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

Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

idlewords.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 253 posts

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#151

Post by willis936 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #141
willis936 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only requires agency from the party assuming control. There are other definitions of control in contexts other than power dynamics that are important. Like a PLL can control an oscillator frequency without the philosophical question of agency needing to be applied. That is a closer definition of control for riding a horse. You control the horse when you pull the reigns. You also control the horse when you decide w…

> only requires agency from the party assuming control It's a political concept. It requires agency from the actor recognising the threat. We're pretty close to being able to hurl a giant rock at Mars. That doesn't by a long shot mean we "control" it. If there were a human settlement on it, on the other hand, being able to credibly threaten Armageddon does give the thrower control.

I see your point.

In the original context of Dune Paul controls the spice because he can destroy it and his will would survive but it would destroy the way of life of the other cultures. So saying "Paul controls spice" only makes sense because another entity needs it and what's really meant is "Paul controls society".

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#152

Post by Timwi »

soledades wrote: post #113
altruios wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do even mean by 'soul'? What do you mean by 'supernatural' - and (assuming your definition is the standard one of 'not detectable by any measurement') by what mechanism that could possibly affect physical matter? (the onus is on you to prove the positive claim that there exists the supernatural or soul to begin with, which there is currently no evidence for). The concept is self defeating by its own definition,…

"Matter" is an abstaction. Mind, properly considered, (i.e. not with words) is not. Strict adherence to Occham's razor would have us dispense with the former, but the latter is useful empirically. There is some dogmatic insistence in GP, but equally dogmatic throwdowns on the other side of the argument are often passed over as trivially obvious. I don't know what's what, but I think this insistence is a useful counte…

> "Matter" is an abstaction. Mind, properly considered, (i.e. not with words) is not.

> Strict adherence to Occham's razor would have us dispense with the former, but the latter is useful empirically.

Did you mean to say “matter” where you said “mind” and vice versa? It’s obviously the reverse of what you said; everything consists of matter, but what specific arrangements of matter you want to call a “mind” is obviously the abstraction.

Ockam’s razor is not really applicable here. Unless, that is, you want to ascribe something mythical to the mind that exists beyond matter — then it’ll trigger.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#153

Post by Cpoll »

> Such skull-and-dagger behavior by the tech elite is going to provoke a backlash by non-technical people who don't like to be manipulated. You can't tug on the levers of power indefinitely before it starts to annoy other people in your democratic society.

This article is from 2016; now it doesn't feel like backlash is strictly a function of manipulation.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#154

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

ctoth wrote: post #112
mbgerring wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physics allows this, and actually taking advantage of it requires billions of dollars of unprecedented infrastructure buildout that is already destabilizing the power grid . The only reason that infrastructure buildout is happening at all is the ideological capture of a small handful of obscenely wealthy people, who are fueling this buildout by spreading the extreme paranoia you’re echoing here. I do not understand w…

> This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow. So, the Baruch Plan? The Manhattan Project was $~2B in 1945 dollars, and a national-scale industrial mobilization. Now North Korea has the bomb. That's with nuclear material, which doesn't get easier and easier and easier to work with every year. Compare to the price to train GPT-2 in 2019 ($43,000), and in 2026 ($…

Since nobody uses GPT-2 any more it's more informative to compare the price to train GPT-2 in 2019 and the price to train GPT 5.5 in 2026. Unfortunately that cost is not disclosed but it's probably in the billions.

The point being: the price to train frontier models isn't coming down, nor is it going to come down because for models to remain on the frontier they have to keep getting bigger and bigger (and trained on more and more data).

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#155

Post by emtel »

ethin wrote: post #96
emtel wrote: post #94

The "Einstein can't get a cat into a carrier even though he is smarter" is just a hilariously bad argument. All cat owners can get their cats into a carrier! And most cats don't want to get in, because they hate the vet! And it's almost entirely because the humans are smarter! You can even get a literal tiger into a carrier, even though it can kill you easily. You just drug its food and wait till it passes out. This…

I... Think you completely missed the point, which is that each and every method you enumerated is a brute-force tactic.

How is drugging an animal's food a "brute force tactic"? What would qualify as a non-brute-force tactic in your mind?

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#156

Post by socalgal2 »

This is a pretty bad talk.

