AI is just someone else's intelligence • Hacker News Board

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#141

Post by danielvaughn » Thu, May 04, 2023, 10:39 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #71

danielvaughn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I don't think it will necessarily crash, but there will be a serious reckoning for any business owner who thinks they can replace critical roles with AI. We're a long way off from that, if ever. In the short term, I think AI will be most useful in areas where (a) indeterminate results are acceptable, and (b) the consequences of a "mistake" are either non-existent or negligible. As humans are imperfect, there…

This is still massively problematic for society and can represent a hollowing out of low to middle skill workers. You know the ones that are low paid and tend to have poor legal and governmental representation while at the same time experiencing hate from the remaining taxpayers for being slackers.

For sure. The translation industry is basically dead, a good chunk of copywriting and marketing is on its way out, and I'm sure a slew of other industries are going to be nearly eradicated. The effect it's going to have on the economy will be painful.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#142

Post by leroy-is-here » Thu, May 04, 2023, 10:40 PM UTC

pulvinar wrote: post #140

leroy-is-here wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These thinking machines don't choose their thoughts. They are not blank slates, waiting patiently and listening. They are just binaries that only get executed when you run them. You have your causes backwards -- _we_ give it thoughts to think by literally seeding the machine with something to think about. Your argument about the human is also missing something: a human can ignore whatever you say to them, but these t…

Well, I did read your article but don't agree with all of it. If machines aren't intelligent because they are so obedient, is that really a path you want to follow when applied to humans? E.g., well-trained soldiers, strict religious practitioners, etc. And if a machine should develop a loose connection and therefore sometimes not obey a command and just go its own way, does that now make it intelligent? You see the…

Yes, if a machine can somehow start disobeying, it becomes intelligent to some degree.

And yes, I want to walk that path because I believe that intelligence is not static and everyone can grow.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#143

Post by bheadmaster » Thu, May 04, 2023, 10:59 PM UTC

joshuahedlund wrote: post #107

bheadmaster wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you, then, agree that a machine that is built to work in the same manner as that single-cell organism (which I assume should be possible with the current technological level humans are at) is also conscious? That path would lead to a conclusion that all matter is, in some way, conscious. I don't disagree, but I find that such definition of consciousness diverges from what we usually mean by it - a walking, talking…

> which I assume should be possible with the current technological level humans are at More of an aside, but we are way way way way below the technological level necessary to construct a machine of the same complexity as a self-replicating self-organizing single-cell organism. Nano scale is nano. We're just barely figuring out how to consistently and accurately modify several nucleotides at once, and not even by crea…

Interesting, I haven't really thought much about the details of such construction.

Though in principle, it's still the same. Long age and randomness of the universe have allowed it to perform a quite exhaustive brute-force search of all possible configurations of atoms, eventually stumbling upon a self-replicating configuration from which we have evolved, but humans could theoretically find one from scratch too, it would just take too much time, like reversing a cryptographic hash.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#144

Post by somewhereoutth » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:01 AM UTC

Closi wrote: post #130

somewhereoutth wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and I conjecture that the necessary complexity can only be found in 'flesh and blood', i.e. analogue, as opposed to 'on/off' digital approximations. Mathematically the real numbers are unimaginably more numerous than the countable numbers (see Cantor), thus a system with a countable state space (i.e. digital computers) cannot embody the complete complexity of a similar real state space system (i.e. the human bra…

A computer could clearly emulate the neurons in the human brain right now if we could map the connections and their strengths accurately - the human brain has many less neurons than GPT4 has parameters.

But it is not just the number of neurons and their connections, there are lots of analogue factors too, and my conjecture is that the magic happens somewhere beyond what can be digitized.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#145

Post by gaganyaan » Fri, May 05, 2023, 1:15 AM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #13

alfor wrote: post #5

Everything is a remix (watch the movie) We are all using the intelligent of previous people, generations of humans. The same is true for AI. It’s not different from humans. What will we do once it’s conscient? Will AI have rights? Should we be able to shut it down?

