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Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat than Artificial Intelligence?

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Re: Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat than Artificial Intelligence?

#21

Post by monocasa »

Nasrudith wrote: post #15
monocasa wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far, intelligence on Earth has been zero sum. We've wiped out multiple other intelligent species until we were the only ones.

I think that was more a result of shared environmental niche more than anything since it happens with non-intelligent species as well. Predators fight over same prey niche even in the same species. Stable multipredator shared prey arrangements have a clear power differential - the stronger one can chase the weaker ones away from kills and if they are slow enough that may be their main strategy. If there were say merp…

Wouldn't intelligences engineered to be a component of our society, by definition, be sharing an environmental niche with us. Going back to your merpeople analogy, we wouldn't put in the effort to build AI, just to drop them in the ocean and have them live their lives separately from us and providing no use to us unless they become so economical that they're just literally everywhere on Earth.

Edit: and going back to you merpeople example, the onset of humans represents a mass extinction level event for the closest thing to merpeople: ceteceans. http://www.iucn-csg.org/index.php/status-of-the-worlds-cetac...

Re: Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat than Artificial Intelligence?

#22

Post by n4r9 »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #16

"Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy and chair of the philosophy department at Duke University." Not a neuroscientist. Not a cognitive psychologist. He gives short shrift to the utility of different levels of description to inform each other.

Are we to dismiss philosophers of science for talking about the philosophical implications of science?

Re: Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat than Artificial Intelligence?

#23

Post by SubiculumCode »

n4r9 wrote: post #22
SubiculumCode wrote: post #16

"Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy and chair of the philosophy department at Duke University." Not a neuroscientist. Not a cognitive psychologist. He gives short shrift to the utility of different levels of description to inform each other.

Are we to dismiss philosophers of science for talking about the philosophical implications of science?

No. But does he understand the neuroscience?

Re: Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat than Artificial Intelligence?

#24

Post by igolden »

dwaltrip wrote: post #8
igolden wrote: post #3

Can someone drop a TLDR for the at-work crowd? would be V grateful

Humans have this seemingly innate or nearly innate theory of mind, where the beliefs and desires of other people can be reasoned about in an effort to understand or predict their behavior. A few key neuroscience results suggest that the brain does not really work how the "theory of mind" has us think it should. The concepts of belief and desire that we use in our theory of mind, may actually just be crude heuristics…

Thank you!

Re: Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat than Artificial Intelligence?

#25

Post by bloke_zero »

n4r9 wrote: post #19
xazo wrote: post #12

A more informative title would be "Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat to Human Distinctiveness than AI?"

The title was very misleading, especially since AI's "threat" usually means a paperclip maximiser or something. I ended up skimming through the whole article to try and figure out what was being threatened. Until the very end I assumed it was our ability to function, knowing how meaningless consciousness is.

I think the threat implied would be that if all of our beliefs are essentially meaningless then nihilism might appear to be the logical outcome.

That is largely what I believe (about beliefs) - they are cute but meaningless.

Re: Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat than Artificial Intelligence?

#26

Post by hprotagonist »

bloke_zero wrote: post #25
n4r9 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title was very misleading, especially since AI's "threat" usually means a paperclip maximiser or something. I ended up skimming through the whole article to try and figure out what was being threatened. Until the very end I assumed it was our ability to function, knowing how meaningless consciousness is.

I think the threat implied would be that if all of our beliefs are essentially meaningless then nihilism might appear to be the logical outcome. That is largely what I believe (about beliefs) - they are cute but meaningless.

well that's cute... but meaningless :)

Re: Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat than Artificial Intelligence?

#27

Post by buboard »

igolden wrote: post #3

Can someone drop a TLDR for the at-work crowd? would be V grateful

arbitrarily concludes that a mechanistic understanding of the brain is "a threat" to our "distinctiveness" i.e. we are not unicorns anymore. zero-information garbage if you ask me

Re: Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat than Artificial Intelligence?

#30

Post by skywhopper »

ny2244111 wrote: post #13

Just a developer, but is this author subtly arguing that in the end, behaviorism has some sort of validity?

That's the closest thing to a thesis I could get out of it. But the real question is, can you scale up the rat-in-a-maze monitoring of physical activity based on simple inputs involving binary choices in a solitary setting into anything meaningful about the much more intricate system of a human brain making complex decisions about abstract concepts in a complicated social mesh? I'm not sure the author's willingness to make the leap that human language is just meaningless noise is justified based on being able to interpret the physical meaning of a rat's brain activity.
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