Mason's "Void Star" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29939057-void-star). The world of this novel is one in which superintelligent AI operate in tandem with everyday human life, with their own unknown motives. The narrative takes place at a point when humans no longer quite understand the science or math behind the AIs' inventions.

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#109

Post by dTal »

andrewla wrote: post #24

I think it’s a little absurd that we would make the leap to machine super-intelligence without going through the step of machine low or medium intelligence. If I could write, I’d write a companion story to this called “Omega-1, the artificial super intelligence that wasn’t really that good at things”. They try to have it write mini-AIs to solve MT problems, but it’s slow and inaccurate. They have it write and produce…

I feel this lacks imagination. In actual fact, a computerised person of average intelligence would be an incredible piece of technology and could easily lead to an AI singularity, given enough funding - which it would probably receive, because holy shit. What happens when you set thousands of average people on a problem, and give them thousands of simulated years to work on it? When you can spin up a research team as easily as an AWS instance?

>but without changing the way that it stores and indexes the information, it can’t make something that can solve problems that it can’t.

And yet people routinely grow up to be smarter than their parents, with no special effort on their parents' part. All you need to make a smarter version of yourself is the ability to make inaccurate copies and dumb luck. What, besides ethics and money, stops you from running an evolutionary process that selects for intelligence at a vastly higher rate than real time?

Re: The Last Invention of Man

#110

Post by empath75 »

ahussain wrote: post #4

I feel like many of these speculative AI pieces seem to ignore that for every incredible breakthrough, there is a large amount of work which is required to build the scaffolding which allows the breakthrough to have real impact in the world. Even if the AI solves "Fermat's Last Theorem" type problems quickly, it seems to me that the vast majority of problems it faces will be "misplaced the database keys", "can't sche…

I think the last thing ai’s will be successful at is generating art that humans will appreciate on anything but the most superficial level, and it surely won’t come from just feeding it a bunch of movies, but rather as a genuine expression of the AI’s own experience of the world.
Post reply on HN