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Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

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Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#71

Post by shpongled »

consumer451 wrote: post #44
shpongled wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be pedantic, I would argue that we aren't even close to being able to simulate the full brain of a flatworm on a supercomputer at anything deeper than a simple representation of neurons. We can't even simulate all of the chemical processes inside a single cell. We don't even know all of the chemical processes. We don't know the function of most proteins.

> We can't even simulate all of the chemical processes inside a single cell. We don't even know all of the chemical processes. We don't know the function of most proteins. Brain > Cell > Molecules(DNA and otherwise) > Atoms > Sub-atomic particles... Potentially dumb question, but how deeply do we need to understand the underlying components to simulate a flatworm brain?

Who knows! I'm sure it depends on how accurately you want to simulate a flatworm brain.

I think current AI research has shown that simply representing a brain as a neural network (e.g. fully connected, simple neurons) is not sufficient for AGI.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#72

Post by notahacker »

Vecr wrote: post #38
sveme wrote: post #16

Does anyone know potential causal chains that bring about the extinction of mankind through AI? Obviously aware of terminator, but what other chains would be possible?

I'm going to take that to mean "P(every last human dead) > 0.5" because I can't model situations like that very well, but if for some reason (see Thucydides Trap for one theory, instrumental convergence for another) the AI system thinks the existence of humans is a problem for its risk management, it would probably want to kill them. "All processes that are stable we shall predict. All processes that are unstable we…

If the AGI - which is for some reason always imagined as a singular entity - thinks humans are unpredictable and risky now, just imagine the unpredictability and risk involved in trying to kill all seven billion of us whilst keeping the electricity supply on...

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#73

Post by mmaunder »

I think history has shown us that we tend to underestimate the rate of technological progress and it's rate of acceleration.

It's tempting to look at Moore's law and use say the development of the 8080, z-80 and 6502 in 1975 as an epoch. But it's hard to use that to get a visceral sense of how much things changed. I think RAM - in other words, available memory - may be more helpful, and it does relate in a distant way with model size and available GPU memory.

So the question is, if we surveyed a group of devs, engineers and computer scientists in 1975 and asked them to extrapolate and predict available RAM a few decades out, how well would their predictions map to reality?

In 1975 the Altair 8800 microcomputer with the 8080 processor had 8K of memory for the high end kit (4096 words).

8 years later, in 1983 the Apple IIe (which I learned to program on) had 64K RAM as standard, or 8 times the RAM.

13 years later in 1996, 16 to 32 MB was fairly commonplace in desktop PCs. That's 32,768K which is 4096 times the 8K available 21 years earlier.

30 years later in 2005, it wasn't unusual to find 1GB of RAM or 1,048,576K or 131,072 times 8K from 30 years earlier.

Is it realistic to expect a 1975 programmer, hardware engineer or computer scientist to predict that available memory in a desktop machine will be over 100,000 times greater 30 years in the future? We're not even taking into account moving from byte oriented CPUs to 32bit CPUs, or memory bandwidth.

2054 is 30 years in the future. It's going to fly by. I think given the unbelievable rate of change we've seen in the past, and how it accelerates, any prediction today from the smartest and most forward thinking people in AI will vastly underestimate what 2054 will look like.

Edit: 32bit CPU's not 64. Typo.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#74

Post by reality71 »

jjcm wrote: post #19

A really simple approach we took while I was working on a research team at Microsoft for predicting when AGI would land was simply estimating at what point can we run a full simulation of all of the chemical processes and synapses inside a human brain. The approach was tremendously simple and totally naive, but it was still interesting. At the time a supercomputer could simulate the full brain of a flatworm. We then…

Your approach will eventually work, no doubt about it, but the question is whether the amount of energy the computer uses to complete a task is less than the energy the equivalent conglomeration of humans use to complete a task.

It seems clear at this point that although computers can be made to model physical systems to great degree, this is not the area where they naturally excel. Think of modeling the temperature of a room, you could try and recreate the physically accurate simulation of every particle and its velocity. We could then create better software to model the particles on ever more powerful and specific hardware to model bigger and bigger rooms.

