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John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

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Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#341

Post by seu »

sershe wrote: post #304
seu wrote: post #214

> Well, you can tie that into a lot of questions, like, ‘Is human population a good thing?’ ‘Is immigration a good thing, where we seem to have been able to take advantage of new sources of humanity that are willing to engage in economic activities and be directed by the markets?’ > The world is a hugely better place with our 8 billion people than it was when there were 50 million people kind of like living in caves…

> He seems to ignore a lot about what the living conditions for people were throughout history, and have a blind trust in the positive power of 'human progress'. Eh? A contender for the most self-contradictory sentence I've ever read ;) The best reason to believe in positive power of "human progress" is, specifically, not ignoring "what the living conditions for people were throughout history".

Let me correct my sentence: there's a blind belief that _technological_ progress automatically equates to better life conditions.

And to clarify: I'm not saying "all technology is bad", but rather "not all technological progress is automatically good for humanity".

As an example, living conditions of hunter-gatherers were way, way better than living conditions of the first people in cities, and I'd argue, depending on which parameters you use, might still be better than our modern, big-city living conditions (except maybe for the richest 1% of the world)

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#342

Post by tejohnso »

> I made an estimate three or four years ago that I think there’s a 50-50 chance that we’ll have clear signs of life in 2030 of artificial general intelligence. That doesn’t necessarily mean a huge economic impact for anything yet, but just that we have a being that’s running on computers that most people recognize as intelligent and conscious and sort of on the same level of what we humans are doing. And after three years of hardcore research on all this, I haven’t changed my prediction. In fact, I probably even slightly bumped it up to maybe a 60% chance in 2030. And if you go up to, say, 2050, I’ve got it at like a 95% chance.

> What I keep saying is that as soon as you’re at the point where you have the equivalent of a toddler—something that is a being, it’s conscious, it’s not Einstein, it can’t even do multiplication—if you’ve got a creature that can learn, you can interact with and teach it things on some level.

Last I heard he wasn't interested in getting into the murky waters of consciousness. But I guess I misremembered. I'm very surprised to hear that he's very seriously talking about a conscious computer in the near future.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#343

Post by throwaway4aday »

TuringTest wrote: post #66
newqer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be such a godsend when I was in school. When there was no "click" with me and the teacher, I just zoned out and flunked the class. A teacher that is custom made is really a game changer.

The problem is that AI will not provide 1:1 tutoring; mentoring will be a luxury limited to the elite classes. The large majority will get the education equivalent of personalized ads. The true insight and guidance that a good mentor can provide, based on the specific needs of the student, is already rare in academia but still possible - everyone remembers that brilliant teacher that made you love a subject, by expla…

Yeah right, just like the elite are the only ones that have access to the courses from all the top universities, every book ever digitized, and software and hardware that allow you to operate a business out of your home now.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#344

Post by ncr100 »

serverholic wrote: post #307
seu wrote: post #214

> Well, you can tie that into a lot of questions, like, ‘Is human population a good thing?’ ‘Is immigration a good thing, where we seem to have been able to take advantage of new sources of humanity that are willing to engage in economic activities and be directed by the markets?’ > The world is a hugely better place with our 8 billion people than it was when there were 50 million people kind of like living in caves…

I’ve come to strongly resent the techno-utopian mindset that unfortunately plagues the tech world. Tech for the sake of tech with zero thought about how it will affect humanity.

Here, here.

I haven't studied it formally and I'm being asked to support techno utopia also. So it feels pretty shaky to me.

Certainly my livelihood is based on the premise of it and my dreams which fuel my workplace motivation serve as foundation to you know what I do with 50% of my life, work on technology. So I am biased.

Some utopian dystopia discussions here on hacker news sort of boil down to the chaos theory level of assumptions, where you can see people exercising their own defensiveness when they snipe on a naysayer, sniping on their grammatical concerns, but not actually engaging in value-based discussions into the hacker news thread. It's like they're not human, they're only practicing it being devil's advocate technicians.

