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

You are the scariest monster in the woods

jamie.ideasasylum.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 405 posts

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#121

Post by rootusrootus »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #23
fruitworks wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the solutions to AI "safety" are analagous to gun control: it is a centralization of power.

Are you claiming a lack of gun / AI control is democratizing? That's not working for (the lack of) gun control in the US at the moment though. Compare also with capitalism; unchecked capitalism on paper causes healthy competition, but in practice it means concentration of power (monopolies) at the expense of individuals (e.g. our accumulated expressions on the internet being used for training materials).

> Compare also with capitalism; unchecked capitalism on paper causes healthy competition

Is that not conflating capitalism with free markets? I have way more confidence in the latter than the former.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#122

Post by cdirkx »

Flamingoat wrote: post #59
us-merul wrote: post #5

"Humans will do what they’ve always tried to do—gain power, enslave, kill, control, exploit, cheat, or just be lazy and avoid the hard work—but now with new abilities that we couldn’t have dreamed of." -- A pretty bleak, and also accurate, observation of humanity. I have to hope that the alternative sentence encompassing all of the good can lead to some balance.

No, it is not accurate at all. There are some people that do all of these sure, however the vast majority of people live pretty ordinary lives where they do very little of what is described. I actually think it is very intellectually lazy to be this cynical.

The problem is that technology exponentially increases the negative effects of bad actors. The worst a sociopath could do in the stone age was ruin his local community; while today there are many more dystopian alternatives.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#123

Post by bee_rider »

marssaxman wrote: post #77
woeirua wrote: post #44

There's this weird disconnect in tech circles, where everyone is deathly afraid of AGI, but totally asleep on the very real possibility of thermonuclear war breaking out in Europe or Asia over the next 10 years. There's already credible evidence that we came perilously close to the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine which likely would've spiraled out of control. AGI might happen, but the threat of nuclear war…

Or, you know, the bit where we've now-irrevocably committed ourselves to destabilizing the global climate system whose relative predictability has been the foundation of our entire civilization. That's going to be a ride.

We just need to convince people that the market is an artificial superintelligence. Or maybe… subintelligence.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#124

Post by andy99 »

bee_rider wrote: post #116
myrmidon wrote: post #13

I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…

I think it is bad writing on the part of the author. Or maybe good writing for getting us engaged with the blog post, bad for making an argument though. They include a line that they don’t believe in the possibility of AGI: > I don’t really believe in the threat of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence—human-level intelligence) partly because I don’t believe in the possibility of AGI and I’m highly skeptical that the…

> humans physically exist so our brains must be possible to build within the existing laws of physics

This is an unscientific position to take. We have no idea how our brains work, or how life, consciousness, and intelligence work. It could very well be that’s because our model of the world doesn’t account for these things and they are not in fact possible based on what we know. In fact I think this is likely.

So it really could be that AI is not possible, for example on a Turing machine or our approximation of them. This is at least as likely as it being possible. At some point we’ll hopefully refine our theories to have a better understanding, for now we have no idea and I think it’s useful to acknowledge this.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#125

Post by Romario77 »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #93
ACCount37 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get how you can see one of those CLI coding tools in action and still parrot the "no agency" line. The goal-oriented behavior is rather obvious. Sure, they aren't very good at agentic behavior yet, and the time horizon is pretty low. But that keeps improving with each frontier release.

> The goal-oriented behavior is rather obvious. Obvious? Is an illusion obviously the real thing? There is nothing substantially different in LLMs from any other run of the mill algorithm or software.

you could make the same argument about humans - we run the cycle of "find food", "procreate", "find shelter" ...

Some people are better at it then others. The progress and development happens naturally because of natural selection (and is quite slow).

AI development is now driven by humans, but I don't see why it can't be done in a similar cycle with self-improvement baked in (and whatever other goals).

We saw this work with AI training itself in games like Chess or Go where it improved itself just by playing with itself and knowing the game rules.

You don't really need deep thoughts for the life to keep going - look at simple organisms like unicellular. They only try to reproduce and survive withing the environment they are in. It evolved into humans over time.

