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AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

economist.com

141–150 of 309 posts

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#141
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more that "thinking" is a vague term that we don't even understand in humans, so for me it's pretty meaningless to claim LLMs think or don't think. There's this very cliched comment to any AI HN headline which is this: "LLM's don't REALLY have . I know this for sure because I know both how humans work and how gigabytes of LLM weights work." or its cousin: "LLMs CAN'T possibly do BECAUSE they generate text one ch…

Thinking is better understood than you seem to believe. We don't just study it in humans. We look at it in trees [0], for example. And whilst trees have distributed systems that ingest data from their surroundings, and use that to make choices, it isn't usually considered to be intelligence. Organizational complexity is one of the requirements for intelligence, and an LLM does not reach that threshold. They have vast…

Who says what degree of complexity is enough? Seems like deferring the problem to some other mystical arbiter.

In my opinion AI slop is slop not because AIs are basic but because the prompt is minimal. A human went and put minimal effort into making something with an AI and put it online, producing slop, because the actual informational content is very low.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a name: Large Language Models, or "Generative" AI. It doesn't think, it doesn't reason, and it doesn't listen to instructions, but it does generate pretty good text!

[citation needed] People constantly assert that LLMs don't think in some magic way that humans do think, when we don't even have any idea how that works.

Yes, and the name for this behaviour is called "being scientific".

Imagine a process called A, and, as you say, we've no idea how it works.

Imagine, then, a new process, B, comes along. Some people know a lot about how B works, most people don't. But the people selling B, they continuously tell me it works like process A, and even resort to using various cutesy linguistic tricks to make that feel like it's the case.

The people selling B even go so far as to suggest that if we don't accept a future where B takes over, we won't have a job, no matter what our poor A does.

What's the rational thing to do, for a sceptical, scientific mind? Agree with the company, that process B is of course like process A, when we - as you say yourself - don't understand process A in any comprehensive way at all? Or would that be utterly nonsensical?

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you need to "think like a human" to think? Is it only thinking if you do it with a meat brain?

Is the substrate important? If you made an accurate model of a human brain in software, in silicon or using water pipes and valves, would it be able to tnink? Would it be conscious? I have no idea.

Me neither but that's why I don't like arguments that say LLM's can't do X because of their substrate, as if that was self-evident. It's like the aliens saying surely humans can't think because they're made of meat.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#144
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can be asserted without proof, can be dismissed without proof. The proof burden is on AI proponents.

It's more that "thinking" is a vague term that we don't even understand in humans, so for me it's pretty meaningless to claim LLMs think or don't think. There's this very cliched comment to any AI HN headline which is this: "LLM's don't REALLY have . I know this for sure because I know both how humans work and how gigabytes of LLM weights work." or its cousin: "LLMs CAN'T possibly do BECAUSE they generate text one ch…

This seems backwards to me. There's a fully understood thing (LLMs)[1] and a not-understood thing (brains)[2]. You seem to require a person to be able to fully define (presumably in some mathematical or mechanistic way) any behaviour they might observe in the not-understood thing before you will permit them to point out that the fully understood thing does not appear to exhibit that behaviour. In short you are requiring that people explain brains before you will permit them to observe that LLMs don't appear to be the same sort of thing as them. That seems rather unreasonable to me.

That doesn't mean such claims don't need to made as specific as possible. Just saying something like "humans love but machines don't" isn't terribly compelling. I think mathematics is an area where it seems possible to draw a reasonably intuitively clear line. Personally, I've always considered the ability to independently contribute genuinely novel pure mathematical ideas (i.e. to perform significant independent research in pure maths) to be a likely hallmark of true human-like thinking. This is a high bar and one AI has not yet reached, despite the recent successes on the International Mathematical Olympiad [3] and various other recent claims. It isn't a moved goalpost, either - I've been saying the same thing for more than 20 years. I don't have to, and can't, define what "genuinely novel pure mathematical ideas" means, but we have a human system that recognises, verifies and rewards them so I expect us to know them when they are produced.

By the way, your use of "magical" in your earlier comment, is typical of the way that argument is often presented, and I think it's telling. It's very easy to fall into the fallacy of deducing things from one's own lack of imagination. I've certainly fallen into that trap many times before. It's worth honestly considering whether your reasoning is of the form "I can't imagine there being something other than X, therefore there is nothing other than X".

Personally, I think it's likely that to truly "do maths" requires something qualitatively different to a computer. Those who struggle to imagine anything other than a computer being possible often claim that that view is self-evidently wrong and mock such an imagined device as "magical", but that is not a convincing line of argument. The truth is that the physical Church-Turing thesis is a thesis, not a theorem, and a much shakier one than the original Church-Turing thesis. We have no particularly convincing reason to think such a device is impossible, and certainly no hard proof of it.