> The same is true for AI. It’s not different from humans I don't know how anyone can believe that. Maybe there will be some future AI where this is true, but it's absolutely not true yet. My argument is that humans absolutely should NOT invent AI that is on our own level. We shouldn't overstep building tools for us to use into trying to invent new artificial life. It's just a bad idea.

Counterpoint: you're just doing a modern version of this:

https://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#146

Post by paletteOvO » Fri, May 05, 2023, 2:42 AM UTC

It is good enough if AI can clone someone else's intelligence.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#147

Post by nullsense » Fri, May 05, 2023, 5:20 AM UTC

Lownin wrote: post #93

drekk wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make decisions subconsciously before your conscious mind is aware of it. It's been experimentally demonstrated and at least calls into question the perception of free will. Each hemisphere of our brain is its own intelligence, but only one hemisphere (for 95% of humans the left hemisphere) controls speech. This only became apparent in some seizure patients during the 21st century when doctors might sever the corp…

I think it might go beyond two intelligences. For instance, there are 500 million neurons that independently govern the gut - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system For reference, a cat has ~200 million neurons in its brain - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_intelligence Perhaps we have dozens of intelligences, with varying degrees of cognition? What is actually happening when the amygdala takes over t…

I think Michael Levin has the right idea with his "cognitive light cones" approach.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#148

Post by r721 » Fri, May 05, 2023, 5:41 AM UTC

morkalork wrote: post #43

apendleton wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only factor in that transition was the complexity of the nervous system It seems likely to me that some arrangement of nerves is possible that's comparably complex to ours, but does not produce consciousness. (I dunno, maybe some organism with much more complex sensory organs than ours that devotes so much complexity budget to that that it only has enough left to devote to general cognition to give it the intel…

Animals are conscious, yes? They may not be as intelligent as humans but they still perceive their environment, have internal drives/desires, make decisions, play, plan routes, solve mazes/puzzles, hunt, have some forms of language communication, some use tools, exploit their surroundings, learn new things, cooperate/work in groups and so on. If one built an AGI that was at the intelligence level of say, a rat or mou…

>Animals are conscious, yes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness#Cambridge...

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#149

Post by soco » Fri, May 05, 2023, 7:52 AM UTC

bheadmaster wrote: post #49

soco wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should I care whether AI is conscious or not? If they eradicate me consciously or by algorithm, am I less dead? Or do I get in a better heaven? We all agree that cows are conscious, where does it help them? We still eat them and they still try to stomp us... so for all means except pure philosophy, debating consciousness is useless. And I'm not a philosopher.

It's just an interesting question, I suppose. Although it also has wide implications for ethics - the concept of human rights relies on empathy. And if AI can experience the world like a human does, and feel pleasure and pain, then either AI deserves rights, or humans don't. Or we just decide that only humans have rights because we are humans and we say so, in which case we're no better than Nazis.

We already have animal rights - because we said so and because it is agreed they feel pleasure and pain. Yet we still eat them and still not let them vote (or push the nuclear button). Although I completely fail to see why would we program (except for fun) the AI to feel pleasure and pain, let's say so for the argument. So, what kind of rights should it get?

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#150

Post by mnky9800n » Fri, May 05, 2023, 8:49 AM UTC

tekmate wrote: post #22

bheadmaster wrote: post #12

I feel that the big hidden implication that these kinds of articles are trying to say is "AI is not real intelligence", further implying something along the lines of "AI will never be conscious" (as it's hard to come up with another definition of "real" intelligence except the-human-kind). I'd like to propose a counterargument: Assumptions: Theory of evolution is true. The primordial single-cell organism from which w…

it's an uncomfortable topic for a lot of people because the idea that sapience/sentience is just a side effect of our brains being pattern matching machines with a giant knowledge graph of neurons means that we're not that special

No, it is emergent behavior. Pattern matching does not require that there be some sort of conscious recognition of your state of being. It simply requires you to respond to stimuli. But we have the ability to abstract our thoughts away from stimuli which allows conscious thought. This is an unexpected result.