Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 683 posts

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#491

Post by pixl97 »

mikemarsh wrote: post #243
danielbln wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a strong argument here. Are you saying there is a level of complexity involved in biological systems that can not be simulated? And if so, who says sufficient approximations and abstractions aren't enough to simulate the emergent behavior of said systems? We can simulate weather (poorly) without modeling every hydrogen atom interaction.

The argument is about causation or generation, not simulation. Of course we can simulate just about anything, I could write a program that just prints "Hello, I'm a conscious being!" instead of "Hello, World!". The weather example is a good one: you can run a program that simulates the weather in the same way my program above (and LLMs in general) simulate consciousness, but no one would say the program is _causing_…

>but that doesn't mean that the machine is actually conscious in the same way a human body empirically

Does it matter? Is a dog/cow/bird/lizard conscious in the same way a human is? We're built from the same basic parts, and yet humans seem to have a higher state of consciousness than other animals around us.

For example the definition of the word conscious is

>aware of and responding to one's surroundings; awake.

I'll give that we likely mean this in a general sense, but I'd say we're pretty close to this with machines. They can observe the real world with sensors of different types, and then either directly compute, or use neural nets to make generalized decisions on what is occurring around them, then proceed to act on those observations.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#492

Post by asdfman123 »

MangoToupe wrote: post #438
asdfman123 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an atheist too. I grew up in the church, rejected it in my teens. The problem with organized religion was the "organized" part -- the centralized, inflexible human authority. I'm increasingly convinced that spirituality is a vital part of the human experience and we should embrace it, not reject it. If you try to banish basic human impulses, they just resurface in worse, unexpected forms somewhere else. We all ne…

> The problem with organized religion was the "organized" part What on earth is "unorganized" religion? How is such a concept distinct from the concepts of "worldview" or "ideology"? When people use the term, I assume automatically they're referring to abrahamic faiths—especially in contrast to "atheism".

I didn't say we need "unorganized religion," I said the problem with organization religion is the organization.

We need more spirituality.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#493

Post by asdfman123 »

jimbokun wrote: post #467
asdfman123 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm already doing it. But the problem is there's not a lot of incentive from management to do it. Long term investment in something that can't easily be quantified is a non-starter to management. People will say "thank you for doing that" but those who create new features that drive metrics get promoted.

That's why it's very important to work for an organization run by engineers or former engineers when writing software. And engineers who actually shipped and maintained successful products over time. For software developed in-house by non-software organizations, the incentives are all wrong because management cannot properly assess the value of well architected systems.

That's true of smaller orgs -- ones that can't afford to pay for nonsense 5-10 years down the road.

Big tech can afford to pay for all kinds of nonsense.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#494

Post by pixl97 »

mikemarsh wrote: post #269
ACCount37 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you? You have weather readouts. One set is from a weather simulation - a simulated planet with simulated climate. Another is real recordings from the same place at the same planet, taken by real weather monitoring probes. They have the same starting point, but diverge over time. Which one is real though? Would you be able tell?

They're not asking about telling the difference in collected data sets, data sets aren't weather. The question is can you tell the difference between the rain you see outside your window, and some representation of a simulated environment where the computer says "It's raining here in this simulated environment". The implied answer is of course, one is water falling from the sky and one is a machine.

>The implied answer is of course, one is water falling from the sky and one is a machine.

Lets say you're in a room a good distance from the window. Suddenly you hear what sounds like thunder and rain falling. From a distance it appears that it's raining outside.

Is the rain real? Or is it simulated on a screen well enough you can't tell?

You have input output devices just like a computer. They don't see reality, they filter out huge amounts of data and your brain just interprets it. If our machines get good enough we may be able to blast signals directly to the brain that say it's raining and the brain wouldn't have any idea if it was simulated or not. Much in the same way it feels like we exist and not a 3d hologram an infinite distance away (or whatever other weirdness physics may or could do).

