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

There is no A.I.

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 523 posts

Re: There is no A.I.

#251

Post by nologic01 »

Animats wrote: 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…

The elephant in the room is the concept of the State. Bad corporations flurish in the shadow of bad government.

Governments are supposed to safeguard the interests of the many. Over decades they used collective resources to advance the research that made IT/AI possible. They granted corporates (private interests) the license to operate, a financial system to oil them, a security system to protect them.

If current IT has the shape it does (oligopolistic, unaccountable, abusive, potentially a runaway disaster) it is entirely due to complicit, captured governments and malfunctioning political systems.

Re: There is no A.I.

#252

Post by popcorncowboy »

Lanier is an effective wordsmith and I applaud the point he's making. Many of the same (good) arguments from his books like "Who owns the future" and "You are not a gadget". But alas I feel he is pissing into the wind.

The reasoning engine that emerged with the latest rounds of GPT is a pre-fire, post-fire phase-change. The impact of the ability to coerce automated reasoning via natural language (even if it's flawed etc) from a digital runtime is.. difficult to overstate. His appeal for a just and equitable distribution of value honouring "data dignity" is noble. But the world in which that could happen doesn't exist.

Instead there is an insane, frenzied, wild-eyed land-grab going on because it's painfully apparent that raging rivers of money and control are going to accrue to the masters of the new frontier (precisely because it will be possible to own and implement an acute version of precisely the problems Lanier tries to address in his equitable digital economics treatises).

Our capitalist economic systems are not able to "think of the people". Every dev + mba with any inkling at all is racing to get in on the "opportunity".

Governments will react a decade or more too late.

This train has already left the station and a great many people are going to be left stranded.

Lanier is right to (continue to) ring this bell. Too bad he's more Stallman than Jobs, because this cause desperately needs backable champion.

Re: There is no A.I.

#253

Post by bell-cot »

agronomov wrote: post #236
bell-cot wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that scenario actually works. Reason: the superficial, "sounds like a person" AI's don't actually have what it takes to sustain a huge, high-tech society. OTOH, letting the idle rich "move" to the matrix could be a good thing...

Well, imagine advanced AI beyond imagination. It is so advanced that it mimicks all of the human activity in exactly the same way. By definition it would be able to do whatever we are doing (and probably better) Unless you don't believe that such an AI is possible, in which case I wonder if you have tried GPT-4 and whether you remember what chat bots were like 5 years ago! This of course would be AGI. It would still…

In a Philosophy 307 class, your "advanced AI beyond imagination...mimic all of the human activity..." description begs some questions about souls, or other "special sparks of magic" which somehow distinguish such AI's from real humans. And exactly how those souls or sparks or whatever might pass Carl Sagan's Invisible Dragon Test.

But in the real world - those same descriptive words are written by a Marketing Dept. The actual engineers, who developed and built the AI, on an all-too-finite budget, know otherwise. And know that the PHB's already have plans to cut the production cost - by collecting data on which parts of the already-limited "mimic all human activity" are ignored by the AI's actual customers, and quietly nerfing or removing those parts.

Re: There is no A.I.

#254

Post by zx8080 »

Animats wrote: 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…

The main question is 'who is in charge?' for the decisions. Who gets punished with no bonus and a bad reputation or even go bankrupt if a company dies?

Same responsibility barrier exists for the driverless cars adoption.

In short, most people feel themselves better (if they even think about it) if a person is in charge and taking responsibility of bad decisions. Someone who will either die with them of will go to prison if thinga go bad.

Probably the same is for the pilotless airplanes: the first bad accident can ruin it.

Re: There is no A.I.

#255

Post by brucethemoose2 »

sdze wrote: post #175
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really agree with this... there is a parallel issue. If AIs are doing most of the work in megacorps (especially if robotics take off), then basically all profit is going to the owners and tiny groups of executive AI "managers." Even the most staunch (but sane) capitalist libertarian will admit mega income inequality is baaad juju.

And who will consume the output of these robots? Surely not the unemployed workers they replaced.

As Duncan kinda pointed out, thats not a corporation's concern... especially those that are first to automate.

Re: There is no A.I.

#256

Post by ogogmad »

throwaway8503 wrote: post #133
ravenstine wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno if there's some trickery going on under the hood, but GPT-4 does basic arithmetic correctly.

This is what I got on ChatGPT today. I assume it used GPT4: Prompt ChatGPT Actual Match 397,356 * 930,547 369,685,207,932 369,758,433,732 FALSE 36,330 * 26,951 979,458,630 979,129,830 FALSE 8,681 * 9,330 80,911,430 80,993,730 FALSE 278 * 903 250,734 251,034 FALSE 82 * 77 6,314 6,314 TRUE Edit: # of correct digits (counting from leftmost) only exceeds 3 on the smallest pair. It drops to two, as well, on the 3x3 set.

You probably used GPT-3.5. That said, I didn't manage to get GPT-4 to calculate 36,330 * 26,951 correctly. I suggested casting out 9s, casting out 11s, doing long multiplication, reversing the digits - nothing.

I have a theory that it does arithmetic badly because the logic goes right-to-left, when LLMs write left-to-right. If the digits were to be reversed, it might not make as many mistakes. I ran out of attempts before I could test this properly.

Re: There is no A.I.

#257

Post by stuaxo »

This article puts into words what I was already thinking, using "AI" to describe LLMs etc isn't helpful.

These tools are really useful for IA though.

Re: There is no A.I.

#258

Post by SanderNL »

Rury wrote: post #87

I'd wager that intelligence is nothing but a reified concept. Something which doesn't innately exist other than as an abstract concept which we have defined, to help us explain complex nature, without the need of fully understanding the underlying complexity giving rise to that nature. Like how cave men used the concept of "gods" for a satisfying explanation for why it rains - we use intelligence to ascertain why som…

You mean it’s “emergent”. Yes, I agree.

But so is everything else that is not a fundamental particle/wave/string.

So, while true, it’s not that useful in and of itself.

Re: There is no A.I.

#259

Post by SanderNL »

ineptech wrote: post #111
Rury wrote: post #87

I'd wager that intelligence is nothing but a reified concept. Something which doesn't innately exist other than as an abstract concept which we have defined, to help us explain complex nature, without the need of fully understanding the underlying complexity giving rise to that nature. Like how cave men used the concept of "gods" for a satisfying explanation for why it rains - we use intelligence to ascertain why som…

I have been thinking along the same lines - the fact that something as comparatively simple and barebones as an LLM can manipulate language symbols well enough to carry on a conversation suggests that it's a lot easier than was previously imagined. I used to think that language was one of the defining characteristics of intelligence, like the instruction set of a cpu, but chatgpt seems like persuasive evidence agains…

In order to predict the next token it’s doing something more like simulating the writer of the words and the context they were likely to be in while writing the words. You cannot make accurate predictions without understanding the world that gave rise to these words.

Consider a detective story with all the clues laid out and then at the end the detective says: “I know who it is. It is: …” Correctly predicting the next “tokens” entails that you incorporate all the previous details. Same goes for math questions, emotive statements, etc.

I’d be careful calling it simple. They might be simulating humans including for example a theory of mind just as a side effect.

Re: There is no A.I.

#260

Post by amelius »

If humans can't even live in harmony with different races, how the hell do we expect us to behave when a new intelligent species enters the scene?
Post reply on HN