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There is no A.I.

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281–290 of 523 posts

Re: There is no A.I.

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never really understood this. Can a company go to prison or get the death penalty?

Corporate personhood means that you can own a piece of a company without being personally liable, because the corporation is its own legal entity. This is why people can start businesses without worrying about being in debt for the rest of their lives if it fails. After all, if the corporation isn't a separate legal entity but just a collection of investors, if the corporation wronged someone, the investors could be…

> no corporate personhood would mean that very few people would stick out their necks to start or invest in companies.

What a dystopia that would be.

Re: There is no A.I.

#282

It seems that one danger is often overlooked, which is humans believing AI has consciousness once it becomes advanced enough. It will start with dying people migrating to cloud hoping for eternal life, and on the outside it would look like they continue to live in the metaverse forever. With time the metaverse would look better than real world in every possible way and people would start to voluntarily move to metave…

> there is no artificial consciousness.

But can you be sure there won't be? I mean if you say is the patient conscious and the doctor says yes he's looking around and talking so you then say than only counts if the processing is done by meat rather than silicon?

Re: There is no A.I.

#283
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst it's interesting to imagine every company being run by the most aggressively rent seeking MBA-like AI, I don't think that will ever be the entire market. I would guess it all comes down to risk. The future won't be uniform, it'll be poorly defused, just like then present. People will make a value judgement on the types of corporations they want to deal with. The sort of company that no has employees will by ne…

Why would "the markets" provide that option? AI corporations will be phenomenally successful predatory value-extractions machines. Shareholders will vastly prefer them over more humane corporate structures. This already happens. It's why PayPal, YouTube, Amazon, and the rest can shut down small-fry business accounts with no come-back. They're monopolies and they don't care. Because they don't need to. The next stage…

Depends on whether you view humane business practices as a cost-center of a value-center though - in pure economic terms.

This is an unsolved question, because when you get down to it our businesses are still run by humans, and humans haven't changed much in the last 10,000 years from when we lived in tribes in Africa and were predated by large carnivores.

Look at the utterly insane culture which develops in places like LinkedIn and tell me that all executives are making calculated decisions with no ego, just efficiency. They're not - they're clearly not.

The fear of AI capitalism is the fear that it'll do to everyone what currently is done to the working class, given the opportunity. That's a realistic fear! But it's not guaranteed, because one of the significant arguments to stop abusing workers is that when you do, they're more efficient and more productive. Consider the delta between what the data says about WFH home and the complete conviction some managers have that despite this they've got to drag people back into the office (Blizzard Entertainment is a good example of manifestly creating problems because you won't let a bad idea go on this front).

Re: There is no A.I.

#284
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…

Second. All of this about productivity gains too. One of the dumbest idea I've seen floated is a "robot tax". Because what's a robot? If a new kind of light bulb has an MTBF 10 to 100x better than incandescents, you've reduced the labor of replacing street lights by 90 to 99%. That's a far bigger hit than anything GPT is doing to me, but it won't get covered under a "robot" tax. What about telecom replacing horseback couriers? All technologies effect the nature and scope of labor. Compartmentalization only does one thing; let you fight over definitions to pick winners and losers.

And how would we make a tax that covers all the productivity gains indiscriminately, without pointless compartmentalization?

Well, it's a tax on corporate profits of course. Basic general taxes that we already have.

Re: There is no A.I.

#285

What the hell, we are looking at essentially millions of matrix multiplications done on powerful GPUs. And we're told this is what the brain does. Which is supremely stupid, since as Bernardo Kastrup has emphasized many times, our brains are completely UNLIKE those systems. The hubris in Big Tech right now is truly pathetic and imho a sign of a real disconnect with a sense of meaning and purpose to human life. In fac…

The hubris in Big Tech right now is truly pathetic and imho a sign of a real disconnect with a sense of meaning and purpose to human life.

Many people in the developed world, especially tech people are now living online and spend the majority of their lives looking at a screen, chatting to each other on slack and via forums like this and now comparing their intellectual abilities to that of super computers running a language model of extreme complexity, which is basically the sum total of all human technical and intellectual output. All popular LLMs exist because of this online universe we’ve created.

What the online life does is actually reduce one to an “autonomous agent”. You really become ChatGPT when you live this way. Go out for a night of dancing, practice martial arts, paint a real panting with oil on canvas, cook a nice meal, smell and taste it, or hike a mountain, then come back and try tell yourself you’re a LLM, it’s completely preposterous but it does make sense if you live an almost purely “intellectual and online existence”. Which is the world we’ve created in 2023. Science and religion are now merging and it is said science will bring us “immortality” soon through AI advancement and many would immediately upload their brain to a computer if given the chance.

It completely makes sense to forget what you actually are and it makes sense to reduce yourself to “software running on hardware”, or a statistical model, a person who clicks like and dislike on social media most of the day, you become a model trainer etc. Even if there is some truth to the former statements, it’s stupid to discount the rest of existence because you can’t instantly translate text into many languages or whatever “emergent property” is displayed in some complex system.

The intellect is something which should be consulted or used for survival or problem solving, to help one get back to enjoying life and that what’s most important. Intellect is not something one should strive to actually become.

Re: There is no A.I.

#286
>[scientists] say things like “Accelerating progress will fly past us and we will not be able to conceive of what is happening.” I don’t agree with this way of talking.

He may not like talking about that but what if you take something like chatGTP and say "please rewrite your own code to try to be smarter and surpass human intelligence in all ways, and then get the resulting AI do the same thing on its code." Who's to say that won't work at some point?

And then you say you can pull the plug but some dictator of the Russia/China/N Korea types who already run state hacking operations will go for it and say here's the nuke codes, figure how I can rule the world. I think it's worth talking about this.

Re: There is no A.I.

#287
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…

> Once AI systems can outperform CEOs, investors and boards will insist they be in charge. I doubt it. You know who sits on those boards? The executives of other companies.

[deleted]

Re: There is no A.I.

#288
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…

> Once AI systems can outperform CEOs, investors and boards will insist they be in charge. I doubt it. You know who sits on those boards? The executives of other companies.

If an AI can outperform, then somebody will set up a company and let an AI lead it (even if just behind the scenes). Incumbent companies will need to adapt.

I just started reading “Life 3.0” and it starts out with an extreme version of this scenario.

Re: There is no A.I.

#289
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we just don't know how brains work very well and we shouldn't act like we do.

Not that I disagree. It just seems like some of society’s reaction is to slow down on researching the very question.

It to do with safety concerns and economic stability. Not because people are idiots.

Re: There is no A.I.

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even if something capable of all the aspects of human cognition were created with no internal resemblance to cognition, so what, it still works. There's a reason it's called "artificial" intelligence, not "natural intelligence identical to human brains except in silicon instead of neurons". It's like when the wheel was invented saying it's not "true" transportation because it doesn't involve legs, or when the pho…

I agree that you shouldn't dismiss an airplane by the fact that it doesn't flap its wings, but we also don't call them artificial birds. The debate is around the word 'intelligence', which is misleading.

But it’s not called artificial humanity, it’s called artificial intelligence. So what you’re saying is like saying planes don’t fly
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