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There is no A.I.
321–330 of 523 posts
Re: There is no A.I.
#322It 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…
Why do you think algorithms can't be conscious? (Unless you believe in souls, that is..)
What would it mean for an algorithm to experience color, sound, pain? There's no need to bring souls into it. That's a religious straw man. We know we do experience the world through sensory sensations, and those also make up our thoughts, memories and dreams. What we don't know is how our understanding of the physical world can possibly create those sensations, since we model the world as abstract mathematical patterns that don't experience sensation.
Re: There is no A.I.
#323Earlier 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
Semantics
Re: There is no A.I.
#324Earlier 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.
But compilers, chess, go and search are all proof that computers could think. We've been discovering as we scale up the hardware that those things appear to be converging to human intelligence with minor tweaks (turns out tree search for chess needed to be combined with matrices and we're most of the way there). ChatGPT can out-reason many people I know and can out-argue a fair number of comments I see on the interne…
> Thinking obviously isn't very important!
This is not obvious in the least. Thinking was required to produce the thing that could achieve the outcome that was defined by thought.
I could just as easily say that AI, as currently implemented, is really just another muscle.
Re: There is no A.I.
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
there are currently two things we are aware of in the universe that can reason abstractly. i don't think this is a coincidence.
Only in a very anthropocentric sense. How do we know an ant colony doesn’t reason abstractly (or a human town for that matter)? What about slime mold or ameba? Both can solve a maze as well as humans. What makes you think a forest ecosystem isn’t capable of abstract though? It is only if we narrow thought to mean precisely human-like thought when humans and human creations are uniquely capable of something. To that e…
Isn't reasoning abstractly a spectrum though? I took the parent to mean "reason abstractly to the same degree humans do".
Slime molds and amebas might be able to reason abstractly to some degree but they can't write code or poetry.
Re: There is no A.I.
#326It 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…
The end goal of meditation, as I understand it, is to come to the conclusion that consciousness is an illusion anyway. So perhaps it wouldn’t matter.
The self, not consciousness. Eastern philosophy is more likely to be idealistic than materialistic. The self as a separate entity that has stability over time is the illusion. The experience of change is not an illusion. Nor would whatever experiences come with enlightenment.
Re: There is no A.I.
#327> 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…
> Are they self-aware? Who tf knows? But they are reasoning through problems.
We know. They are not self aware. They’re a matrix. They don’t have any internal state.
Do not anthropomorphisize the notion of reasoning.
Re: There is no A.I.
#328GPT4 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 got a coding challenge as part of the interview process. I had 2h to complete it, but I finished in 30mins thanks to ChatGPT. I wrote some test cases and told ChatGPT to generate more. I reviewed them and copied a few relevant ones. It also hinted me that I could add support for fractions.
Re: There is no A.I.
#329Earlier 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…
“You cannot make accurate predictions without understanding the world that gave rise to these words.”
This depends on the definition of understanding. There are an infinite number of equations that could describe the trajectory of a ball being thrown, and none of them are exactly correct depending on how deep down the understanding hole one travels.
Re: There is no A.I.
#330> 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…
> Are they self-aware? Who tf knows? But they are reasoning through problems. We know. They are not self aware. They’re a matrix. They don’t have any internal state. Do not anthropomorphisize the notion of reasoning.
People are using ChatGPT and observing it keep track of conversation state, so if you are going to claim it has no internal state you will need to be more precise in what you are saying, which I suppose is that the underlying neural network is not being updated as we talk to it?
yet