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The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

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Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#121

Post by tome »

cobaltblue wrote: post #101
kfk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nick sounds like a crazy guy, but then you watch some of his presentations and you see he is not that crazy. What he says make sense and I think everybody agrees the threat is non zero. The next step is understanding that if you look over the past 100,000 years, nothing posed an existential threat and thus we expect an incredibly low chance of that happening in the next 100 years. The whole point relies on believing…

Adding to this, imagine you were part of an ancient alien species checking in on earth every so often. Around 4.5 billion years ago, Earth was formed. 500 million years later, the first self-replicators appeared. Another half billion years (now 3.5 billion years ago) for things to settle down and create the most recent ancestor from which all life descends from. Over the next 3 billion years nothing much happens, unt…

> This species at present could wipe out almost all life from the planet (if it wanted, which it doesn't) in multiple ways

That's interesting. How could it? Please present a plausible scenario (more plausible than "The US president decides to cover the globe with nuclear explosions, and everyone with any degree of influence over the process just lets him do it").

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#122

Post by fl0wenol »

pron wrote: post #16
kfk wrote: post #12

Well, at a logical level, it's one of the biggest existential threats, if 1. it can be done; 2. humans are intelligent enough to pull it off. There is a non 0 chance of AI (and related existential threat), as there is a non 0 chance of a meteorite coming down and wiping all of us off the Earth. But my guess is that most of us would say "YES" to a meteorite deviation project, while "Meh" to any attempt to better under…

Well, we can predict more-or-less what will happen when a large meteorite hits earth, but we have no clue (other than sci-fi scenarios) for the nature of the threat AI poses, if only because we are so far away from understanding what AI is. We don't know if intelligence can be separated from agency and agenda, we don't know if intelligence can be separated from emotions, and we don't even know if intelligence can eve…

> We can and should, however, discuss the more immediate related dangers of our real-world machine learning, such as self-reinforcing bias.

Quoting to emphasize.

It is one thing to acknowledge that there is a non-zero probability that an uncontrollable AI might be created, but that we have other things to worry about and so why hand-wring over it.

What should be the strong counterpoint to this hand-wringing is that what we should be doing is better understanding the behavior of the "weak" AI we have now. We need grasp where it does and doesn't work, a difficult problem to "sell" since it lacks that alien-like doomsday aspect or predatory agency.

These kinds of problems are the problems of our own creation and thus we must take ownership.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#123

Post by mcguire »

api wrote: post #23
tsunamifury wrote: post #18

I think Jaron knows what many engineers who have worked on AI know: That the external promise of AI is far more inflated than the capability of the actual technology. It's simply that when the current technology gets just complicated enough for the above-average person to no longer understand, everyone starts assigning magical properties and expectations to it. This results in short term over-valuations, which inevit…

This drives a long cycle of AI booms and AI winters. Right now we seem to be in another boom. When the limits of deep learning and other new techniques become apparent, we'll be back in another AI winter.

My prediction: One or both of two problems will be the straw that breaks the "wait, this doesn't work as well as you've hyped it to" camel's back.

1. Explanation of why a particular decision was made. (I was incredibly happy to see the Toyota article this morning that mentioned this very subject.)

2. Flexibility in the face of change. (Or is there a better response to a model with declining effectiveness than "start over".)

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#124

Post by arethuza »

tome wrote: post #121
cobaltblue wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this, imagine you were part of an ancient alien species checking in on earth every so often. Around 4.5 billion years ago, Earth was formed. 500 million years later, the first self-replicators appeared. Another half billion years (now 3.5 billion years ago) for things to settle down and create the most recent ancestor from which all life descends from. Over the next 3 billion years nothing much happens, unt…

> This species at present could wipe out almost all life from the planet (if it wanted, which it doesn't) in multiple ways That's interesting. How could it? Please present a plausible scenario (more plausible than "The US president decides to cover the globe with nuclear explosions, and everyone with any degree of influence over the process just lets him do it").

Cobalt salted hydrogen bombs are one fairly plausible route - how many and how large they'd need to be is another question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb

[Of course, they don't exist at the moment - but they wouldn't be that difficult to make as one advantage of a Doomsday bomb is that you don't need to deliver it so it can be made as large as you want through staging].

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#125

Post by tome »

arethuza wrote: post #124
tome wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This species at present could wipe out almost all life from the planet (if it wanted, which it doesn't) in multiple ways That's interesting. How could it? Please present a plausible scenario (more plausible than "The US president decides to cover the globe with nuclear explosions, and everyone with any degree of influence over the process just lets him do it").

