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

The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 1001 posts

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#291

Post by pegasus »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #238
pegasus wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can be made boring by reducing them to an arbitrary choice of definition of the word "thinking", but the question is really about weather inference is in principle as powerful as human thinking, and so would deserve to be applied the same label. Which is not at all a boring question. It's equivalent to asking weather current architectures are enough to reach AGI.

> inference is in principle as powerful as human thinking There is currently zero evidence to suggest that human thinking violates any of the basics principles of the theory of computation nor extend the existing limits of computability. > Which is not at all a boring question. It is because you aren't introducing any evidence to theoretically challenge what we've already know about computation for almost 100 years n…

> There is currently zero evidence...

Way smarter people than both of us disagree: among them being Roger Penrose, who wrote two books on this very subject.

See also my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45804258

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#292

Post by iamleppert »

If AI were really intelligent and thinking, it ought to be able to be trained on its own output. That's the exact same thing we do. We know that doesn't work.

The obvious answer is the intelligence and structure is located in the data itself. Embeddings and LLMs have given us new tools to manipulate language and are very powerful but should be thought of more as a fancy retrieval system than a real, thinking and introspective intelligence.

Models don't have the ability to train themselves, they can't learn anything new once trained, have no ability of introspection. Most importantly, they don't do anything on their own. They have no wants or desires, and can only do anything meaningful when prompted by a human to do so. It's not like I can spin up an AI and have it figure out what it needs to do on its own or tell me what it wants to do, because it has no wants. The hallmark of intelligence is figuring out what one wants and how to accomplish one's goals without any direction.

Every human and animal that has any kind of intelligence has all the qualities above and more, and removing any of them would cause serious defects in the behavior of that organism. Which makes it preposterous to draw any comparisons when its so obvious that so much is still missing.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#293

Post by drdaeman »

cyrusradfar wrote: post #94

I think the challenge with many of these conversations is that they assume consciousness emerges through purely mechanical means. The “brain as a computer” metaphor has been useful in limited contexts—especially for modeling memory or signal processing; but, I don’t think it helps us move forward when talking about consciousness itself. Penrose and Hameroff’s quantum consciousness hypothesis, while still very specula…

> consciousness may arise from phenomena beyond classical computation

Sapolsky addresses this in “Determined”, arguing that quantum effects don’t bubble up enough to alter behavior significantly enough.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#294

Post by tsimionescu »

dist-epoch wrote: post #31
ale wrote: post #21

This reads like 2022 hype. It's like people stil do not understand that there's a correlation between exaggerating AI's alleged world-threatening capabilities and AI companies' market share value – and guess who's doing the hyping.

Tell me about one other industry which talked about how dangerous it is to get market share

The arms industry and information security industry (say, Palantir) come to mind - except the danger is more easily demonstrable in those cases, of course.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#295

Post by vidarh »

darkwater wrote: post #241
vidarh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no way of measuring whether or not you experience feelings and sensations, or are just regurgitating statements to convince me of that. The only basis I have for assuming you are sentient according to that definition is trust in your self-reports.

> The only basis I have for assuming you are sentient according to that definition is trust in your self-reports Because the other person is part of your same species so you project your own base capabilities onto them, because so far they shown to behave pretty similarly to how you behave. Which is the most reasonable thing to do. Now, the day we have cyborgs that mimic also the bodies of a human a la Battlestar Gal…

It's the most reasonable thing to do because we have no actual way of measuring and knowing. It is still speculation.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#296

Post by ACCount37 »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #97
jjcm wrote: post #92

So much of the debate of whether AI can think or not reminds me of this scene from The Next Generation: https://youtu.be/ol2WP0hc0NY LLMs hit two out of the three criteria already - self awareness and intelligence, but we're in a similar state where defining consciousness is such a blurry metric. I feel like it wont be a binary thing, it'll be a group decision by humanity. I think it will happen in the next decade or…

Self-awareness is a bold claim, as opposed to the illusion of it. LLMs are very good at responding in a way that suggests there's a self, but I am skeptical that proves much about whether they actually have interior states analogous to what we recognize in humans as selfhood...

In the purely mechanical sense: LLMs get less self-awareness than humans, but not zero.

It's amazing how much of it they have, really - given that base models aren't encouraged to develop it at all. And yet, post-training doesn't create an LLM's personality from nothing - it reuses what's already there. Even things like metaknowledge, flawed and limited as it is in LLMs, have to trace their origins to the base model somehow.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#297

Post by vidarh »

ivraatiems wrote: post #54
vidarh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or possessed of subjective experience in any measurable way We don't know how to measure subjective experience in other people, even, other than via self-reporting, so this is a meaningless statement. Of course we don't know whether they are, and of course we can't measure it. I also don't know for sure whether or not you are "possessed of subjective experience" as I can't measure it. > What they are not is conscio…

> Unless we can find indications that humans can exceed the Turing computable - something we as of yet have no indication is even theoretically possible - there is no rational reason to think it can't. But doesn't this rely on the same thing you suggest we don't have, which is a working and definable definition of consciousness? I think a lot of the 'well, we can't define consciousness so we don't know what it is so…

No, it rests on computability, Turing equivalence, and the total absence of both any kind of evidence to suggest we can exceed the Turing computable, and the lack of even a theoretical framework for what that would mean.

Without that any limitations borne out of what LLMs don't currently do are irrelevant.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#298

Post by vidarh »

prmph wrote: post #56
vidarh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or possessed of subjective experience in any measurable way We don't know how to measure subjective experience in other people, even, other than via self-reporting, so this is a meaningless statement. Of course we don't know whether they are, and of course we can't measure it. I also don't know for sure whether or not you are "possessed of subjective experience" as I can't measure it. > What they are not is conscio…

> I also don't know for sure whether or not you are "possessed of subjective experience" as I can't measure it. Then why make an argument based on what you do not know?

My point exactly. The person I replied to did just that.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#299

Post by FloorEgg »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #269
XorNot wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hardly an unreasonable supposition: the one definitely conscious entities we know of are also the apex intelligence of the planet. To put it another way: lots of things are conscious, but humans are definitely the most conscious beings on Earth.

I can understand what less cognizant or self aware means, but "less conscious" is confusing. What are you implying here? Are their qualia lower resolution?

In a sense, yes.

If one is to quantify consciousness it would probably make sense to think of it as an area of awareness and cognizance across time.

Awareness scales with sensory scale and resolution (sensory receptors vs input token limits and token resolution). E.g. 128k tokens and tokens too coarse to count rs in strawberry.

Cognizance scales with internal representations of awareness (probably some relation to vector space resolution and granularity, though I suspect there is more to it than just vector space)

And the third component is time, how long the agent is conscious for.

So something like...

Time * awareness (receptors) * internal representations (cell diversity * # cells * connection diversity * # connections)

There is no way this equation is right but I suspect it's sort of directionally correct.

I'm deep in the subject but just riffing here, so take this with a lot of salt.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#300

Post by levitatorius »

nprateem wrote: post #90
vidarh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or possessed of subjective experience in any measurable way We don't know how to measure subjective experience in other people, even, other than via self-reporting, so this is a meaningless statement. Of course we don't know whether they are, and of course we can't measure it. I also don't know for sure whether or not you are "possessed of subjective experience" as I can't measure it. > What they are not is conscio…

Anyone who believes an algorithm could be conscious needs to take mushrooms.

Yes! If algorithm is conscious (without being alive) then the eaten magic mushroom is also very conscious, judged by it's effect on the subject.
Post reply on HN