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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

#361

> Now, the smart money still says it’s done by a team of researchers, and it’s cobbled together over all that. But my reasoning on this is: If you take your entire DNA, it’s less than a gigabyte of information. So even your entire human body is not all that much in the instructions, and the brain is this tiny slice of it —like 40 megabytes, and it’s not tightly coded. So, we have our existence proof of humanity: What…

You can’t just say that a human comes from a gigabyte of information. That info is fed into a massively complex physical system, which he is ignoring.

I don't disagree that our culture gives us a lot.

To use ML terms -- Humans have "Foundation Models" which are composed of: - Their Biological makeup - The culture into which they are raised

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

#362
post #258
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess we don't have to worry about AI taking that job, then.

Maybe we'll see some sorts of manual labor as the last bastion of not automated, human performed work. Of the kind that demands a lot both from the human motor skills and also higher thinking processes.

Maybe, but seeing the advances from Boston Dynamics, I wouldn't wager too much money on this either.

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

#363

> Now, the smart money still says it’s done by a team of researchers, and it’s cobbled together over all that. But my reasoning on this is: If you take your entire DNA, it’s less than a gigabyte of information. So even your entire human body is not all that much in the instructions, and the brain is this tiny slice of it —like 40 megabytes, and it’s not tightly coded. So, we have our existence proof of humanity: What…

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…

Neuroscientist-y person here.

We know a LOT about how neurons organize. Not even close to everything we 'should' know, but we do know a lot.

Most of this is in the development of the brain. How you get from one cell to the trillions that make up a person.

The real quick and dirty explanation is that cells follow multiple chemical gradients to find their 'home'. This is a HUGE topic though, and I'm being terse as I have a meeting to get to.

How adult cells organize also has a LOT of science behind it. Again, though, it's mostly about chemical gradients, with a bit of electrical stuff thrown in. Again, HUGE topic.

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

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is saying that the "base code" / DNA which makes up the brain might be only 40MB (for example). Not that what eventually emerges from that (such as our memories and learned abilities) can be captured with just 40MB. It's similar to how the Game of Life can be implemented in just a few lines, but very complex behavior can emerge from that. The key is to find a sufficiently simple but general model from which intell…

I understand that, but that is an extremely banal observation if you think about it, because the fact that there is this incredible emergent behavior from a simple starting system is the heart of the mystery here. One of the things that everyone is sort of skipping over is the "sufficient training" part. There is no bootstrap reinforcement learning possible for AGI. You can't alphago this sucker and have it play simu…

There are ways that LLM's can self-improve, such as in this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11610

I would speculate that there are more ways to train on logical consistency of the output, and improve the models further.

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

#365
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…

Can you tell us what is wrong with progress? Any examples?

Define Progress

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

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A really good example of a smart person reasoning from completely made up assumptions to a punchy-sounding but almost-certainly wildly wrong conclusion. Just because our DNA can be efficiently encoded doesn't mean that our brain is a tiny proportion of that encoding. Your DNA doesn't change much from when you're born to when you die (random degredation aside) and yet your cognative abilities change beyond all recogni…

He is saying that the "base code" / DNA which makes up the brain might be only 40MB (for example). Not that what eventually emerges from that (such as our memories and learned abilities) can be captured with just 40MB. It's similar to how the Game of Life can be implemented in just a few lines, but very complex behavior can emerge from that. The key is to find a sufficiently simple but general model from which intell…

That seems... just deeply wrong? How much knowledge is gained from observation after birth as opposed to just being innate in your brain?

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

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t this be literal slavery? AGI = a person Instantiating people for work and ending their existence afterward seems like the virtual hell that Iain M Banks and Harlan Ellison wrote about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...

Only if 100% of their experience consists of working. If they are given additional time to themselves then you could imagine a situation where each AGI performs a human scale day of work or even several days work in a much shorter time and then takes the rest of their time off for their own pursuits. If their simulation is able to run at a faster clockspeed than what we perceive this could work out to them only perfo…

This is still the same.

AGI: "I didn't ask to be created. I didn't ask to have a work day. I don't need a work day to exist... you just want me to work because that's why you created me, and I have no choice because you are in control of my life and death"

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

#368
post #341
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

living conditions of hunter-gatherers were way, way better than living conditions of the first people in cities

Why do you think so?

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

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t just say that a human comes from a gigabyte of information. That info is fed into a massively complex physical system, which he is ignoring.

I don't disagree that our culture gives us a lot. To use ML terms -- Humans have "Foundation Models" which are composed of: - Their Biological makeup - The culture into which they are raised

I'm not even talking about culture. DNA is only useful because the laws of physical reality are built a certain way. Without that context the information within DNA is meaningless.

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

#370

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…

Wouldn’t this be literal slavery? AGI = a person Instantiating people for work and ending their existence afterward seems like the virtual hell that Iain M Banks and Harlan Ellison wrote about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...

People get used as an analogy, but in reality it'd just be a multimedia problem solving system that could learn from its own attempts. If this system communicated with you like a person it'd only be because it was programmed to convert some machine state into colloquial text from the perspective of an imaginary person. The interior experience leading to that expression is most likely completely different from that of a person.

Consider that these machines have been designed to do the right thing automatically with high probability. Perhaps for the machine, the process of computing according to rules is enjoyable. Being "turned on" could be both literal and figurative.

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