[1] Individual behaviours of LLMs are "not understood" in the sense that there is typically not some neat story we can tell about how a particular behaviour arises that contains only the truly relevant information. However, on a more fundamental level LLMs are completely understood and always have been, as they are human inventions that we are able to build from scratch.

[2] Anybody who thinks we understand how brains work isn't worth having this debate with until they read a bit about neuroscience and correct their misunderstanding.

[3] The IMO involves problems in extremely well-trodden areas of mathematics. While the problems are carefully chosen to be novel they are problems to be solved in exam conditions, not mathematical research programs. The performance of the Google and OpenAI models on them, while impressive, is not evidence that they are capable of genuinely novel mathematical thought. What I'm looking for is the crank-the-handle-and-important-new-theorems-come-out machine that people have been trying to build since computers were invented. That isn't here yet, and if and when it arrives it really will turn maths on its head.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#145
post #4

Okay, so AI isn’t exceptional, but I’m also not exceptional. I run on the same tech base as any old chimpanzee, but at one point our differences in degree turned into one of us remaining “normal” and the other burning the entire planet. Whether the particular current AI tech is it or not, I have yet to be convinced that the singularity is practically impossible, and as long as things develop in the opposite direction…

If you use non-constructive reasoning¹ then you can argue for basically any outcome & even convince yourself that it is inevitable. The basic example is as follows, there is no scientific or physical principle that can prevent the birth of someone much worse than Hitler & therefore if people keep having children one of those children will inevitably be someone who will cause unimaginable death & destruction. My recom…

I'm pretty sure a lot of work has gone into making institutions resistant to a potential future super-Hitler. Whether those efforts will be effective or not, it is a very real concern, and it would be absurd to ignore it on the grounds of "there is probably some limit to tyranny we're not yet aware of which is not too far beyond what we've previously experienced." I would argue a lot more effort should have gone into preventing the original Hitler, whose rise to power was repeatedly met with the chorus refrain "How much worse can it get?"

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do these comparisons actually make sense though? Aircraft and submarines belong to a different category and of the same category, than AI.

I am just trying to make the point that the machines that we make tend to end up rather different to their natural analogues. The effective ones anyway. Ornithopters were not successful. And I suspect that articifial intelligences will end up very different to human intelligence.

Okay... but an airplane in essence is modelling the shape of a bird. Where do you think the inspiration for the shape of a plane came from? lmao. come on.

Humans are not all that original, we take what exists in nature and mangle it in some way to produce a thing.

The same thing will eventually happen with AI - not in our lifetime though.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more that "thinking" is a vague term that we don't even understand in humans, so for me it's pretty meaningless to claim LLMs think or don't think. There's this very cliched comment to any AI HN headline which is this: "LLM's don't REALLY have . I know this for sure because I know both how humans work and how gigabytes of LLM weights work." or its cousin: "LLMs CAN'T possibly do BECAUSE they generate text one ch…

This seems backwards to me. There's a fully understood thing (LLMs)[1] and a not-understood thing (brains)[2]. You seem to require a person to be able to fully define (presumably in some mathematical or mechanistic way) any behaviour they might observe in the not-understood thing before you will permit them to point out that the fully understood thing does not appear to exhibit that behaviour. In short you are requir…

LLMs are absolutely not "fully understood". We understand how the math of the architectures work because we designed that. How the hundreds of gigabytes of automatically trained weights work, we have no idea. By that logic we understand how human brains work because we've studied individual neurons.

And here's some more goalpost-shifting. Most humans aren't capable of novel mathematical thought either, but that doesn't mean they can't think.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment reminds me of the forever present HN comments that take a form like "HN is so hypocritical. In this thread commenters are saying they love X, when just last week in a thready about Y, commenters were saying that they hated X."

All articles published by the Economist are reviewed by its editorial team. Also, the Economist publishes all articles anonymously so the individual author isn't known. As far as I know, they do this so we take all articles and opinions as the perspective of the Economist publication itself.

re: Why are The Economist’s writers anonymous?, Frqy3 had a good take on this back in 2017:

> From an economic viewpoint, this also means that the brand value of the articles remains with the masthead rather than the individual authors. This commodifies the authors and makes then more fungible.

> Being The Economist, I am sure they are aware of this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14016517

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably spend 80% of my time in front of a computer driving agents, challenge accepted :)

Marshall McLuhan called, he said to ask yourself, who's driving who?

"We shape our tools, and therefore, our tools shape us."

Ironically the outro of a YouTube video I just watched. I'm just a few hundred ms of latency away from being a cyborg.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#150
While I feel silly to take seriously something printed in The Economist, I would like to mention that people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of any technology and underestimate its long-term impacts. Maybe AI will follow the same route?
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