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

There is no A.I.

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 523 posts

Re: There is no A.I.

#311

Post by booleandilemma »

agronomov wrote: post #221

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…

Until the AI humans figure out how to create life, and then the cycle repeats.

Re: There is no A.I.

#312

Post by mensetmanusman »

pjscott wrote: post #186
mrjin wrote: 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.

Evolution is how the universe works. We are the universe.

Re: There is no A.I.

#313

Post by coldtea »

s1mplicissimus wrote: post #302
coldtea wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :)

Whether you can be "curious while starving" might or might not be possible, but it is irrelevant to the point.

For starters, because the claim argued is that you can have motivation (say, through curiocity) even without a survival instinct.

And it's perfectly possible to have no survival instinct and yet not to be starting anyway. It's enough that you have access to food or are fed, to avoid starvation. So lack of survival instict is not the same as starvation.

If we substitite "starvation" for "access to electricity" (as AGIs don't eat food), as long as an AGI is provided by electricity by us, even if it has no survival instict, can still have curiosity, and thus motivation.

Re: There is no A.I.

#314

Post by mensetmanusman »

Rury wrote: post #87

I'd wager that intelligence is nothing but a reified concept. Something which doesn't innately exist other than as an abstract concept which we have defined, to help us explain complex nature, without the need of fully understanding the underlying complexity giving rise to that nature. Like how cave men used the concept of "gods" for a satisfying explanation for why it rains - we use intelligence to ascertain why som…

Our current ‘simple rules’ to explain nature can only account for a small % of the visible universe.

Assuming there are simple rules, we don’t know how, for example, an electron has the wherewithal to follow them (when does it read the rules or check on them, where are they stored, etc.). It’s mystery all the way down (unless you define it as simple using hand-wavey abstractions ;))

Re: There is no A.I.

#315

Post by jhbadger »

coldtea wrote: post #159
Swizec wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels more like smarter automation to me. Yep. Elevators used to be proof that machines can think. Then compilers, and chess, and go, and search, and … The problem with AI is that as soon as it works, we stop thinking about it as “artificial intelligence” and it becomes “just automation”. Then AI moves to the next goalpost.

> Elevators used to be proof that machines can think Did they? When? By who?

Early elevators used to need professional human operators (you sometimes see them in old movies). Stopping at a selected floor was something a machine was unable to do on its own. Until it was and elevator operators lost their jobs and we just took it for granted that machines could do it.

Re: There is no A.I.

#316

Post by tuatoru »

gitfan86 wrote: post #132
tuatoru wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP is measured both as production and as consumption. The figures have to be the same, within a "statistical discrepancy". The consumption is final consumption: goods and services used by households. You are asserting that households will each have 100 times the income that they do now (and be spending the same proportion of income as they do now). Edit: I believe that if most companies, or even a significant minori…

I'm saying that many things that cost $100 in 2020 will cost less than $1 for the exact same thing in 2028. It is already happening in 2023. How much would it cost in 2020 to get a 2000 word essay written at a 10th grade level? What is the cost of the same service today? When a service costs goes down 99% that 99% goes directly into GDP growth.

Well, let's see. The biggest parts of household budgets are shelter; transport; food, clothing and utilities; healthcare; and education-related costs.

Are houses going to drop 99% in price? That will impoverish house owners.

Are cars going to drop 99% in price, and fuel, and roads? I don't see how chatGPT helps.

Can chatGPT make shoes for a dollar, or burgers for a cent? Can it provide cancer treatments?

When your infant is at her early childhood center, will chatGPT wipe her nose and help her use the toilet?

The best case for chatGPT's effect on GDP is a nearly invisible lift.

Re: There is no A.I.

#317

Post by goatlover »

IshKebab wrote: post #298
TechBro8615 wrote: post #65

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…

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 thr…

The argument is that LLMs don't have any motivations or goals, unless a human prompts them. They're not trying to stay alive or reproduce. They don't get hungry, feel pain or loneliness. They're just complex tools.

Re: There is no A.I.

#318

Post by titzer »

> If the new tech isn’t true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration.

What an utterly vapid and ignorant view. In the rest of the article Lanier goes on to argue that it's all just "simple mathematics". Yeah, yeah, and computers are just simple NAND gates, amirite?

I've waffled over the years about how close I've thought AI is or could possibly be. Most of that time I've been very skeptical. But the past 6 months have been utterly mind-blowing. And I've spent some hours with GPT conversing. I've had it solve problems for me by explaining the problem in my own language and it turns around and writes workable code for me. That solves a novel problem.

Oh, it made a mistake? Sometimes says funny things? Well, so does my uncle.

Are they self-aware? Who tf knows? But they are reasoning through problems.

I didn't find the article illuminating in the slightest. It literally had nothing to say and no insight whatsoever. It was just "don't call it that because I don't like this."

Re: There is no A.I.

#319

Post by titzer »

gitfan86 wrote: post #73
eointierney wrote: post #36

Can we just backronym AI to Approximate Intelligence and carry on? There are so many dangers and possibilities of AI that are fascinating, and none of them are even remotely as interesting as those of actual animal and human intelligence. It's as if AI is held up as a mirror to our stupidity, and the Turing Test is how we measure ourselves against our models of computation. I'm really weirded out by the fear and expl…

Thank you, the philosophers and religious people are more than welcome to discuss what is "true" intelligence or humanity I'm more focused on the fact that GDP as it was measured in 2020 is going to 100x in the next 5 years.

If you mean Grandstanding, Deception and Posing, then yep, I agree.

Re: There is no A.I.

#320

Post by jensensbutton »

coldtea wrote: post #158
TechBro8615 wrote: post #65

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.

I don't see why you think it would be easier to encode "curiosity" than "survival".
Post reply on HN