Useful idiots is kind of what I think. We need to have more values discussions, ethics too.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#345

Post by seu »

_gabe_ wrote: post #310
seu wrote: post #214

> Well, you can tie that into a lot of questions, like, ‘Is human population a good thing?’ ‘Is immigration a good thing, where we seem to have been able to take advantage of new sources of humanity that are willing to engage in economic activities and be directed by the markets?’ > The world is a hugely better place with our 8 billion people than it was when there were 50 million people kind of like living in caves…

> The problem with Carmack and many like him, is that they think of themselves as purely rational beings operating within scientific frameworks and based purely on scientific results, but whenever they step outside the technical fields in which they work, they are ignorant and dogmatic. I'm just curious, do you happen to work in a technical field and consider yourself rational and scientific? And if you do, why do yo…

I have a degree in computer science and worked in a technical field for over 20 years. I don't call myself "rational and scientific", though I do think that the Scientific Method is a great way of creating useful models of the world. But those models - like all models - are wrong. Maybe it's just semantics, but one of my points is exactly that some people believe that they are "rational and scientific" and ignore that we are not just computers; experience, emotions and unconscious bias plays an important role in our decisions. Thinking that the whole world (and themselves) can be perfectly rationalized, makes them miss the point that there are non-rational reasons for them to think the way they do. That's why I refer to when I talk about dogmatism.

I suggest everyone (who wants to hear me) to read Joseph Weizenbaum's "Computer Power and Human Reason"; he does a much better job than me at raising similar arguments to mine. Also, Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow", for the ways in which we _all_ are so _not_ 100% rational in our everyday decisions.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#346

Post by throwaway4aday »

poulpy123 wrote: post #207
labrador wrote: post #12

This paragraph took me aback: But if I just look at it and say, if 10 years from now, we have ‘universal remote employees’ that are artificial general intelligences, run on clouds, and people can just dial up and say, ‘I want five Franks today and 10 Amys, and we’re going to deploy them on these jobs,’ and you could just spin up like you can cloud-access computing resources, if you could cloud-access essentially arti…

As soon as we reach real AI, even at the level of a 5 years old, it is game over. So education or not education people will become completely useless to the rich that will own the AI

Robotics still has a way to go.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#347

Post by throwaway4aday »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #219
no-s wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's funny that all of these weird fantasies people have about AI are about replacing the rank and file workers. When I read about chatGPT passing MBA exams but failing at arithmetic I get a little frisson of excitement. A regular person who has any marketability tends to swap jobs when management becomes a PITA or gets stuck in nincompoopery. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just swap out management instead? Imag…

Or wouldn't it be hilarious if the best, most intelligent AI is given control of a company and decides investing profits back in shareholders is a losing proposition. Instead the company should focus 100% of profit on ending world hunger or poverty to ensure an ever growing supply of new customers. If AI decides capitalism is inefficient and exploitive... lol.

Food is not the driving force behind population growth. Reduction in infant mortality creates a boom but as soon as people start getting out of poverty and get some education they have much fewer children. AI would need to optimize for both low infant mortality and high levels of poverty and ignorance if it wanted an everlasting population boom.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#348

Post by xwdv »

mhh__ wrote: post #290
xwdv wrote: post #191

Like Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin, John Carmack is one of those men who will never really die. He’ll simply become code.

By that measure he's long dead

For those who will never meet Carmack they might as well consider him dead, only his code is what matters to them now.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#349

Post by throwaway4aday »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #329
throwaway4aday wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally, everyone can afford to rent a Frank or Amy to do work for them.

How would the economies work for that? Aren’t I just a middleman taking my cut?

I suppose you would be both the human and physical representative of the AI. I could only see it really working if the AI weren't conscious. If they were conscious beings then obviously they would have rights and couldn't just be booted up every time someone needed a job done.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#350

Post by throwaway4aday »

m3kw9 wrote: post #316
throwaway4aday wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only the code describing the molecular hardware which is mostly just a description of a neuron. We don't as yet know how the neurons decide to specialize and organize themselves into a brain but one guess is that they are exploiting the physical principals that govern atomic and molecular interactions so the "code" for this might not even be present in the DNA itself it would be the physics of "a group of mole…

Yeah some sort of physical optimization that depends on forces definitely come into play in organizing the brain structure but at the end we can mimic that in code

Maybe, I'm still not convinced that artificial neural networks have all the same capabilities as biological ones.
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