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There is no A.I.

newyorker.com

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Re: There is no A.I.

#41

Post by dbish »

astrange wrote: post #35
williamtrask wrote: post #4

For those who don’t know about the author, he is most well known a founder of the field of virtual reality. As a full time philosopher in the CTO’s office at MSFT, and the originator of concepts like data dignity, he’s uniquely qualified to write this kind of piece. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier

> As a full time philosopher in the CTO’s office at MSFT Is that like Shingy, the AOL digital prophet? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/crystal-ball-3

Exactly. Very hard to pin down any real inventions but very good at getting paid for the mystique

Re: There is no A.I.

#42

Post by blazespin »

williamtrask wrote: post #4

For those who don’t know about the author, he is most well known a founder of the field of virtual reality. As a full time philosopher in the CTO’s office at MSFT, and the originator of concepts like data dignity, he’s uniquely qualified to write this kind of piece. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier

"who first conceived the idea of virtual reality"

Re: There is no A.I.

#43

Post by b33j0r »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #27

All of these arguments seem to think that the brain isn't also generating a statistical ordering of semantic words and actions. Obviously the brain has a way more complex network of subsystems with various specialties than the artificial models we have today and is able to generalize language, math, and positional reasoning and mix it with the older parts of the brain for reward and training mechanisms and it can do…

We just can’t accept that we might solve ourselves. People are understandably desperate to understand their experiences as more than an encoding of a thing that might be explained.

And all of our surprising wins and awful mistakes had explainable reasons, dammit; it wasn’t just a misfiring of trained statistical networks!

Re: There is no A.I.

#44

Post by jancsika »

Ray Kurzweil's most important argument[1] from that one book he wrote two or three times:

If AIs can convince us humans they are sentient, we'll believe them.

Does that webgpu demo run on anything more than canary yet?

In any case, someone is going to fall in love with one of their browser processes soon. I'll guess by mid-August.

More rank speculation: by October, some poor soul will post on SO asking how to retrieve their immortal beloved from the browser tab they accidentally closed. Yikes... even confined to my speculation chamber that one hurts!

1: The other important argument was of course that the crew of Star Trek were almost certainly committing suicide every time they beamed down to a planet. Mind blown. Still makes me wonder what disastrous rituals we engage in today merely because nobody in our society has ever questioned it.

Edit: I think these large language models pose a great test for Ray's hypothesis. I mean, it sure seems like they can pass the Turing test already. So in a year or two, we'll know if most people feel like the chatbuddy they have running in a browser tab is a tool, or an entity with its own agency. It seems to be going in the direction of tool atm, but as above I'm speculating that's mostly because of the restrictions build into ChatGPT. But I guess we'll see.

Re: There is no A.I.

#45

Post by blazespin »

harry8 wrote: post #34
ShamelessC wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the philosopher who first conceived the idea of virtual reality What does that even mean?

Descartes "evil demon" from 1641 says Wikipedia is the philosophical idea in all it's forms short of "but with a computer" Anyone got anything earlier? Wouldn't surprise me. https://iep.utm.edu/evil-new/

pretty sure first person that had a dream figured out VR.

Re: There is no A.I.

#46

Post by jes5199 »

atdrummond wrote: post #21
williamtrask wrote: post #4

For those who don’t know about the author, he is most well known a founder of the field of virtual reality. As a full time philosopher in the CTO’s office at MSFT, and the originator of concepts like data dignity, he’s uniquely qualified to write this kind of piece. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier

Jaron has an amazing publicist. I challenge anyone to read Wikipedia’s history of VR ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#History ) and assess him to fairly be called a founder. There was serious work being done for over a decade before he even started his firm; VPL never came close to being a standard and the VR tech today has hardly any relation to his “post symbolic” language. He’s certainly a very sm…

he hasn’t given up on VPL, though, only few years back Vi Hart’s eleVR team was working on “sculptural” programming languages within VR, at Microsoft Research under Jaron. (…but I think that team disbanded a couple years back)

Re: There is no A.I.

#47

Post by ethanbond »

b33j0r wrote: post #43
tracerbulletx wrote: post #27

All of these arguments seem to think that the brain isn't also generating a statistical ordering of semantic words and actions. Obviously the brain has a way more complex network of subsystems with various specialties than the artificial models we have today and is able to generalize language, math, and positional reasoning and mix it with the older parts of the brain for reward and training mechanisms and it can do…

We just can’t accept that we might solve ourselves. People are understandably desperate to understand their experiences as more than an encoding of a thing that might be explained. And all of our surprising wins and awful mistakes had explainable reasons, dammit; it wasn’t just a misfiring of trained statistical networks!

Or we just don't know how brains work very well and we shouldn't act like we do.

Re: There is no A.I.

#48

Post by anonylizard »

rolodato wrote: post #37

My cynical AI opinion is that if it truly was revolutionary, we would be seeing private companies or governments use it internally to massively boost their productivity or achieve otherwise impossible feats. Instead, all we're seeing are consumer products or half-baked integrations that are another way to further centralize data collection. Talks about all-powerful, malevolent AI or requesting to halt AI development…

"we would be seeing private companies or governments use it internally "

What world are you living in, where this isn't happening? Every private company that can use it is using it, Microsoft themselves must be using Copilot. Governments are lining up to train their own LLMs.

Commercial and consumer use are not mutually exclusive, in any case.

Also "Humanity is excellent at oppressing others, and I have no doubt we'd be equally good at oppressing a true AI as well."

If you actually read history a bit carefully, you'd understand this frequently works out badly for the oppressors. The Romans hired, and abused their germanic mercenaries, thinking with their centuries of political experience, they could let the Germanics do all the hard fighting while getting paid little.

The contemporary Jin dynasty in China thought the same way, just hire barbarian mercenaries to do all the hard work in their civil wars. Those illiterate barbarians, who up that point, have never achieved much in China, surely wouldn't be a threat.

It ended very badly for both of those polities.

Re: There is no A.I.

#49

Post by Animats »

atdrummond wrote: post #21
williamtrask wrote: post #4

For those who don’t know about the author, he is most well known a founder of the field of virtual reality. As a full time philosopher in the CTO’s office at MSFT, and the originator of concepts like data dignity, he’s uniquely qualified to write this kind of piece. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier

Jaron has an amazing publicist. I challenge anyone to read Wikipedia’s history of VR ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#History ) and assess him to fairly be called a founder. There was serious work being done for over a decade before he even started his firm; VPL never came close to being a standard and the VR tech today has hardly any relation to his “post symbolic” language. He’s certainly a very sm…

He did have a team that produced an early VR system. It took two expensive Silicon Graphics machines to run the headgear. I got to try it, with him present. There was a second person wired up, driving a model of a lobster or octopus or something, and I could sort of interact with them. All the right parts were there. But it didn't work very well. Too slow, and too low-rez. Turn head, wait for tracker and rendering to catch up. 80s VR was pretty marginal.

Re: There is no A.I.

#50

Post by Swizec »

xz0r wrote: post #39
tracerbulletx wrote: post #27

All of these arguments seem to think that the brain isn't also generating a statistical ordering of semantic words and actions. Obviously the brain has a way more complex network of subsystems with various specialties than the artificial models we have today and is able to generalize language, math, and positional reasoning and mix it with the older parts of the brain for reward and training mechanisms and it can do…

Correlation is not causation. It feels more like smarter automation to me.

> 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.

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