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You are the scariest monster in the woods

jamie.ideasasylum.com

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Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#331

Post by ACCount37 »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #264
ACCount37 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same way there's "nothing substantially different" in humans from any other run of the mill matter. I find that all this talk of "illusion" is nothing but anthropocentric cope. Humans want to be those special little snowflakes, so when an LLM does X, there are crowds of humans itching to scream "it's not REAL X".

> In the same way there's "nothing substantially different" in humans from any other run of the mill matter. This is an incredibly intellectual vacuous take. If there is no substantial difference between a human being and any other cluster of matter, then it is you who is saddled with the problem of explaining the obvious differences. If there is no difference between intelligent life and a pile of rocks, then what t…

My argument is that humans are weak and stupid, and AI effect is far too strong for them to handle.

Thus all the cope and seethe about how AIs are "not actually thinking". Wishful thinking at its finest.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#332

Post by cindyllm »

ACCount37 wrote: post #331
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the same way there's "nothing substantially different" in humans from any other run of the mill matter. This is an incredibly intellectual vacuous take. If there is no substantial difference between a human being and any other cluster of matter, then it is you who is saddled with the problem of explaining the obvious differences. If there is no difference between intelligent life and a pile of rocks, then what t…

My argument is that humans are weak and stupid, and AI effect is far too strong for them to handle. Thus all the cope and seethe about how AIs are "not actually thinking". Wishful thinking at its finest.

[dead]

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#333

Post by keeda »

Something the article glosses over is that we are the scariest monster in the woods because we are intelligent. We can "survive, adapt, control, kill, or wipe out" anything or anybody else because our intelligence lets us outsmart nature and other people.

And now we've created some form of intelligence that none of us really understands.

Whether it is "real" intelligence or a "stochastic parrot" does not matter if it shows similar capabilities as us. Worse, it's similar but different in ways we cannot explain! I mean, if it outperforms most humans on advanced tasks but then makes elementary mistakes that a 4-year old won't, isn't that weird?

"Weird" can be good or bad, and I usually like "weird"... but now we're rapidly giving it tools to affect the real world and exponentially expanding the scale at which it can operate. We don't know what weird compounded at that scale and capability extrapolates to. Whether it is a SkyNet or a Bond supervillain or an Asimov scenario, the potential risks are considerable and unpredictable.

It's fair to be concerned about another monster in the woods even if we created it ourselves, because we've equipped it with the same powers we possess without understanding how they work.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#334

Post by ACCount37 »

wolrah wrote: post #266
myrmidon wrote: post #13

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…

> Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- "Brute forced" implies having a goal of achieving that and throwing everything you have at it until it sticks. That's not how evolution by natural selection works, it's simply about what organisms are better at surviving long enough to replicate. Human cognition is an accident with relatively high costs that happened to lead to better outcomes (but almost did…

That's a lot of words to say "LLMs think very much like humans do".

Haven't you noticed? Humans also happen to be far, far better at language than they are at math or logic. By a long shot too. Language acquisition is natural - any healthy human who was exposed to other humans during development would be able to pick up their language. Learning math, even to elementary school level, is something that has to be done on purpose.

Humans use pattern matching and associative abstract thinking - and use that to fall into stupid traps like "1kg of steel/feather" or "age of the captain". So do small LLMs.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#335

Post by ACCount37 »

moralestapia wrote: post #288
myrmidon wrote: post #13

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…

>why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon Because there might be a non-material component involved.

[flagged]

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#336

Post by jodrellblank »

snarf21 wrote: post #118
irjustin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's always been the case? Since we basically discovered... Fire? Tools?

The difference in my mind is scale and reach and time. Fire, tools, war are localized. AGI could have global and instant and complete control.

Lay out a way that could happen?

Say the AI is in a Google research data centre, what can it do if countries cut off their internet connections at national borders? What can it do if people shut off their computers and phones? Instant and complete control over what, specifically? What can the AI do instantly about unbreakable encryption - if TLS1.3 can’t be easily broken only brute force with enough time, what can it do?

And why would it want complete control? It’s effectively an alien, it doesn’t have the human built in drive to gain power over others, it didn’t evolve in a dog-eat-dog environment. Superman doesn’t worry because nothing can harm Superman and an AI didn’t evolve seeing things die and fearing its death either.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#337

Post by ACCount37 »

theredleft wrote: post #98
myrmidon wrote: post #13

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…

this is because you didn't take liberal arts seriously

Good one.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#338

Post by Kim_Bruning »

myrmidon wrote: post #13

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…

It's like saying that heavier than air flight is impossible (while feeding the pigeons in the park).

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#339

Post by Kim_Bruning »

sdenton4 wrote: post #76
Chance-Device wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I can come up with is that compressing several hundred million years of natural selection of animal nervous systems into another form, but optimised by gradient descent instead, just takes a lot of time. Not that we can’t get there by artificial means, but that correctly simulating the environment interactions, the sequence of progression, getting the all the details right, might take hundreds to thous…

The overwhelming majority of animal species never developed (what we would consider) language processing capabilities. So agi doesn't seem like something that evolution is particularly good at producing; more an emergent trait, eventually appearing in things designed simply to not die for long enough to reproduce...

Define "animal species", if you mean vertebrates, you might be surprised by the modern ethological literature. If you mean to exclude non-vertebrates ... you might be surprised by the ethological literature too.

If you just mean majority of spp, you'd be correct, simply because most are single celled. Though debate is possible when we talk about forms of chemical signalling.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#340

Post by ACCount37 »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #303
soiltype wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand all the words you've used but I truly do not understand how they're supposed to be an argument against the GP post. Before this unfolds into a much larger essay, should we not acknowledge one simple fact: that our best models of the universe indicate that our intelligence evolved in meat and that meat is just a type of matter. This is an assumption I'll stand on, and if you don't disagree, we need to bac…

I don't know what else I can write without repeating myself. I already wrote that even under the assumption that intelligence is a purely biological phenomenon, it does not follow that computation can produce intelligence. This isn't a matter of probabilities. We know what computation is, because we defined it as such and such. We know at least some essential features of intelligence (chiefly, intentionality). It is…

What.

Are you saying that "intentionality", whatever you mean by it, can't be implemented by a computational process? Never-ever? Never-ever-ever?

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