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There is no A.I.

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Re: There is no A.I.

#291

Post by sclarisse »

coldtea wrote: post #154
sclarisse wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations have rights because they are owned by humans and those humans have rights. Corporations are just a convenient way to do things together, like conduct a business and own property. Corporate personhood is just a legal abstraction to represent those peoples’ rights, a facade pattern that lets multi-person groups neatly fit in existing laws that might discuss individuals. Corporations like Citizens United ca…

> Corporations have rights because they are owned by humans and those humans have rights. One does not really follow from another. Washing machines are also "owned by humans" but they don't get rights. > Corporations are just a convenient way to do things together, like conduct a business and own property. Corporate personhood is just a legal abstraction to represent those peoples’ rights, a facade pattern that lets…

It is seldom more-convenient to represent your property as a thing that has rights. But if we did decide to speak as if it had rights, it would have its owners rights.

It would have the right not to be searched by the government, without due process of law, for instance. (This is your right not to be searched.) It would have the right not to have some components or clothes therein seized by the government, without just compensation. (This is your right not to have your property seized.) It would have the right to free speech, which might be relevant if you programmed an on board chip to play some interesting audio. (Mine does Schubert, a factory setting.)

A corporation has the right to put out whatever message it likes, because its owners have that right. This is often threatened. Courts just find it convenient to try cases as if the corporate entity were a person acting instead of referring to “the rights of the various owners [list here], who are acting through the corporate entity” every single time. That’s it. That’s the entire doctrine. That’s literally all it is or means.

Re: There is no A.I.

#292

Post by vidarh »

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.

Hence Marx prediction of capitalism eventually suffering from simultaneously crises of overproduction and underemployment. A prediction based only on two assumptions: that capitalism will continue to increase productivity and reduce costs, and that eventually the only cost that can still be cut will be labour.

His third prediction is one we can hope is wrong: that society will stubbornly refuse to adapt until the issue is forced by uprisings.

Re: There is no A.I.

#293

Post by IshKebab »

tim333 wrote: post #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 t…

Yeah that stood out to me too. Can he really not imagine how AI could take over the human race? There are plenty of films to give ideas.

I've noticed a lot of people dismissing concerned people think that those people expect GPT-4 to take all our jobs and destroy humanity.

But nobody thinks that. The reason people are concerned is not because GPT-4 has human level intelligence; it's because it has shown that human level intelligence might actually be possible in the not too distant future.

In other words, GPT-4 is never going to take over the world, but what about GPT-40?

Re: There is no A.I.

#294

Post by lib-dev »

bsenftner wrote: post #280
nologic01 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I believe this is an issue of scale: humans need to operate at a smaller scale for fairness to exist at all. We do not have any evolutionary preparation for operating collectively at global scale. Our small minds try to take advantage of our situation when in positions of power, while being incapable of realizing the mass unfairness that behavior actualizes. This is an issue with human nature itself. We have to chang…

All nature is in constant flux including human nature. I wouldn’t say “we all know”.

Re: There is no A.I.

#295

Post by MrScruff »

SanderNL wrote: post #259
ineptech wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nex…

Yes exactly. All of the dismissive ‘it’s just a fancy next word predictor’ articles can’t see the woods for the trees. Just because the function of the model is to predict the next word tells us almost nothing about what internal representation of the world it has built in order to generalise. I don’t for a second think it’s currently of comparable complexity to the world model we all have in our brains, but I also don’t think there’s any clearly defined theoretical limit on what could be learned, beyond the need for the internal model to make better predictions and the optimiser to find this more optimal set of weights (which might be a limit in practice as of now).

Re: There is no A.I.

#296

Post by IshKebab »

stabbles wrote: post #241
atleastoptimal wrote: post #61

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.

Go and Google "artificial birds" and report back.

Look up the definition of "artificial" while you're at it.

Re: There is no A.I.

#297

Post by tim333 »

IshKebab wrote: post #293
tim333 wrote: post #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 t…

Yeah that stood out to me too. Can he really not imagine how AI could take over the human race? There are plenty of films to give ideas. I've noticed a lot of people dismissing concerned people think that those people expect GPT-4 to take all our jobs and destroy humanity. But nobody thinks that. The reason people are concerned is not because GPT-4 has human level intelligence; it's because it has shown that human le…

Yeah I'm quite optimistic but I think it's going to be a situation where we need good guys with AI to counter bad guys with AI.

Re: There is no A.I.

#298

Post by IshKebab »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #65
tracerbulletx wrote: post #27

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…

I generally agree with you, but I think this argument overlooks the lack of an obvious reward function in large language models. GPT-N has no survival instinct, because there is no existential threat of death, no fitness function to optimize to extend its survival at any cost. Without this need to survive, there can be no motivation, and without motivation there can be no intent. And without intent, can there truly b…

I think this kind of argument is making a similar mistake. In the same way that there's nothing fundamentally special about the computation human brains do, there's nothing fundamentally special about our "fitness function" (to reproduce).

It's just hard coded, whereas GPT's is dictated. More or less anyway.

Also our "fitness function" or motivations & goals aren't even that hard coded. You can easily modify them through drugs.

Re: There is no A.I.

#299

Post by bilvar »

popcorncowboy wrote: post #252

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…

Ah the same old argument Hayek dismantled over 70 years ago.

Re: There is no A.I.

#300

Post by chattingasacow »

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…

You raise an important point in discussing the role of corporations in the development and deployment of AI. Indeed, many of the concerns surrounding AI are not necessarily new but rather stem from existing corporate practices. Automating these practices through AI might exacerbate existing issues and create new challenges.

Consumer protection is a crucial aspect of addressing these concerns. Regulating AI should involve regulating corporations' use of AI to prevent harmful practices, promote transparency, and ensure ethical applications. This would require a balance between fostering innovation and imposing necessary restrictions to safeguard consumers and society as a whole.

The potential for AI systems to outperform CEOs and other decision-makers raises questions about the future of corporate management. While there is a possibility that AI could be employed to optimize decision-making and increase efficiency, it is important to recognize the limits of AI in understanding human values, ethics, and emotions. Striking the right balance between utilizing AI capabilities and retaining human oversight will be essential to navigate the future of corporate governance.

Moreover, the involvement of policymakers and regulators is crucial in addressing these challenges. As AI continues to advance and integrate into various aspects of society, it becomes more important to have comprehensive regulations that ensure the responsible development and use of AI technologies.

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