I don't see why similar thing can't happen when AI gets to be complex enough to just keep improving itself. It doesn't have some of the limitations that life has like being very fragile or needing to give birth. Because it's intelligently designed the iterations could be a lot faster and progress could be achieved in much shorter time compared to random mutations of life.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#126

Post by jncfhnb »

nonethewiser wrote: post #105
jncfhnb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you could make AGI right now tbh. It’s not a function of intelligence. It’s just a function of stateful system mechanics. LLMs are just a big matrix. But what about a four line of code loop that looks like: ```while true: update_sensory_inputs() narrate_response() update_emotional_state() ``` LLMs don’t experience continuous time and they don’t have an explicit decision making framework for having any agency…

Where is the "what the thing cares about" part? When I look at that loop my thought is, "OK, the sensory inputs have updated. There are changes. Which ones matter?" The most naive response I could imagine would be like a git diff of sensory inputs. "item 13 in vector A changed from 0.2 to 0.211" etc. Otherwise you have to give it something to care about, or some sophisticated system to develop things to care about. E…

That is more or less the concept I meant to evoke by updating an emotional state every tick. Emotions are in large part a subconscious system dynamic to organize wants and needs. Ours are vastly complicated under the hood but also kind of superficial and obvious in its expression.

To propose the dumbest possible thing: give it a hunger bar and desire for play. Less complex than a sims character. Still enough that an agent has a framework to engage in pattern matching and reasoning within its environment.

Bots are already pretty good at figuring out environment navigation to goal seek towards complex video game objectives. Give them an alternative goal to maximize certainty towards emotional homeostasis and the salience of sensory input changes because an emergent part of gradual reinforcement learning pattern recognition.

Edit: specifically I am saying do reinforcement learning on agents that can call LLMs themselves to provide reasoning. That’s how you get to AGI. Human minds are not brains. They’re systems driven by sensory and hormonal interactions. The brain does encoding and decoding, informational retrieval, and information manipulation. But the concept of you is genuinely your entire bodily system.

LLM-only approaches not part of a system loop framework ignore this important step. It’s NOT about raw intellectual power.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#127

Post by Yizahi »

ACCount37 wrote: post #74
myrmidon wrote: post #13

I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…

I don't get how you can see one of those CLI coding tools in action and still parrot the "no agency" line. The goal-oriented behavior is rather obvious. Sure, they aren't very good at agentic behavior yet, and the time horizon is pretty low. But that keeps improving with each frontier release.

What LLM programs do has zero resemblance to the human agency. That's just a modern variation of very complex set of GoTos and IfElses. Agency would be an LLM parsing your question and answering you "fuck off". Now that is agency, that is independent decision making, not programmed in advance and triggered by keywords. Just an example.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#128

Post by [deleted] »

cdirkx wrote: post #122
Flamingoat wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is not accurate at all. There are some people that do all of these sure, however the vast majority of people live pretty ordinary lives where they do very little of what is described. I actually think it is very intellectually lazy to be this cynical.

The problem is that technology exponentially increases the negative effects of bad actors. The worst a sociopath could do in the stone age was ruin his local community; while today there are many more dystopian alternatives.

[deleted]

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#129

Post by jmull »

So silly.

Of course humans are (by far) the source of the biggest problems humans face.

The argument here is that since humans are the scariest, we should ignore problems AI might cause.

Pure nonsense, since (1) AI is human-created — so just another piece of what makes us scary; (2) this kind of binary thinking makes no sense anyway — as if there can’t be multiple things to be concerned with.

> Anyone trying to tell you otherwise is trying to distract you.

A particularly poor bit of argumentation. Barely above sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting, “Blah, blah, blah! I can’t hear you!”

What is is about AI that makes people lose their minds?

edit: seeing the engagement this is getting, maybe it’s a false flag operation of sorts? Making such bad anti-ai arguments that the argument for ai gets stronger? That would at least make some sense.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#130

Post by Traubenfuchs »

bravetraveler wrote: post #94
myrmidon wrote: post #13

I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…

I dismiss it much like I dismiss ideas such as "Ketamine for Breakfast for All" . Attainable, sure, but I don't like where it goes.

I think most people would have a better life using ketamine, but not that regularly for breakfasts as it permanently damages (shrinks) your bladder, eventually to the point where you can‘t hold any urine at all anymore.
Post reply on HN