81–90 of 209 posts
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> whether humans are the fittest carrier of information for our DNA We humans are defined by our DNA, so are we not by definition the fittest carrier for it?
We are defined by DNA but DNA has evolved.
What I’ve found when studying ontological arguments is, if you replace god with pink unicorns and the argument still holds, the argument is lacking something. I mentally replaced AGI with zombies in this article and quite a lot of it held up. I don’t think it’s completely wrong, but it cherrypicks mercilessly. For example, the section on innovations turning up quicker than predicted has some fairly sizeable counters…
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Mostly because other intelligences might have more ability than us to achieve their goals, and have different goals. "Intelligence does not imply goals" is the thing to keep in mind here. E.g. what if more intelligent aliens truly believed that the only purpose in the world is proving more mathematical theorems? And decided to turn all of the planet into a giant math-proving machine? Destroying all the planet, all th…
We currently have thousands, or even millions of intelligent entities (humans) which think pretty wild and dangerous things. We usually just tell them "shut up Bob and take your meds" and that's it. Sometimes we regrettably kill them. Why would such AGI have the means of turning all of the planet into anything? I mean, sure, I also think the Terminator is a decent movie, but that doesn't make it a reasonable blueprin…
Your second paragraph: presumably you think it's literally impossible to invent nanotechnology to make yourself omnipotent, but I'm not willing to place that at less likely than 5%. Something clever enough could probably just manipulate the existing social structures to kill all the humans (something very intelligent that truly wanted nuclear war could probably make it happen). Just a little bit of tweaking to smallpox might be able to destroy humanity anyway. Even just the right new religion might do it (witness the great purges by pretty much every religion ever). None of these suggestions are intended as "this is a plausible way of killing those inconvenient humans"; but if each of my suggestions (nanotech, nuclear war, pandemic, grand new idea like a religion) has a five percent chance of working, that's already a 18.5% chance that exactly one of them would work. Once the humans are dead, of course, it has all the time in the world to achieve all its goals.
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I think it's just because intelligence is better defined and easier to test than consciousness.
Intelligence is one of the most poorly defined words there is; I can't even begin to imagine what you have in mind. Consciousness is usually only one of two things; either "being aware" or "the experience of having an inner voice".
And some people don't have an inner monologue. It's not specifically mentioned in http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex... but it's of that same class of thing; there are certainly hits on Google for people claiming not to have an inner voice, and I didn't even bother reading the article on psychologytoday about it.
What I’ve found when studying ontological arguments is, if you replace god with pink unicorns and the argument still holds, the argument is lacking something. I mentally replaced AGI with zombies in this article and quite a lot of it held up. I don’t think it’s completely wrong, but it cherrypicks mercilessly. For example, the section on innovations turning up quicker than predicted has some fairly sizeable counters…
Yudkowsky isn't claiming "innovations always turn up quicker than expected", to which indeed fusion would be a counterexample, he's claiming "very soon before an innovation turns up, it often seems decades in the future even to most practitioners", and fusion is not a counterexample to that .
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Ah, so the AGI term users are like "ha-ha I chose a vague term, now you can't argue semantics, take that!"
We understand what intelligence is better than we understand what consciousness is. "Artificial Consciousness" would be the vague term.
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Can you define 'near' for me? I think AGI is likely closer to the present than 1987 was -- that is, I'd bet on having AGI by 2047. (Note: this is distinct from superhuman AGI.) Do you not agree? I think a lot of people underestimate NNs because they think of NNs in terms of the semantics of their history instead of all possible semantics that can be fit to tensor networks. We know [P] that NNs are a sufficient abstra…
> Can you define 'near' for me? Not sensibly in terms of years, no. It's more a handwaving gut feeling combined with an intuition. I didn't feel like there was a royal road from symbolic AI to AGI. It doesn't feel to me like there is one from NNs either. As for the intuition: perhaps it's because it was my PhD topic, I have always felt that there needs to be a breakthrough in emergence, specifically in evolutionary c…
I've got a repo[2] for a vm where the programs can act in that way. But I am at the early stages of programming initial programs with economic/learning strategies. So I don't know how promising it is. More details can be found spread out on my blog [3]
[1] https://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.htm...
[2] https://github.com/eb4890/agorint/
[3] https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com/2017/08/13/introduct...
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Yudkowsky isn't claiming "innovations always turn up quicker than expected", to which indeed fusion would be a counterexample, he's claiming "very soon before an innovation turns up, it often seems decades in the future even to most practitioners", and fusion is not a counterexample to that .
Right but on the quadrants of predictions of timing vs imminence, all the examples are in one quadrant to justify the need to act now. Fair enough for reinforcing a narrative but a tad disingenuous.
The alternative would be technologies that were never developed at all, most of which never had this sort of discussion and therefore wouldn't work as examples.
Take a more historical view, though, and you'll notice there were people claiming flight was near even decades before the Wright brothers.
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I don't have any way to prove that you're conscious. It seems premature to assume that a hypothetical future AGI will necessarily possess consciousness, even if we could agree on what exactly "consciousness" is.
OK but here's a little gedankenexperiment: suppose I had a machine that could simultaneously simulate 2 consciousnesses (either parent/child configuration or sibling), (bear with me) import recordings from conscious beings, and allowed one consciousness to query the other. Then it could know if someone were conscious or not. (if I am getting this right) those would be the minimal criteria for being able to (contentio…
Dennett denies Nagel's claim that the bat's consciousness is inaccessible, contending that any "interesting or theoretically important" features of a bat's consciousness would be amenable to third-person observation. For instance, it is clear that bats cannot detect objects more than a few meters away because echolocation has a limited range. He holds that any similar aspects of its experiences could be gleaned by further scientific experiments. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
Heterophenomenology ("phenomenology of another, not oneself") is a term coined by Daniel Dennett to describe an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena. It consists of applying the scientific method with an anthropological bent, combining the subject's self-reports with all other available evidence to determine their mental state. The goal is to discover how the subject sees the world him- or herself, without taking the accuracy of the subject's view for granted. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology