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There is no A.I.

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201–210 of 523 posts

Re: There is no A.I.

#201
post #166
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't A-players, but B-players who have no insight over the complexity of C-players' jobs so they think they can replace them with AI.

Even temporarily imitating D players for longer than a few unsourced articles on the internet might be a start until we start getting hand wavy about B players being threatened. I'm honestly not even sure what world we are debating. Some hypothetical one in the future when AI fills some ideal trajectory we aren't even close to being capable of predicting in some near-term measurable timeframe? I'm as pro-exponential…

The cool thing is we can now stop relying solely on human imagination for ideating on futures funnels, and leverage GPT-4 to help us do it, and get a much more realistic sense of what types of things an AI system might conceivably attempt given we can probe these models for what is in them. Granted that's not perfect because GPT-N+1 will have emergent capabilities not present in GPT-N and so it's not always going to be a realistic assessment, but it's an ever closer approximation and it gives much more information than relying solely on human imagination.

I've been doing this a bit lately and despite the fact that I know it's only predicting the next token, I'm still slightly unnerved as I watch a black box computer system slowly type out novel and plausible ways to kill me.

Re: There is no A.I.

#202
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you lost the weights how is that not killing the AI? Is it because it lacks the death experience? If so what about bitrotting the weights incrementally and degrading its inputs?

The AI is digital. It is 1s and 0s and lives in discrete changes. Living creatures are not digital.

The universe is quantized, according to quantum physics. That means living creatures are effectively digital.

Re: There is no A.I.

#203

GPT4 appears very intelligent when you discuss program code with it. It simply crazy; it can write SNOBOL4 code to extract a field from /etc/passwd. When you discuss other things, it goes off the rails a lot more. For instance, I have had it quote some passages of classic English poetry to me, stating blankly that those passages contain certain words. The passages did not contain any traces of those words or even rem…

You seem to be saying that to have general intelligence one must be an expert in every field? That rules out quite a number of humans too.

No, I'm just saying that there is AI, and it's okay to use the term. There has been for a long time. E.g. SHRDLU in 1970 was/is AI.

Re: There is no A.I.

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before too long, we will not dele­gate deci­sions to AI systems because they perform better. Rather, we will dele­gate deci­sions to AI systems because they can get away with every­thing that we can’t. Here's Frontier Airlines announcing proudly to investors that they will do exactly that.[1] See page 44. Today: Call center. Avenue for customer negotiation. Tomorrow: Chatbot efficiently answers questions, reduces c…

This is the infuriating part of dealing with Amazon customer service these days. Anything that doesn’t fit into the box of what the chatbot will do is met with “I understand your frustration, …” and it’s like, no, there is no understanding here! Just like call center trees have escapes to real service by pressing 0 ad nauseum or swearing loudly, these AI service agents will have ways to get to real people and they’ll…

How many times have you read about someone locked out of their account and having no recourse except taking it to HN and hoping a human on the inside reaches out?

Imagine if that was every corporation, and some of them had zero humans on the inside.

Re: There is no A.I.

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will always need a charismatic human being to be the figurehead of an organization, so I don’t think AI will ever replace CEOs. They will wind up making the important decisions though.

How often do most people physically see CEOs, though? For most purposes maybe it's enough to project charisma in a video. An AI CEO might also be capable of superhuman "interpersonal" feats like "personally" answering every letter, phone call or complaint.

Max Headroom as CEO.

Re: There is no A.I.

#207
post #68

The elephant in the room in these discussions of AI is the concept of the corporation. Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are things corporations already do. Deceptive marketing, exploiting customer information, conspiring to keep prices high, creating distractions from things companies are doing, setting up monopolies, lying to customers - the usual. With AI, this can be automated. Most of this is…

> Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are things corporations already do. There is a rebuttal to this view presented here by Robert Miles: https://youtu.be/L5pUA3LsEaw

It's a 15 minute talking head video from 4 years ago, and when you get to the end, it says that "Corporations are the real misaligned AGI" will be covered in the next video. No sign of that next video.

His big point in the first video is that corporations can achieve only a modest level of superintelligence. A corporation can have more breadth of knowledge than any individual, and for some tasks, that's good enough. But it's mostly using more people for broad coverage.

All this predates GPT. What we're seeing with GPT is good breadth combined with mediocre intelligence. That's very corporate. It handles much of what people do in offices. We may not get super-intelligence that way. Just super bureaucracy. Which is a problem.

Re: There is no A.I.

#208
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the infuriating part of dealing with Amazon customer service these days. Anything that doesn’t fit into the box of what the chatbot will do is met with “I understand your frustration, …” and it’s like, no, there is no understanding here! Just like call center trees have escapes to real service by pressing 0 ad nauseum or swearing loudly, these AI service agents will have ways to get to real people and they’ll…

How many times have you read about someone locked out of their account and having no recourse except taking it to HN and hoping a human on the inside reaches out? Imagine if that was every corporation, and some of them had zero humans on the inside.

It is not a good future, and at least in Amazon’s case jeff@amazon.com works as an escalation route.

My gmail account with the same username got banned in 2007ish in the middle of college, I definitely feel the pain of no recourse. I lost everything - calendars, todo lists, email and had no way to get the underlying data or do anything about it.

My hope is that at the end of the day a corporation is made of people (legally, this is why they have 1st amendment rights in the USA) and this will prevent the scenario you imagine because the money of those people will be at risk.

Re: There is no A.I.

#209

All of these arguments seem to think that the brain isn't also generating a statistical ordering of semantic words and actions. Obviously the brain has a way more complex network of subsystems with various specialties than the artificial models we have today and is able to generalize language, math, and positional reasoning and mix it with the older parts of the brain for reward and training mechanisms and it can do…

That computer scientists think that they are even close to replicating biology and the mammal brain with AI is complete hubris. This is biology inspired engineering, it's not like we are building brains out of silicon here.

Re: There is no A.I.

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"we would be seeing private companies or governments use it internally " What world are you living in, where this isn't happening? Every private company that can use it is using it, Microsoft themselves must be using Copilot. Governments are lining up to train their own LLMs. Commercial and consumer use are not mutually exclusive, in any case. Also "Humanity is excellent at oppressing others, and I have no doubt we'd…

> What world are you living in, where this isn’t happening? You left off the rest of the sentence: “to massively boost their productivity or achieve otherwise impossible feats”

That was implied, I think, though achieving impossible feats is a bit of a stretch in expectations.

Private enterprise is certainly leveraging LLMs. OpenAI APIs on Azure are very hot right now, limited to companies that have existing contracts with Azure.

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