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#495

Post by pixl97 »

jimbokun wrote: post #352
mikemarsh wrote: post #149

The idea of replicating a consciousness/intelligence in a computer seems to fall apart even under materialist/atheist assumptions: what we experience as consciousness is a product of a vast number of biological systems, not just neurons firing or words spoken/thought. Even considering something as basic as how fundamental bodily movement is to mental development, or how hormones influence mood ultimately influencing…

AGI won't replicate our experience. But it could be more powerful than us.

Honestly replicating our experience would be rather wasteful. Much like making planes the same way birds work to carry cargo.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#496

Post by pixl97 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #429
jillesvangurp wrote: post #60

We should do things because they are hard, not because they are cheap and easy. AGI might be a fantasy but there are lots of interesting problems that block the path to AGI that might get solved anyway. The past three years we've seen enormous progress with AI. Including a lot of progress in making this stuff a lot less expensive, more efficient, etc. You can now run some of this stuff on a phone and it isn't terribl…

> I think the climate impact of data centers is way overstated relative to the ginormous amounts of emissions from other sources. Yes it's not pretty but it's a fairly minor problem compared to people buying SUVs and burning their way through millions of tons of fuel per day to get their asses to work and back. Just a simple example. There are plenty. Oh no. AI data centers are sucking up so much power it's making ev…

This is not a data center problem but a policy one of the last 20+ years.

We have not been building and extending energy sources, instead from some time around 2000 we've been steady stating and increasing efficiency. That's perfectly fine, but if anything shows up and uses more power, that puts us in a losing game. We should have trashed our coal power plants forever ago, and looked at more things like nuclear and now solar and wind. Instead we are attempting to play catch up with a troglodyte foot on our face that is yelling 'burn more coal'.

Don't blame data centers, instead blame politicians that would blame culture wars and the closest minority for the rest of our problems instead of actually working on public goods.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#497

Post by pixl97 »

ares623 wrote: post #433
Marha01 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you just lack imagination. I can imagine a lot of benefits of AGI or near-AGI systems.

I agree. The benefits are just not well distributed.

The benefits of technology rarely are at first.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#498

Post by zx10rse »

themanmaran wrote: post #281
mlhpdx wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it that you imagine happens to the water after it goes through the data center?

Clearly it vanishes without a trace and simply leaves the water cycle.

Drinking water does not magically appears in the water cycle the next day.

[0] - "And what we found is is that up to 43% of data centers, and this is our largest data centers, are located in areas of high or extremely high water stress. And that's really shocking because data centers require huge amount of drinking water to be able to cool their servers."

[0]- Business Insider | Exposing The Dark Side of America's AI Data Center Explosion - https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA?t=1201

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#499

Post by fallingfrog »

titzer wrote: post #474
fallingfrog wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some idea of what the way forward is going to look like but I don't want to accelerate the development of such a dangerous technology so I haven't told anyone about it. The people working on AI are very smart and they will solve the associated challenges soon enough. The problem of how to slow down the development of these technologies- a political problem- is much more pressing right now.

Let me guess, you have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.

Well it kind of sucks honestly because im never going to get any sort of recognition, but that's partly by choice and partly because I don't have the right personal connections. I 100% understand why all of you think I'm a significant fool. Thats ok. Like i said, im burying the idea. But its obvious enough that someone else will discover it soon enough.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#500

Post by Apocryphon »

keeganpoppen wrote: post #259
lukan wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I share your pain .. but was it ever really better in reality? Unfortunately it is not like human society in history had truth as the highest virtue.

yeah maybe around the time of Archimedes it was closer to the top, but societies in which people are willing to die for abstract ideas tend to be one... where the value of life isn't quite as high as it is nowadays (ie no matter how much my inner nerd has a love and fascination for that time period, no way i'm pressing the button on any one-way time machines...).

Archimedes, who according to legend was killed in the middle of searching for truth?
Post reply on HN