Cobalt salted hydrogen bombs are one fairly plausible route - how many and how large they'd need to be is another question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb [Of course, they don't exist at the moment - but they wouldn't be that difficult to make as one advantage of a Doomsday bomb is that you don't need to deliver it so it can be made as large as you want through staging].

Interesting. So the idea is that a small group of people could unilaterally build and detonate one of these without anyone else being able to stop them?

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#126

Post by Jach »

mcguire wrote: post #116
Houshalter wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand how the technology works, and I still believe it's amazing and rapidly progressing. Certainly it isn't human level now, and it might take a decade or two to get there. But it's still an incredible advancement. AI has gotten way better than anyone expected in the last 5 years or so. Progress in many of these areas like image recognition was super slow and challenging. And all of a sudden computers are app…

" Certainly it isn't human level now, and it might take a decade or two to get there. " Any chance you could define "human level" in a way to make this a meaningful sentence? Twenty-five years after I was introduced to this problem and I still have never heard a better definition of "intelligence" than the Turing test, and it's a purely operational, "I'll know it when I see it" thing.

I.J. Good: "Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control."

A merely human-level AI is one that can match to some window of performance a random human in the intellectual outputs of that human, which are vast and general -- playing games, writing poetry, critiquing film, building small rockets, having conversations, programming, carving wood, teaching a class, diagnosing and fixing a leak, constructing mathematical models... For things that require a body, it suffices to instruct a human what to do, but this thing might as well help design a robot body that's at least as versatile as a human body since we humans do that too even if Atlas is still pretty far off. We're unlikely to have an AI perfectly human-equivalent in the sense that it would probably by default already be superior in some ways by virtue of its ability to not need sleep, do calculations efficiently and correctly, have access to perfect memory, and so on, and unless it's ultraintelligent then it's probably not better than a random human at everything (say directing a movie) just like you aren't.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#127

Post by mcguire »

Houshalter wrote: post #63
stepvhen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And it's very likely to kill us all. This is absolutely absurd. Could you elaborate on that instead of just pointing to a book?

The tl;dr is that we will eventually have AIs which are smarter than humans. Much smarter than humans, to the point that we are to them what chimpanzees are to us. They would have godlike powers and abilities. And this could happen very rapidly, as the first smart AIs design even better AIs and better computers, which then design even better AIs, and so on. The second point is that they would have no reason to keep u…

I hate to be the logical positivist here (I really, really do), but I'm not sure what your first two sentences mean. What would "smarter than humans" mean and how exactly is it going to happen?

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#128

Post by djhn »

marcosdumay wrote: post #114
tsunamifury wrote: post #18

I think Jaron knows what many engineers who have worked on AI know: That the external promise of AI is far more inflated than the capability of the actual technology. It's simply that when the current technology gets just complicated enough for the above-average person to no longer understand, everyone starts assigning magical properties and expectations to it. This results in short term over-valuations, which inevit…

People always overestimate technological progress at the short time, and underestimate it at the long time. (Somebody else said that, don't remember who.) On what time-frame are you make those claims?

Applies to human behaviour as well - we overestimate how much we will achieve or change in the short run, and underestimate the same in the long run.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#129

Post by mcguire »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #93
stepvhen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The tl;dr is that we will eventually have AIs which are smarter than humans. Much smarter than humans, to the point that we are to them what chimpanzees are to us. >The second point is that they would have no reason to keep us around. Questions: (1) What reason do we have to keep chimpanzee's around? Why don't we just kill them all? They can't even do calculus. (2) Whatever the answer for question 1, wouldn't an AI…

1. Because we have empathy and because we have no compelling economic reason to (economics always overruling silly things like empathy). 2. Empathy, which is a part of our emotions, is an incredibly complex thing we can't even begin to formalize yet - it's extremely unlikely that a random AI we'd build would happen to have the exact same emotional makeup as we do. 3. "Smart" has a particular meaning here when used in…

That's a good point. How is AI worse than a smart, amoral human?

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#130

Post by ddingus »

IanDrake wrote: post #67
TeMPOraL wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that this time we're running out of work we could give to those who will get displaced by machines. Yes, we can keep inventing bullshit jobs, but we've already reached the point when people are starting to ask, if working for the sake of working makes any sense.

>Yes, we can keep inventing bullshit jobs What is an example of a non-government bullshit job?

Greeter?
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