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

There is no A.I.

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 523 posts

Re: There is no A.I.

#101

Post by incongruity »

jancsika wrote: post #44

Ray Kurzweil's most important argument[1] from that one book he wrote two or three times: If AIs can convince us humans they are sentient, we'll believe them. Does that webgpu demo run on anything more than canary yet? In any case, someone is going to fall in love with one of their browser processes soon. I'll guess by mid-August. More rank speculation: by October, some poor soul will post on SO asking how to retriev…

It is also likely due to the people using it most right now. Wait until it’s more broadly used and you’ll have people anthropomorphizing it (rightly or wrongly). ‘

Re: There is no A.I.

#102

Post by ETH_start »

counttheforks wrote: post #94
eternalban wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This then is the perfect historic opportunity to revist granting personhood to corporations. p.s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood Almost all such legal framings have been motivated by the legal difficulties of applying laws to organized groups of individuals. For example, entering into contracts is legally between two parties. Presumably, the sheer amount of legal reworking necessary to actually cr…

I never really understood this. Can a company go to prison or get the death penalty?

It's much more limited than what its critics imagine. It's a legal doctrine to ensure shareholder's rights aren't violated. For example, shareholders having a right to Free Speech means you can't suppress that right when shareholders act through the corporate legal structure to utter speech.

Re: There is no A.I.

#103

Post by runarberg »

throwaway8503 wrote: post #63
tracerbulletx wrote: post #27

All of these arguments seem to think that the brain isn't also generating a statistical ordering of semantic words and actions. Obviously the brain has a way more complex network of subsystems with various specialties than the artificial models we have today and is able to generalize language, math, and positional reasoning and mix it with the older parts of the brain for reward and training mechanisms and it can do…

Since LLMs can't do arithmetic, one has to think there's more going on, at least in the arithmetic part of the brain, than is going on in LLMs.

Excellent observation. In fact the language part of the brain is only a (albeit a rather large) portion of the brain (not nearly as large as visual processing though). And people who suffer brain damage which renders them unable to speak (or understand speech; which interestingly is a different portion; albeit close to each other) are still able to demonstrate intelligent behavior with ease.

In fact it is damage to the prefrontal cortex (which has nothing to do with speech) which is mostly correlated with a detriment in intelligent behavior (suspiciously also social behavior; a food for though in what we consider “intelligence”). Victims of lobotomy had their prefrontal cortex destroyed, and their injuries resulted in them loosing their personalities and loosing basic function as human beings, even though they were still able (but perhaps not always willing) to speak and comprehend speech.

Re: There is no A.I.

#104

Post by CodexArcanum »

I don't really like the latter parts of the article where he begins suggesting that we need to contextually tag all data so the provenance of generated items can be assessed.

Somehow, I don't think forcing attribution and tracking on all the world's data is a good idea. Or, you know, possible.

Like, he outlines this nightmare scenario of terrorists using torture deepfakes to threaten people, then wants to pretend that terrorists will be so kind as to mark their videos as AI-produced?

Like the top comment said, the problem is corporations and capital. All the rest of this is more and more smoke to cover up the very real, human-powered destruction of the open web, free information, and privacy.

Re: There is no A.I.

#105

Post by joshuahedlund »

anonylizard wrote: post #48
rolodato wrote: post #37

My cynical AI opinion is that if it truly was revolutionary, we would be seeing private companies or governments use it internally to massively boost their productivity or achieve otherwise impossible feats. Instead, all we're seeing are consumer products or half-baked integrations that are another way to further centralize data collection. Talks about all-powerful, malevolent AI or requesting to halt AI development…

"we would be seeing private companies or governments use it internally " What world are you living in, where this isn't happening? Every private company that can use it is using it, Microsoft themselves must be using Copilot. Governments are lining up to train their own LLMs. Commercial and consumer use are not mutually exclusive, in any case. Also "Humanity is excellent at oppressing others, and I have no doubt we'd…

> What world are you living in, where this isn’t happening?

You left off the rest of the sentence: “to massively boost their productivity or achieve otherwise impossible feats”

Re: There is no A.I.

#106

Post by joshuahedlund »

pulvinar wrote: post #85
kazinator wrote: post #38

GPT4 appears very intelligent when you discuss program code with it. It simply crazy; it can write SNOBOL4 code to extract a field from /etc/passwd. When you discuss other things, it goes off the rails a lot more. For instance, I have had it quote some passages of classic English poetry to me, stating blankly that those passages contain certain words. The passages did not contain any traces of those words or even rem…

You seem to be saying that to have general intelligence one must be an expert in every field? That rules out quite a number of humans too.

Most humans can tell you pretty accurately whether or not a passage contains a word.

Re: There is no A.I.

#107

Post by sleigh-bells »

counttheforks wrote: post #94
eternalban wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This then is the perfect historic opportunity to revist granting personhood to corporations. p.s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood Almost all such legal framings have been motivated by the legal difficulties of applying laws to organized groups of individuals. For example, entering into contracts is legally between two parties. Presumably, the sheer amount of legal reworking necessary to actually cr…

I never really understood this. Can a company go to prison or get the death penalty?

Corporate personhood means that you can own a piece of a company without being personally liable, because the corporation is its own legal entity. This is why people can start businesses without worrying about being in debt for the rest of their lives if it fails. After all, if the corporation isn't a separate legal entity but just a collection of investors, if the corporation wronged someone, the investors could be sued personally.

Maybe the concept is taken too far in terms of political donations and free speech but no corporate personhood would mean that very few people would stick out their necks to start or invest in companies. I don't think a modern economy would even be possible.

Re: There is no A.I.

#108

Post by fatherzine »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #65
tracerbulletx wrote: post #27

All of these arguments seem to think that the brain isn't also generating a statistical ordering of semantic words and actions. Obviously the brain has a way more complex network of subsystems with various specialties than the artificial models we have today and is able to generalize language, math, and positional reasoning and mix it with the older parts of the brain for reward and training mechanisms and it can do…

I generally agree with you, but I think this argument overlooks the lack of an obvious reward function in large language models. GPT-N has no survival instinct, because there is no existential threat of death, no fitness function to optimize to extend its survival at any cost. Without this need to survive, there can be no motivation, and without motivation there can be no intent. And without intent, can there truly b…

...yet

Re: There is no A.I.

#109

Post by scotty79 »

Animats wrote: post #68

The elephant in the room in these discussions of AI is the concept of the corporation. Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are things corporations already do. Deceptive marketing, exploiting customer information, conspiring to keep prices high, creating distractions from things companies are doing, setting up monopolies, lying to customers - the usual. With AI, this can be automated. Most of this is…

> Once AI systems can outperform CEOs

Random number generator can outperform more than half of the CEOs.

That's not why we have CEOs. Gamblers are a superstitious bunch and they love their lucky monkeys. So they put into law that they are entitled to one lucky monkey per corporation.

Re: There is no A.I.

#110

Post by spondyl »

counttheforks wrote: post #94
eternalban wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This then is the perfect historic opportunity to revist granting personhood to corporations. p.s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood Almost all such legal framings have been motivated by the legal difficulties of applying laws to organized groups of individuals. For example, entering into contracts is legally between two parties. Presumably, the sheer amount of legal reworking necessary to actually cr…

I never really understood this. Can a company go to prison or get the death penalty?

> Can a company go to prison or get the death penalty?

In theory, yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_dissolution

Post reply on HN