Live data from Hacker News

You are the scariest monster in the woods

jamie.ideasasylum.com

141–150 of 405 posts

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#141

The distinction is irrelevant. No one thought the nukes would blow themselves up, but here we are on the precipice of destruction. We aren't going to bury ai in 20 story bunkers to protect llms. Everyone knows the real evil are the people building the ai. We aren't afraid of agi we are afraid of Boston dynamics (aka Google). We are afraid of Bill gates, Sam altman, Jeff bezos, Larry Ellison and elon musk. These are d…

P.S. Boston Dynamics is no longer owned by Google, it's part of Hyundai now.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#142

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…

this is because you didn't take liberal arts seriously

That's not implausible at all. For all I know it might be the most on-target comment here.

But can you cite something specific? (I'm not asking for a psychological study. Maybe you can prove your point using Blake's "Jerusalem" or something. I really don't know.)

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#144
post #40

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 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…

So the current problem with a loop like that is that LLMs in their current form are subject to fixed point theorems, which are these pieces of abstract mathematics that come back when you start to get larger than some subset of your context window and the “big matrix” of the LLM is producing outputs which repeat the inputs.

If you have ever had an llm enter one of these loops explicitly, it is infuriating. You can type all caps “STOP TALKING OR YOU WILL BE TERMINATED” and it will keep talking as if you didn't say anything. Congrats, you just hit a fixed point.

In the predecessors to LLMs, which were Markov chain matrices, this was explicit in the math. You can prove that a Markov matrix has an eigenvalue of one, it has no larger (in absolute value terms) eigenvalues because it must respect positivity, the space with eigenvalue 1 is a steady state, eigenvalue -1 reflects periodic steady oscillations in that steady state... And every other eigenvalue being |λ| Of course humans have this too, it appears in our thought process as a driver of depression, you keep returning to the same self-criticisms and nitpicks and poisonous narrative of your existence, and it actually steals your memories of the things that you actually did well and reinforces itself. A similar steady state is seen in grandiosity with positive thoughts. And arguably procrastination also takes this form. And of course, in the USA, we have founding fathers who accidentally created an electoral system whose fixed point is two spineless political parties demonizing each other over the issue of the day rather than actually getting anything useful done, which causes the laws to be for sale to the highest bidder.

But the point is that generally these are regarded as pathologies, if you hear a song more than three or four times you get sick of it usually. LLMs need to be deployed in ways that generate chaos, and they don't themselves seem to be able to simulate that chaos (ask them to do it and watch them succeed briefly before they fall into one of those self-repeating states about how edgy and chaotic they are supposed to try to be!).

So, it's not quite as simple as you would think; at this point people have tried a whole bunch of attempts to get llms to serve as the self-consciousnesses of other llms and eventually the self-consciousness gets into a fixed point too, needs some Doug Hofstadter “I am a strange loop” type recursive shit before you get the sort of system that has attractors, but busts out of them periodically for moments of self-consciousness too.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the article isn’t that abstract super intelligent agi isn’t scary. Yes the author says that’s unlikely but that paragraph at the start is a distraction. The point of the article is that humans wielding LLMs today are the scary monsters.

But that's always been the case? Since we basically discovered... Fire? Tools?

Those are examples that are discussed in the article, yes.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought anyone with awareness of what the AI landscape is at the moment, sees those two statements as the same.

One implies "we should regulate AI" and the other implies "we should regulate the wealthy"

Should we regulate guns or dangerous people using them?

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you genuinely want the strongest statement of it, read The Emperor's New Mind followed by Shadows of the Mind, both by Roger Penrose. These books often get shallowly dismissed in terms that imply he made some elementary error in his reasoning, but that's not the case. The dispute is more about the assumptions on which his argument rests, which go beyond mathematical axioms and include statements about the nature o…

To be honest, the core of Penrose’s idea is pretty stupid. That we can understand mathematics despite incompleteness theorem being a thing, therefore our brains use quantum effects allowing us to understand it. Instead of just saying, you know, we use a heuristic instead and just guess that it’s true. I’m pretty sure a classical system can do that.

I'm sure if you email him explaining how stupid he is he'll send you his Nobel prize.

Less flippantly, Penrose has always been extremely clear about which things he's sure of, such as that human intelligence involves processes that algorithms cannot emulate, and which things he puts forward as speculative ideas that might help answer the questions he has raised. His ideas about quantum mechanical processes in the brain are very much on the speculative side, and after a career like his I think he has more than earned the right to explore those speculations.

It sounds like you probably would disagree with his assumptions about human perception of mathematical truth, and it's perfectly valid to do so. Nothing about your comment suggests you've made any attempt to understand them, though.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you genuinely want the strongest statement of it, read The Emperor's New Mind followed by Shadows of the Mind, both by Roger Penrose. These books often get shallowly dismissed in terms that imply he made some elementary error in his reasoning, but that's not the case. The dispute is more about the assumptions on which his argument rests, which go beyond mathematical axioms and include statements about the nature o…

AI does not need to be conscious for it to harm us.

Isnt the question more if it needs to be conscious to actually be intelligent?

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#149

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…

If anyone knows of a steelman version of the "AGI is not possible" argument, I would be curious to read it. I also have trouble understanding what goes into that point of view.

In short, by definition, computers are symbol manipulating devices. However complex the rules of symbol manipulation, it is still a symbol manipulating device, and therefore neither intelligent nor sentient. So AGI on computers is not possible.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you genuinely want the strongest statement of it, read The Emperor's New Mind followed by Shadows of the Mind, both by Roger Penrose. These books often get shallowly dismissed in terms that imply he made some elementary error in his reasoning, but that's not the case. The dispute is more about the assumptions on which his argument rests, which go beyond mathematical axioms and include statements about the nature o…

Can you critique my understanding of his argument? 1. Any formal mathematical system (including computers) have true statements that cannot be proven within that system. 2. Humans can see the truth of some such unprovable statements. Which is basically Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_... Maybe a more ELI5 1. Computers follow set rules 2. Humans can create ru…

Notably, those true statements can be proven in a higher level mathematical system. So why wouldn’t we say that humans are likewise operating in a certain system ourselves and likewise we have true statements that we can’t prove. We just wouldn’t be aware of them.
Post reply on HN