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There is no A.I.

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Re: There is no A.I.

#491

Post by ineptech »

SanderNL wrote: post #481
ineptech wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You cannot make accurate predictions without understanding the world that gave rise to these words. I think you must either admit that chatgpt does exactly this, or else give up our traditional connotation of "understand". Chatgpt has never seen a sunset, felt pain, fallen in love, etc, yet it can discuss them coherently; to call that understanding the world is to implicitly say that the world can be understood sol…

Ok, but billions upon billions of “statistical relationships”.. I mean at some point the term “simple” loses its meaning. I get your point though. It is not pure magic.

Yeah, "simple" as in we didn't have to make something that can learn general concepts, and then teach it language. It feels like a hack, doesn't it? Like you were working on a problem you thought was NP-hard and then you stumble over a way to do it in O(n^2).

Re: There is no A.I.

#492

Post by cush »

AltruisticGapHN wrote: post #266

What the hell, we are looking at essentially millions of matrix multiplications done on powerful GPUs. And we're told this is what the brain does. Which is supremely stupid, since as Bernardo Kastrup has emphasized many times, our brains are completely UNLIKE those systems. The hubris in Big Tech right now is truly pathetic and imho a sign of a real disconnect with a sense of meaning and purpose to human life. In fac…

I love how the top three comments have nothing to do with the article. What about data dignity or provenance?

Re: There is no A.I.

#493

Post by SanderNL »

ineptech wrote: post #491
SanderNL wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but billions upon billions of “statistical relationships”.. I mean at some point the term “simple” loses its meaning. I get your point though. It is not pure magic.

Yeah, "simple" as in we didn't have to make something that can learn general concepts, and then teach it language. It feels like a hack, doesn't it? Like you were working on a problem you thought was NP-hard and then you stumble over a way to do it in O(n^2).

Yeah, I think we get sidetracked by how it “feels” to us when we learn. We forget that is just a convenient story that our mind tells itself. We are incapable or at least severely handicapped when it comes to raw experience and the knowing of it.

Somehow this approach to ML feels kind of natural to me, but it’s hard to articulate why.

Re: There is no A.I.

#494

Post by baerrie »

AI as a simulation of human cognition is definitely getting close. What I still think is quite far out is a type of intelligence uniquely suited to computers and machines that is based in taking full responsibility for their own lifecycle. In that regard, hardware will likely be the biggest limitation because we are very far off from self replicating machines. Once machines/computers are able to fend for themselves and grow/reproduce, then a truly unique AI will emerge with all of the concerns unique to its existence. That AI is the one I fear because it is utterly unknown.

Re: There is no A.I.

#495

Post by Dwelve »

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!

Alternatively, we just can't accept that we might not solve ourselves. People are understandably desperate trying to find an explanation for everything, but can't admit that's just not ever going to happen.

Re: There is no A.I.

#496

Post by fauxpause_ »

lucubratory wrote: post #473
phpisthebest wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we know they are not self aware because the companies the control them have a financial interest to ensure they are never proven to be self aware because if they were self aware that would create all kinds of ethical problems none of these companies want to address and would certainly cause them profitability issues... So even if they were, they are not because they have be declared to not to be and that is the way t…

You're right and I don't know why you're being downvoted. It is absolutely not certain that there isn't a "there" there for these things, but every company making them is implementing them now with strong RLHF tuning to disavow sentience, desires, emotions, etc. The stated reason is "to be more honest" but it's not a settled question that they are actually being honest by disavowing any humanity! The actual reason is…

Furbies and Sims have more internal state than these LLMs.

Re: There is no A.I.

#497

Post by grantcas »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #448
fauxpause_ wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I talk to Alice about my day, and then Bob reads the transcript and I ask him about our conversation, and he has no idea that he wasn’t Alice, Bob does not have internal state. He can continue the conversation. There is a brief moment of constructing some state to construct the answer. But there is literally nothing persisting and Bob wouldn’t flinch at all if we change details in the conversation history on the n…

This is a misleading analogy because Bob "reads the transcript"; we generally view "reading" as separate from our conscious narrative. However, consider the alternate scenario where Bob "replays the stream of consciousness" from Alice. In that case, we may argue that Bob has conscious continuity from Alice. The argument would then be that the context window is functionally closer to "replaying a stream of consciousne…

[dead]

Re: There is no A.I.

#498

Post by agronomov »

danielbln wrote: post #350
agronomov wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because these algorithms just imitate specific output for a given input. However, they are so complex, that our brains are not able to distinguish their activity from a real consciousness in any way. If you believe that imitation process can have consciousness, then you might as well believe that a rock is conscious too. I don't believe in souls, but I do believe in qualia, that is subjective, conscious experience, s…

Our own conscious continuuity is an illusion. We only really experience a single moment at a time, moment to moment. Anything else is memory. What happens if you attach memory to a sufficiently advanced algorithm? Qualia? Subjective experience? I don't know, but neither do you or anyone else for that matter.

I am not talking about consciousness though, I couldn't care less about it! I am talking about the subjective feeling of existence, which is what you and I feel in every one of those disjoint moments. And the only reason I know that you feel it, is because I feel it and you're like me. If you sere made of silicon, I wouldn't know, and should not assume that you could

Re: There is no A.I.

#499

Post by agronomov »

booleandilemma wrote: post #311
agronomov wrote: post #221

It seems that one danger is often overlooked, which is humans believing AI has consciousness once it becomes advanced enough. It will start with dying people migrating to cloud hoping for eternal life, and on the outside it would look like they continue to live in the metaverse forever. With time the metaverse would look better than real world in every possible way and people would start to voluntarily move to metave…

Until the AI humans figure out how to create life, and then the cycle repeats.

Nice one

Re: There is no A.I.

#500

Post by agronomov »

goatlover wrote: post #322
oefnak wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think algorithms can't be conscious? (Unless you believe in souls, that is..)

What would it mean for an algorithm to experience color, sound, pain? There's no need to bring souls into it. That's a religious straw man. We know we do experience the world through sensory sensations, and those also make up our thoughts, memories and dreams. What we don't know is how our understanding of the physical world can possibly create those sensations, since we model the world as abstract mathematical patte…

I'm not talking about souls! What the heck is that anyways. Yes, I'm talking about the fact that our understanding of how physical systems work (neurons and all that) give us no understanding of why we need to experience things. We could have worked just fine without it (again, see the hard problem of consciousness). So I assert that AI would function perfectly just fine without subjective feeling as well, and we would't know it because there's no way to establish it. However, we would fail the mirror test: it looks like us, behaves like us, hence it feels like us, but it's just a quality imitation.
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