It starts of interesting and then goes into lots of nonsense and non-sequitars when it start its takedown. (note: I'm not an AI alarmist, just reading the talk)

Arugment from Wooly Definition: An irrelevant argument - we don't need more intelligence. All we need is human intellegence + duplication and communication. An AI can clone itself immediately with its existing knowledge. A human can't. And AI can transmit thoughts perfectly "I know kung-fu style" a human can't

Argument From Stephen Hawking's Cat: This is also irrelevant. The arugment is supposed to be against Superintelligence but this argument is against controlling it, not against it happening.

Argument From Einstein's Cat: more of the same

Argument From Emus: more of the same - we can't control it

Argument From Slavic Pessimism: also not an argument against superintelligence.

Argument From Complex Motivations: Not an argument against superintelligence. Only an argument that some intelligences have mental issues

Argument From Actual AI: this didn't age well

Argument From My Roommate: not an argument against superintelligence. Only that some intelligences aren't motivated.

Argument From Brain Surgery: Not even sure that this is saying? It seems to be saying you need to learn stuff? Yea, people learn, AI can learn.

Argument From Childhood: Not an argument against AI. (1) unlike humans, AI can duplicate with full knowledge. (2) AI can learn faster than humans. Already proven.

Argument From Gilligan's Island: It takes a village is not an argument - AI can also specialize if it needs to.

Grandiosity, Megalomania, Comic Book Ethics: These argument that the people who believe in it often feel they should be charge. I agree that's true and bad. This is not an argument against superintelligence.

Transhuman Voodoo: This is an appeal to "these ideas sound too incredible therefore you should not believe them". Not sure how that's an argument

Religion: Agree, people who beleive and seem and maybe are religious. That's not an argument against superintelligence.

Simulation: Non-sequitar. This is "some of these people believe other crazy stuff QED no superintelligence". That's not an argument against superintelligence.

Data Hunger: This is actually an argument supporting the superintelligence believers. They believe sucking up all the data is bad. Not sure what argument is being made here relativel to superintelligence.

... and I stopped ... What a waste of time

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#157

Post by fragmede »

kbrkbr wrote: post #92
smaudet wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all its talk of inoculation, this is a terribly written essay. They do not make a point, nor even arguments, instead, opting to ramble in hopes that you forget whatever it was you were thinking. The issue is simple. Just like us (who are arguably complex, look at what we're building over here, this AI computer stuff!), entities have simple core needs (like food, water, power, etc.). An infinitely smart AGI has th…

From my point of view we have simply no idea what a infinitely smart AGI is and how to build it. How would it make the combinatorial explosion in state space search go away, to pick one example? And if it doesn't, is it then an infinitely smart AGI? The concept seems to assume all problems humans struggle with can be solved. The halting problem is one witness that this is probably not true.

If you're gonna look at it that way, then the halting problem is just a dressed up computer science version of the question "can God make a rock so heavy even he can't lift it?" Could an infinitely smart AGI come up with the answer to the unanswerable question?

It doesn't need to be infinitely smart to do a better job than the worst of humanity's blunders.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#158

Post by jjulius »

emtel wrote: post #155
ethin wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I... Think you completely missed the point, which is that each and every method you enumerated is a brute-force tactic.

How is drugging an animal's food a "brute force tactic"? What would qualify as a non-brute-force tactic in your mind?

Well now we're just ignoring the point for the sake of a semantics debate.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#159

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Shalomboy wrote: post #33
andai wrote: post #14

Has anyone played SOMA? Spoiler warning. It explores this idea of, what if there's an AI in charge of ensuring mankind survives at all costs. What would it be willing to do, to keep us alive? Would we even recognize the result as human? It's a horror game and it explores all kinds of fascinating and disturbing scenarios. Simulations of human minds. Artificial worlds. Human minds in robot bodies. Genetically modified…

SOMA was a cognito-hazard for me and my roommate in college; we played it in the dark together while on some sort of mild hallucinogen and when it came time for Simon to find that high-pressure dive suit, we lost our minds (no pun intended). Watching the WAU twist its way through PATHOS II in whatever way worked first is a particularly jarring analogy for what has happened to our own profession. I can't help but thin…

You should try Inside. There's a few underwater sequences and they're not horror at all.

Honest.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

#160

Post by fragmede »

emtel wrote: post #155
ethin wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I... Think you completely missed the point, which is that each and every method you enumerated is a brute-force tactic.

How is drugging an animal's food a "brute force tactic"? What would qualify as a non-brute-force tactic in your mind?

Learning to speak cat and then reasoning with the cat, in cat-ese, to get into the carrier of its own volition.
Post reply on HN