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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

#421

Post by unsupp0rted »

nullc wrote: post #311
e12e wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would turning one off be murder? Or does that only apply to deletion?

If people could be turned off and back on without harming them (beyond the downtime) doing so without consent would be a very different crime than murder.

Perhaps or perhaps not. Turning off a person for long enough and thus depriving them of the chance to live in their own time with their existing family and friends is comparable to murder. It isn't murder, but it's comparable.

At some point Picard in Star Trek says to an alien "We're not qualified to be your judges. We have no law to fit your crime".

Turning off a person for a while and then turning them back on? We don't even have a law to fit your crime... but we should and it's probably quite similar to murder.

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

#422

Post by cactusplant7374 »

lostmsu wrote: post #385
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The experts in the field say we need a philosophical breakthrough. Isn't everyone else inexperienced in this regard? https://aeon.co/essays/how-close-are-we-to-creating-artifici...

> David Deutschis a physicist at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Society. What field were you referring to?

It could be linguistics, philosophy, or knowing enough of the history of those fields that make one an expert. I think Chomsky's argument on AI and specifically cognition and the brain is quite useful.

Yet, you never hear Altman or Carmack talking about cognition or how computers can understand the meaning of something like a human. They aren't interested in such questions. But to conduct an experiment don't you have to know what you are looking for? Does a chemist do experiments by mixing 1 million compounds at a time?

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

#423

Post by innagadadavida »

sershe wrote: post #359
seu wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On average technology has been overwhelmingly good. The GP is too vague, but what is the alternative to blind progress being proposed - some ethicist deciding what's good? When has that ever work out well? I'm pretty sure it has 100% track record of failure, I don't believe modern ethicists will do any better than luddites, inquisition, or Paul Elrich just because they have better manners. In fact I think less of a b…

> On average technology has been overwhelmingly good.

In order to achieve this, we are destroying the environment, other species and their habitats.

> but what is the alternative to blind progress being proposed

You don’t need and ethicist for this - but an accountant. We need to get stricter about negative externalities. For example, every inventor/manufacturer should be forced to take back their product after end of life. This will slow progress but if done right, it will avoid destruction brought by technology or at least not palm it off on to poorer society or environment.

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

#424

Post by AlchemistCamp »

loveparade wrote: post #26

I'm always taken aback by this fascination and heroification with John Carmack (or similar figures) on HN. I love Doom and Quake too, but that doesn't qualify him any more than any other random senior engineer to work on something totally different. From his interviews it looks like he understands little about the technical details of ML, or about as much as anyone can learn in a few months, and is just banking on PR…

> I'm always taken aback by this fascination and heroification with John Carmack (or similar figures) on HN. I love Doom and Quake too, but that doesn't qualify him any more than any other random senior engineer to work on something totally different.

According to Sriram Krishnan, John Carmack was at Facebook's highest engineering level and achieved the top possible rating of "redefines expectations" for his level three years in a row. They had to create a new tier for him. Nobody else has ever reached that level. He replaced a "hundred person team" and maybe was better than that team.

I have no inside insight to the matter, but this seems like something beyond a "random senior engineer".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXbSOiqnQxQ&t=711s

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

#425

Post by AlchemistCamp »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #411
loveparade wrote: post #26

I'm always taken aback by this fascination and heroification with John Carmack (or similar figures) on HN. I love Doom and Quake too, but that doesn't qualify him any more than any other random senior engineer to work on something totally different. From his interviews it looks like he understands little about the technical details of ML, or about as much as anyone can learn in a few months, and is just banking on PR…

According to Sriram Krishnan, John Carmack was at > I'm always taken aback by this fascination and heroification with John Carmack (or similar figures) on HN. I love Doom and Quake too, but that doesn't qualify him any more than any other random senior engineer to work on something totally different. Facebook's highest engineering level and achieved the top possible rating of "redefines expectations" for his level th…

This comment was misformatted, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34648802

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

#426

Post by lostmsu »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #422
lostmsu wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> David Deutschis a physicist at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Society. What field were you referring to?

It could be linguistics, philosophy, or knowing enough of the history of those fields that make one an expert. I think Chomsky's argument on AI and specifically cognition and the brain is quite useful. Yet, you never hear Altman or Carmack talking about cognition or how computers can understand the meaning of something like a human. They aren't interested in such questions. But to conduct an experiment don't you have…

I generally have pretty low regard for philosophy, and consider Popper + current scientific method to be SoTA. Its relationship to the nature of cognition overall seems pretty dubious.

As for linguistics, IMHO the existence and success of GPT pretty much puts Chomsky into the proven wrong bucket, so again, not a good example. (his whole point used to be that statistical model can't learn syntax in principle, and GPT's syntax is close to impeccable)

Re: a chemist. Well sort of. Because technically speaking a molecule of the same compound in a certain location and with certain energy is different from another molecule in a different location and with different energy. And even if you disregard that, why would you think that doing 1 million compounds could not significantly move material sciences forward? It is not like they don't want to do that, it is more of that they can't in practice at this time.

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

#427

Post by lostmsu »

random314 wrote: post #414
lostmsu wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, one does not need this paper to get towards the AI. Adam the optimization algo you might need (and even there I am not sure). And it is very readable. The fact that this particular proof of Adam's convergence is complicated is largely irrelevant. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.6980.pdf

Yes, if you set the bar low enough - everything is easy and can be learnt in a month.

That's not really an argument for why understanding this is needed to move the field forward.

Even your point rests on an assumption, that there's no proof for Adam convergence, that a high school student could understand, which is just a guess at best.

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

#428

Post by solarmist »

braindead_in wrote: post #356
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 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 and whatever. There is a theory that hunter-gatherers were much more happier compared to us because they were more in tune with the natural environment, had fewer sources of stress, and were more connected to their community than modern humans. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsan…

They also happily murdered unaffiliated tribes just because.

There are tons of trade offs.

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

#429

Post by osigurdson »

confidantlake wrote: post #251
the_gipsy wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Useless? They still have to buy all that crap that is currently sold to them.

No need to sell things at that point. Just produce and consume whatever you want.

Fully agree. We need to stop thinking about money, wealth, etc. The fundamental issue is access to goods and services. If it is easy to build an AI robot that can build a few copies of itself which in turn create a private jet using stuff lying around on the ground, I'm not really poor though I have no money (just the robo).

So the challenge for the bad capitalists in this hypothetical is to make sure I never get said robo in the first place. How realistic will this be? Are they that hellbent on ensuring that everyone else is poor?

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

#430

Post by sn9 »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #394
Balgair wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

Ok, are those chemical gradients encoded in DNA?

They're encoded in the laws of physics.

Kinda like asking if gravity and fluid dynamics are encoded in the blueprint for an aircraft.

The design relies on them, and exists in the form it does because of them.

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