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You are the scariest monster in the woods

jamie.ideasasylum.com

31–40 of 405 posts

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#31
post #25

> I don’t really believe in the threat of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence—human-level intelligence) partly because I don’t believe in the possibility of AGI and I’m highly skeptical that the current technology underpinning LLMs will provide a route to it. I'm on board with being skeptical that LLMs will lead to AGI; but - there being no possibility seems like such a strong claim. Should we really bet that there…

We still haven’t figured out what intelligence even is. Depending on what you care about, the second-smartest animal in the world varies wildly.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#32

"We (humans) are the scariest animal in the woods. We’re the scariest animal anywhere. At any time, in any location, under any circumstances, if there’s a human present then that’s the scariest motherfucker in the woods." Has this guy not heard of the Bengal tigers of the Sundarban forests, which kill ~50 humans per year? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attacks_in_the_Sundarban...

> Has this guy not heard of the Bengal tigers of the Sundarban forests, which kill ~50 humans per year?

How many tigers have been killed by humans? How many would be killed if humans did not restrain each other from killing tigers because we have killed so many that they are endangered. That population could be entirely wiped out by humans in the area.

Mosquitoes kill far more people than tigers. So do venomous snakes. The fact is that when a human faces either of these they are far more likely to end up dead than the human.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#34

I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…

Perhaps the AGI people thinking we can catch up millions of years of evolution in a handful of years

evolution isn't a directed effort in the same way that statistical learning is. The goal of evolution is not to produce the most inteligent life. It is not nessisarially an efficient process either.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#35
post #25

> I don’t really believe in the threat of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence—human-level intelligence) partly because I don’t believe in the possibility of AGI and I’m highly skeptical that the current technology underpinning LLMs will provide a route to it. I'm on board with being skeptical that LLMs will lead to AGI; but - there being no possibility seems like such a strong claim. Should we really bet that there…

>only way to make something that is "us".

Which many people seem to neglect that instead of making us, we make an alien.

Hell, making us a is a good outcome. We at least somewhat understand us. Setting off a bunch of self learning, self organizing code to make an alien, you'll have no clue what comes out the other side.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#36

I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…

Language is only an end product. It is derived from intelligence.

The intelligence is everything that created the language and the training corpus in the first place.

When AI is able to create entire thoughts and ideas without any concept of language, then we will truly be closer to artificial intelligence. When we get to this point, we then use language as a way to let the AI communicate its thoughts naturally.

Such an AI would not be accused of “stealing” copyrighted work because it would pull its training data from direct observations about reality itself.

As you can imagine, we are no where near accomplishing the above. Everything an LLM is fed today is stuff that has been pre-processed by human minds for it to parrot off of. The fact that LLMs today are so good is a testament to human intelligence.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#37

We have been using the mechanism of "Humans communicating and working together" to form superintelligences for a long time. They have gotten more effective, more efficient and more durable with time. AI isn't the new monster. It's a new mitochondria being domesticated to supercharge the existing monsters.

That reminds me of the “paper clip maximizer” thought experiment about rogue AI fulfilling a particular goal, without being held to any consideration of human welfare I thought it was a very novel idea at first, until I realized that this describes all manners of human groups, notably corporations and lobbying groups, they will turn the world into a stove, subvert democracy, (try to) disrupt the economic and social f…

And corporations are ultimately just sock-puppets for humanity. People forget that and like to other them while simultaneously turning them into the scapegoats. See every idiot with the list of companies responsible for global warming that amounts to 'every oil company' and ignore that it was the customers were the ones burning their products.

It is to be expected really. Humans themselves hold little consideration to human welfare when fulfilling their goals. It is something ingrained by nature for survival and in no way limited to humans. Every drop of water you drink, every bite you eat, are ones which cannot go to the thirsty and the hungry. With few exceptions, only our children would even give us pause to forgo such things for the sake of others.

Also bit of a pet peeve of mine: society isn't a delicate bolt of laced silk. It isn't a fabric, much less one that is damaged by any little change that you don't like. It isn't even stable which makes the charges of anything as 'ruining' society especially bizarre when nobody can point to where it would go before the blamed change. So hold off on poisoning Socrates.

Even if we hold the current state as worthy of preservation we would ultimately fail to for reasons related to the central paradox of tradition. Why your forebearers first did something was not done because of obedience to tradition, so by trying to preserve it set in stone, you have already failed.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#38

I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…

Wasn't there a story about healthcare companies letting AI determine coverage? I can't remember.

Computers have been making decisions for a while now. As a specific personal example from 2008, I found out that my lender would make home loan offers based on an inscrutable (to me and the banker I was speaking to) heuristic. If the loan was denied by the heuristic, then a human could review the decision, but had strict criteria that they would have to follow. Basically, a computer could “exercise judgement” a make offers that a human could not.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#39

About as helpful as "Guns don't kill people ... " And equally rebutted by Eddie Izzards "Well, I think the gun helps".

All of the solutions to AI "safety" are analagous to gun control: it is a centralization of power.

That is assuming that ASI doesn't centralize power itself. I mean, if you are a non-human part of the animal kingdom you'd probably say that humans have centralized power around themselves.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#40

I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…

I think you could make AGI right now tbh. It’s not a function of intelligence. It’s just a function of stateful system mechanics.

LLMs are just a big matrix. But what about a four line of code loop that looks like:

```while true: update_sensory_inputs() narrate_response() update_emotional_state() ```

LLMs don’t experience continuous time and they don’t have an explicit decision making framework for having any agency even if they can imply one probabilistically. But the above feels like the core loop required for a shitty system to leverage LLMs to create an AGI. Maybe not a particularly capable or scary AGI, but I think the goalpost is pedantically closer than we give credit.

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