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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

#641

Post by Capricorn2481 »

buu700 wrote: post #485
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not separate at all, especially if the question is "How hard should we push people to use this." To be clear, there are a lot of people who routinely used airplanes who don't post-covid, but insisted that they had to. Yeah, I think it's pretty wasteful to fly across the country for a 30 minute meeting. Most don't fly at all. I don't know what mass-psychosis white collar industries were under to think that was…

They're 100% separate. "Planes aren't useful" and "planes don't work" are completely different sentiments than "it's pretty wasteful to fly across the country for a 30 minute meeting" and "we shouldn't push people hard to use air travel". I know for a fact that planes work, because I've been on a plane and observed it lifting me high off the ground and rapidly transporting me to a distant location. The fact that plan…

> I know for a fact that planes work, because I've been on a plane and observed it lifting me high off the ground and rapidly transporting me to a distant location. The fact that planes typically emit CO2 doesn't make their existence and utility some kind of mass hallucination.

You're arguing with an imaginary person. Read what I wrote. I didn't call AI vaporware, I said we shouldn't consider its integration into society purely on technical merits, ignoring the cost, which I think could be big if OpenAI's very public plans are made reality. You're making a strawman.

The mass hallucination is not that plane's are useful, it's that a plane is the only reasonable solution to human communication.

Honestly, you're just further illustrating the complete erosion of nuance that comes when you paint people with concerns about AI as frivolous.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#642

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

pavas wrote: post #636
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems entirely possible that the "philosophical zombie" is an impossible/illogical construct, and that in fact anything with all the structure necessary for consciousness will of necessity be conscious. When considering the structural underpinnings of consciousness, it's interesting to note the phenomena of "blindsight", which is essentially a loss of visual consciousness without an actual loss of vision! Note tha…

> It seems entirely possible that the "philosophical zombie" is an impossible/illogical construct, and that in fact anything with all the structure necessary for consciousness will of necessity be conscious. Yes, and that's pretty much exactly the point: we don't know of any way of determining whether someone is a p-zombie or a being with conscious phenomenal experience. We can certainly have an opinion or belief or…

> Yes, and that's pretty much exactly the point: we don't know of any way of determining whether someone is a p-zombie or a being with conscious phenomenal experience.

That seems to come down to defining, in a non hand-wavy way, what we mean by "conscious phenomenal experience". If this is referring to personal subjective experience, then why is just asking them to report that subjective experience unsatisfactory ?!

I get that consciousness is considered as some ineffable personal experience, but as a thought experiment, what if the experimenter, defining themselves as "conscious" wanted to probe if some subject's subjective experience differed from their own, then they could at least attempt to verbalize any and all aspects of their own (the experimeter's) subjective experience and ask the subject if they felt the same, and the more (unconstrained) questions they asked without finding any significant difference would make it asymptotically unlikely that there was any difference.

> which is why it's [p-zombie detection] been called the "hard problem" of consciousness

AFAIK the normal definition of the hard problem is basically how and why the brain gives rise to qualia and subjective experience, which really seems like a non-problem...

We have thoughts and emotions, and mental access to these, so it has to feel like something to be alive and experience things. If we introspect on what having, say, vision, is like, or what it is like to have our eyes open vs shut, then (assuming we don't have blindsight!) we are obviously going to experience the difference and be able to report it - it does "feel" like something.

Qualia are an interesting thing to discuss - why do we experience what we do, or experience anything at all for that matter when we see, say a large red circle. Why does red feel "red"? Why and how does music feel different in nature to color, and why does it feel the way it does, etc?

I think these are also really non-problems that disappear as soon as you start to examine them! What are the differences in quales of seeing a small red circle vs a large red circle, or a large blue circle vs a large red one... When you consider differences in quales vs the fact that we experience anything at all (which is proved by our ability to report that we do). Color is perceived as surface attribute with a spatial extent, with colors differentiated by what they remind us of. Blue brings to mind water, sky and other blue things, Red brings to mind fire, roses, and other red things. Perception of color can be proven to be purely associative, not absolute, by Ivo Kohler's chromatic adaptation experiments, having the subject wear colored goggles whose effect "wears off" after a few days with normal subjective perception of color returning.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#643

Post by buu700 »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #641
buu700 wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're 100% separate. "Planes aren't useful" and "planes don't work" are completely different sentiments than "it's pretty wasteful to fly across the country for a 30 minute meeting" and "we shouldn't push people hard to use air travel". I know for a fact that planes work, because I've been on a plane and observed it lifting me high off the ground and rapidly transporting me to a distant location. The fact that plan…

> I know for a fact that planes work, because I've been on a plane and observed it lifting me high off the ground and rapidly transporting me to a distant location. The fact that planes typically emit CO2 doesn't make their existence and utility some kind of mass hallucination. You're arguing with an imaginary person. Read what I wrote. I didn't call AI vaporware, I said we shouldn't consider its integration into soc…

There's no straw man. If what you're saying is you agree with me, then you're the one imagining an argument where none exists.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#644

Post by rsbrown »

Etheryte wrote: post #2

Many big names in the industry have long advocated for the idea that LLM-s are a fundamental dead end. Many have also gone on and started companies to look for a new way forward. However, if you're hip deep in stock options, along with your reputation, you'll hardly want to break the mirage. So here we are.

