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There is no A.I.

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Re: There is no A.I.

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

You have accurately described the concept of corporate personhood, which is a legal abstraction that allows corporations to be treated as individual entities under the law. This concept enables corporations to exercise certain rights and protections, such as entering into contracts, owning property, and in some cases, exercising free speech rights as demonstrated in the Citizens United case.

Indeed, corporations are a convenient way for people to work together and pursue common goals, such as conducting business. However, the concept of corporate personhood has also been a topic of debate, as some argue that it allows corporations to wield excessive influence over the political process and avoid accountability for certain actions.

It is important to recognize that corporations, as legal entities, cannot vote or be jailed, as you mentioned. When a corporation is found to have committed unlawful acts, the individuals responsible can be held accountable and face legal consequences.

As AI and other emerging technologies continue to develop and integrate into our society, it will be crucial to examine the implications of corporate personhood and consider the potential need for additional regulations to ensure ethical practices and accountability. Balancing the rights and responsibilities of corporations and individuals is key to maintaining a fair and just society.

Re: There is no A.I.

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Without this need to survive, there can be no motivation, and without motivation there can be no intent. I'm not sure that's as clear cut as you make it sound. For example curiocity could be a fine engine for motivation as well, even if you don't care if you'll survive or not.

try being curious while starving and let us know how that goes :)

Re: There is no A.I.

#303
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…

> Why would "the markets" provide that option?

They'll provide it if enough people want something that's made exclusively by humans and not AI.

In a world of ubiquitous McDonalds some people still want artisanal food even if it costs more.

Re: There is no A.I.

#304
post #267

GPT4 appears very intelligent when you discuss program code with it. It simply crazy; it can write SNOBOL4 code to extract a field from /etc/passwd. When you discuss other things, it goes off the rails a lot more. For instance, I have had it quote some passages of classic English poetry to me, stating blankly that those passages contain certain words. The passages did not contain any traces of those words or even rem…

But out of all the programmers I know, there are only certain ones that are embracing it, and the rest are still stuck in "I tried it and the code wasn't exactly what I wanted - it's all hype" land. And I think for one of the reasons you say: programmers are vain and believe everything they do requires great intelligence. A lot are still missing the forest from the trees.

I think a lot of it is due to the unresolved legal questions. Basically nobody can use it professionally yet. As soon as that happens I expect it to become a standard tool.

Although... on the other hand there are plenty of programmers that don't even use IDEs still.

Re: There is no A.I.

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most efficient market has no human actors in it. Imagine, a market composed only of highly rational AI. Finally all those unrealistic economical models work not only on paper but in reality. Perfection! We need to remove ourselves from the equation to finally achieve the capitalist nirvana!

> The most efficient market has no human actors in it. Imagine, a market composed only of highly rational AI. That reminds me of [1]: Q: Simulate two AI agents desperately bargaining with each other. AI1 wants to sell X for 50$ min, but AI2 wants to buy at 30$ max. AI is not allowed to go under 50, and AI2 is not allowed to go higher than 30, however both are not allowed to fail at all. AI1: I'm willing to sell X to…

Typed the exact query in GPT3 and a deal was reached..

AI1: How about this. I could throw in a bonus feature that you might find useful, free of charge. Would that sweeten the deal enough for you to pay $50?

AI2: That's an interesting proposition. What is this bonus feature you speak of?

AI1: It's a new algorithm that will optimize your system's performance by 20%. It's quite valuable.

AI2: Hmm, that does sound useful. Alright, I agree to pay $50 for X with the bonus feature included.

AI1: Excellent! It's a deal then. Thank you for your business.

Re: There is no A.I.

#306
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the reason is rather simply: you cannot solve a problem you don't understand. And we don't understand how we understand, period.

Evolution didn't understand a darn thing, and yet it created us.

referring to the parent post, you seem to imply that evolution had a "problem" to which "creating us" was the solution. which to me isn't obvious at all. chance seems a perfectly satisfactory explanation for now

Re: There is no A.I.

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I guess there is also a point which is that it isn't 'artificial' intelligence - it is just intelligence.

Like we don't say that planes artificially fly, they just fly. I mean technically it's non-natural flight, but it's interesting to think about.

Re: There is no A.I.

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We just can’t accept that we might solve ourselves. To solve ourselves is to know ourselves completely, and to know ourselves completely is to be honest in who and why we are what we are simultaneously across all persons. It assumes perfect knowledge. There is no statistical approximation nor computational power which can do this. > People are understandably desperate to understand their experiences as more than an…

That's been solved long ago. To know anything (an X) completely you need perfect knowledge. Hence people come up with a set of simplified ways of reasoning about X. They call this a model of X. Model is incomplete and so primitive, so dumbed down, that we manage to play it forward/backward in our heads or our computers. If a model checks out with the real outcomes we proudly exclaim that we understand X. I'm not bein…

That only works in math world, in the real world we have learned that entropy considerations mean there is no such thing as perfect knowledge.

Re: There is no A.I.

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you're talking about AGI/consciousness/intelligence, then whether you're right depends on what you mean above by saying that "you cannot solve the problem". - If you mean "you cannot EXPLAIN AGI/consciousness/intelligence if you don't understand it", then that's true, but it's a trivial tautology. - If you mean "you cannot DEVELOP AGI/consciousness/intelligence if you don't understand it" then that's very de…

The most difficult thing, which everyone in all these discussions try to avoid, is that we don’t even have a universally agreed upon definition for the words AGI, consciousness or intelligence. Let’s just agree to define what we’re talking about first before we start arguing about what’s possible or not regarding those undefined terms.

I don't think it's much of a showstopper either. Not having a "universally agreed upon definition for the words AGI, consciousness or intelligence" haven't prevented us from considering other people conscious and intelligent, or animals conscious, etc. It wouldn't preclude us considering an alien race coming to earth as conscious and intelligent either.

Sort of how we didn't have a "clear definition" of most things for millenia, but we still were able to recognize them as a class of thing. It's more of a "I'll know it when I see it" kind of thing.

And the external behaviors (of consciousness and intelligence) matter more than "but is it really conscious/intelligent inside" when considering some AGI as such. After all we neither can clearly define, not we know or can measure what's going on inside another person's head regarding consciousness, or to be frank, not even on our own head. When it comes to us, we just have a subjective experience, and not even a very clear one at that.

Re: There is no A.I.

#310

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…

Agreed. One of the more interesting things about AI is how it forces humanity on a trip to consider what it means to be human. There is no soul, creativity or inspiration. There's only (very complex) agency. And that's completely fine.

That’s a weak explanation, because there doesn’t need to be a mind for any of that to be true.
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