Just like how thermodynamics might make more sense to model statistically, I think intelligence is not best modeled at the synapse layer.

I think the much more interesting question is what would the equivalent of a worm brain be for a digital intelligence?

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#75

Post by bbor »

lainga wrote: post #4
bbor wrote: post #2

Very interesting, especially the huge jump forward in the first figure and a possible majority of AI researchers giving >10% to the Human Extinction outcome. To AI skeptics bristling at these numbers, I’ve got a potentially controversial question: what’s the difference between this and the scientific consensus on Climate Change? Why heed the latter and not the former?

A climate forcing has a physical effect on the Earth system that you can model with primitive equations. It is not a social or economic problem (although removing the forcing is). You might as well roll a ball down an incline and then ask me whether Keynes was right.

Ha, well said, point taken. I’d say AI risk is also a technology problem, but without quantifiable models for the relevant risks, it stops sounding like science and starts being interpreted as philosophy. Which is pretty fair.

If I remember an article from a few days ago correctly, this would make the AI threat an “uncertain” one, rather than merely “risky” like climate change (we know what might happen, we just need to figure out how likely it is).

EDIT: Disregarding the fact that in that article, climate change was actually the example of a quintessentially uncertain problem… makes me chuckle. A lesson on relative uncertainty

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#76

Post by mistrial9 »

mmaunder wrote: post #73

I think history has shown us that we tend to underestimate the rate of technological progress and it's rate of acceleration. It's tempting to look at Moore's law and use say the development of the 8080, z-80 and 6502 in 1975 as an epoch. But it's hard to use that to get a visceral sense of how much things changed. I think RAM - in other words, available memory - may be more helpful, and it does relate in a distant wa…

fair, but include the "BlackSwan".. setbacks, destruction, etc

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#77

Post by golol »

endisneigh wrote: post #70
golol wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why define AGI like that? General intelligence is supposed to be something like human intelligence. You are talking about ASI.

I'm curious to hear your definition of AGI that hasn't already been met, given computers have been superior to humans at a large variety of tasks since the 90s.

- passing a hard Turing test, adversarial and with a duration of a few weeks and comparing with 10th percentile humans.

- being a roughly human equivalent remote worker.

- having robust common sense on language tasks

- having robust common sense on video, audio and robotics tasks, basically housework androids (robotics is not the difficulty anymore).

Just to name a few. There is a huge gap between what LLMs van do and what you describe!

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#78

Post by paxys »

endisneigh wrote: post #69
paxys wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI doesn't have to mean superintelligence/singularity (which seems to be what you are describing).

What is your definition for AGI that isn't already met?

Intelligence involves self-learning and self-correction. AIs today are trained for specific tasks on specific data sets and cannot expand beyond that. If you give an LLM a question it cannot answer, and it goes and figures out how to answer it without additional help, that will be behavior that qualifies it as AGI.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#79

Post by mmaunder »

mistrial9 wrote: post #76
mmaunder wrote: post #73

I think history has shown us that we tend to underestimate the rate of technological progress and it's rate of acceleration. It's tempting to look at Moore's law and use say the development of the 8080, z-80 and 6502 in 1975 as an epoch. But it's hard to use that to get a visceral sense of how much things changed. I think RAM - in other words, available memory - may be more helpful, and it does relate in a distant wa…

fair, but include the "BlackSwan".. setbacks, destruction, etc

Got any historical examples? I lived through it from 1984 onwards as a young programmer and can't think of any, other than perhaps the dot-com bust (I was at eToys) which didn't impede the rate of technological progress much - only the rate of return.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#80

Post by ehsanu1 »

novagameco wrote: post #21
endisneigh wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I doubt we will have AGI by even 2100. I define AGI as the ability for an intelligence that is not human to do anything any human has ever done or will do with technology that does not include itself* (AGI). * It also goes without saying that by this definition I mean to say that humanity will no longer be able to meaningfully help in any qualitative way with respect to intellectual tas…

I'm optimistic in that I hope we don't have AGI by 2100 because it sounds like a truly dystopian future even in the best case scenario

What kind of best case are you imagining? I don't quite understand why the very best case would be dystopian.
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