Name some? Because YeCun's break is the first big name I've seen strike out in a major fashion away from the LLM trajectory.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#645

Post by Nevermark »

nawgz wrote: post #638
mcny wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we are talking past one another here. I disagree that all the computer processors in the world combined don't have enough raw processing power to simulate a single bee brain. That to me is an absurd idea. Now if you meant we don't know enough about bees to actually model what its brain does and create a processor to actually process an artificial bee brain, then yes, we don't have that ability yet. ---- A…

> I disagree that all the computer processors in the world combined don't have enough raw processing power to simulate a single bee brain. That to me is an absurd idea. A bee weighs 100mg. If they are 5% brain, their brain weighs 5mg. 5mg of carbon is 2.5 * 10^20 atoms. The largest supercomputers, at hundreds of trillions of transistors, come in at 2-5 * 10^14 transistors. I don't think that combining all the compute…

> A bee weighs 100mg. If they are 5% brain, their brain weighs 5mg. 5mg of carbon is 2.5 * 10^20 atoms.

Any rational characterization of the problem has left the building here.

Nobody wants to simulate any creature's brain or nervous system atom for atom.

Most of what atoms do in any cell, including neurological cells, is operate a vast number of complex but common survival systems. And the very small fraction supporting specifically neurological behavior, do not meaningfully contribute at the level where specifics of individual atoms matter, but at a level many orders of magnitude higher in scale.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#646

Post by XorNot »

daveguy wrote: post #626
XorNot wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this up till saying we must be very far from AGI. I don't think we're close, but the scale of human inputs doesn't tell us anything about it. A useful AGI need not be capable of human level cognition, and human level cognition need not require the entire human biological or nervous systems - we're a product of millions of years of undirected random evolution, optimized to run a fleshy body and survive Af…

I'm pretty sure human level cognition requires human level processing power. We are still multiple orders of magnitude away from that. A blind programmer still has human processing power. The "usually-sight" regions of the brain don't just shut down. They're still used.

Sure, but there are animals with much larger brains on Earth which have - we believe - a reasonably high level of cognition but have not achieved the technological and engineering feats which we have (i.e. dolphins, whales, elephants as naive examples based on brain mass and complexity).

Conversely you have birds - with much smaller brains - which also don't achieve those things but display advanced language skills, have apparent societal structure and despite our inability to understand it seem to have enough language to communicate advanced concepts.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#647

Post by pavas »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #642
pavas wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems entirely possible that the "philosophical zombie" is an impossible/illogical construct, and that in fact anything with all the structure necessary for consciousness will of necessity be conscious. Yes, and that's pretty much exactly the point: we don't know of any way of determining whether someone is a p-zombie or a being with conscious phenomenal experience. We can certainly have an opinion or belief or…

> Yes, and that's pretty much exactly the point: we don't know of any way of determining whether someone is a p-zombie or a being with conscious phenomenal experience. That seems to come down to defining, in a non hand-wavy way, what we mean by "conscious phenomenal experience". If this is referring to personal subjective experience, then why is just asking them to report that subjective experience unsatisfactory ?!…

I'm actually curious here, because maybe our experiences are different. When you look at something red, before any associations or thoughts kick in, before you start thinking "this reminds me of fire" or analyzing it, is there something it's like for that redness to be there? Some quality to it that exists independent of what you can say about it?

For me, I can turn off all the thinking and associations and just... look. And there's something there that the looking is of or like, if that makes sense. It's hard to put into words because it's prior to words, and can possibly be independent of them.

But maybe that's not something universal? I know some people don't have visual imagery or an inner voice, so maybe phenomenal experience varies more than we assume. Does that distinction between the experience itself and your ability to think/talk about it track for you at all?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#648

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

pavas wrote: post #647
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, and that's pretty much exactly the point: we don't know of any way of determining whether someone is a p-zombie or a being with conscious phenomenal experience. That seems to come down to defining, in a non hand-wavy way, what we mean by "conscious phenomenal experience". If this is referring to personal subjective experience, then why is just asking them to report that subjective experience unsatisfactory ?!…

I'm actually curious here, because maybe our experiences are different. When you look at something red, before any associations or thoughts kick in, before you start thinking "this reminds me of fire" or analyzing it, is there something it's like for that redness to be there? Some quality to it that exists independent of what you can say about it? For me, I can turn off all the thinking and associations and just... l…

> And there's something there that the looking is of or like, if that makes sense

I think I know what you mean, but if you consider something really simple like the patch of a single color, even without any color associations (although presumably they are always there subconsciously) then isn't the experience just of "a surface attribute, of given spatial extent". There is something there, that is the same in that spatial region, but different elsewhere.

At least, that's how it seems to me, and isn't that exactly how the quale of a color has to be - that is the essence of it ?!

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#649

Post by herewulf »

simonw wrote: post #22

Thanks to that weird Elon Musk story TIL that Deep Mind's Denis Hassabis started his career in game development working at Lionhead as lead AI programmer on Black & White! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis

A game that most certainly did not live up to the hype of its own time, sadly.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#650

Post by fallingfrog »

titzer wrote: post #635
fallingfrog wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You literally see no irony here? You are doubling, tripling down on some idea you won't even vaguely describe to people, but you are so utterly convinced that it's right you don't appear to even admit the possibility that your idle thoughts could be wrong, or just silly. Frankly it sounds delusional and you should question yourself more often. If you're so afraid of being right that you won't even write the idea down…

Ugh why do you care so much? Leave me alone. The big insane statement i made was "i have some idea of what the next bit of advancement will look like". Transformers are a special case of a much more beautiful general principle ok? Go away
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