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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#501

Post by ryeights »

asdfman123 wrote: post #346
lordleft wrote: post #59

The language around AGI is proof, in my mind, that religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion. A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes still endures.

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…

This is an odd perspective to me. I'm an atheist because I don't find the truth claims of theistic religions convincing. Whether or not the centralized structure of modern religion is problematic is tangential to that

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#502

Post by pixl97 »

tialaramex wrote: post #486
jimbokun wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never been explained to me why a god like AI would care one way or another whether people tried to bring it into being or not. I mean the AGI exists now, hurting the people that didn't work hard enough to bring it into existence won't benefit the AGI in any way.

God-like AI feels like we're really overestimating how tough the problem "Destroy humans" would be and so we've imagined this very impressive reason it could happen when actually we're fragile and might more or less blow away by mistake. It seems we're much more likely to accidentally build something dumb that kills us via an unanticipated side effect. Like actual Weaboo but for society not just one business. AI help…

Hence why I like using the paperclip maximizer as an example. It's not out to get you, you getting got is just an unintentional side effect. Kind of like global warming. Nobody wants the earth to burn up, they just want to give up transportation/heating/whatever else a lot less.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#503

Post by wmf »

kalkin wrote: post #154
alyxya wrote: post #69

> Briefly, the argument goes that if there is a 0.001% chance of AGI delivering an extremely large amount of value, and 99.999% chance of much less or zero value, then the EV is still extremely large because (0.001% * very_large_value) + (99.999% * small_value) = very_large_value I haven't heard of that being the argument. The main perspective I'm aware of is that more powerful AI models have a compounding multiplier…

Right. Nobody makes a Pascal's wager-style argument in _favor_ of investing in AGI. People have sometimes made one against building AGI, on existential risk grounds. The OP author is about as confused on this as the water usage point... But the appetite for arguments against AI (which has legitimate motivations!) is so high that people are willing to drop any critical thinking.

People have definitely made the argument that every day AGI is delayed, people are dying from things AGI could have cured etc.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#504

Post by fallingfrog »

ACCount37 wrote: post #246
chriswarbo wrote: post #125

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. Ever since "AI" was named at Dartmouth, there have been very smart people thinking that their idea will be the thing which makes it work this time. Usually, those ideas work really well in-the-small (ELIZA, SHRDLU, Automated Mathematician, et…

Far more common are ideas that don't work on any scale at all. If you have something that gives a sticky +5% at 250M scale, you might have an actual winner. Almost all new ML ideas fall well short of that.

If someone else comes along and makes the exact claim I just made, I won't believe it either

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#505

Post by wmf »

austy69 wrote: post #104

> As a technologist I want to solve problems effectively (by bringing about the desired, correct result), efficiently (with minimal waste) and without harm (to people or the environment). I agree with the first two points, but as others have commented the environmental claim here is just not compelling. Starting up your computer is technically creating environmental waste. By his metrics solving technical problems et…

As long as you use the most efficient computer (Apple M5 natch) then you're causing minimal waste.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#506

Post by wmf »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #10

I'm surprised the companies fascinated with AGI don't devote some resources to neuroscience - it seems really difficult to develop a true artificial intelligence when we don't know much about how our own works. Like it's not even clear if LLMs/Transformers are even theoretically capable of AGI, LeCun is famously sceptical of this. I think we still lack decades of basic research before we can hope to build an AGI.

If you want to create artificial human intelligence you need to know how the brain works. If you're creating alien intelligence the brain doesn't matter.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#507

Post by Apocryphon »

killerstorm wrote: post #58
hagbarth wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe AlphaFold, AlphaEvolve etc are _not_ looking to get to AGI. The whole article is a case against AGI chasing, not ML or LLM overall.

AlphaEvolve is a general system which works in many domains. How is that not a step towards general intelligence? And it is effectively a loop around LLM. But my point is that we have evidence that Demis Hassabis knows his shit. Just doubting him on a general vibe is not smart

Has he, his team, or DeepMind used any AGI rhetoric, even just as advertising?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#508

Post by SomaticPirate »

simonw wrote: post #12

Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…

The AI water usage aspect is pretty clearly a lie and a gross misunderstanding at best https://open.substack.com/pub/andymasley/p/the-ai-water-issu... There are dozens of other things that use we use everyday that have a larger impact. I think there a real concerns here but the water usage argument is a poor one

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#509

Post by sethaurus »

whilenot-dev wrote: post #447
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s a red herring ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring ) It’s a fundamentally flawed argument

What a weird stance. You agree to mislead or distract from a relevant or important question?

Attempt generosity. Can you think of another way to interpret the comment above yours? Is it more likely they are calling their own argument a red herring, or the one they are responding to?

If something looks like a "weird stance", consider trying harder to understand it. It's better for everyone else in the conversation.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#510

Post by mikemarsh »

pixl97 wrote: post #494
mikemarsh wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, the…

So how do we get from "machines may get really good at faking things to human perception" to "machines themselves can have human-like (or 'better') perception"?

The question is so-called consciousness arising out of machines, not machines deceiving human consciousness.

Even then, that deception still doesn't prove equivalency of simulated and real things, unless we're adopting an extreme and self-contradictory subjectivist epistemology.

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