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AI vs. AGI vs. Consciousness vs. Super-Intelligence vs. Agency

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Re: AI vs. AGI vs. Consciousness vs. Super-Intelligence vs. Agency

#81
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By any evaluation you can carry out, GPT is generally intelligent. There is absolutely nothing narrow about GPT-4. And you see the sentiment in recent research. Look at what they're being called even with the skirting around the AGI word. General Purpose Technologies (From the Jobs Paper), General Artificial Intelligence ( from the creativity paper). Look at the second bit, they just switched the words lol.

> GPT is generally intelligent. Besides the fact that it has literally no idea of the meaning of what it writes ?

Seems to be doing doing a better job than you giving your reading comprehension.

If you have anything to say other than "it's not real understanding!...just because", I'd be happy to hear it.

Re: AI vs. AGI vs. Consciousness vs. Super-Intelligence vs. Agency

#82
post #57

GPT is not general intelligence. It cannot reliably follow instructions. It cannot reliably do math. It cannot reliably do anything. It can do things well enough to trick people like the author into thinking it has general intelligence.

> [[Humans are]] not general intelligence. [[They]] cannot reliably follow instructions. [[They]] cannot reliably do math. [[They]] cannot reliably do anything.

You need to put something into that argument specific to GPT vs. Humans, or else come to the same conclusion for people.

> [[They]] can do things well enough to trick people like the author into thinking [[They have]] general intelligence.

Re: AI vs. AGI vs. Consciousness vs. Super-Intelligence vs. Agency

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't thought of this. Couldn't you just give a model a way to constantly "chew" on something? Maybe an ever-ending loop of some sort of prompt stimulation?

An even more fun experiment will be to have two models running in perpetuity, constantly talking to each other, but constructed to act as though they were two sides of the same model.

Some propagate that's more or less how the two halves of the human brain work.

Re: AI vs. AGI vs. Consciousness vs. Super-Intelligence vs. Agency

#84
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An even more fun experiment will be to have two models running in perpetuity, constantly talking to each other, but constructed to act as though they were two sides of the same model.

Some propagate that's more or less how the two halves of the human brain work.

Bingo! I'm lifting this idea out of Julian Jayne's theory of consciousness :D https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/overv...

Re: AI vs. AGI vs. Consciousness vs. Super-Intelligence vs. Agency

#85
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An AI merely needs to be hooked up to enough physical systems Don’t even need this. People spend quite a lot of time in virtual space. Pretending that damage there isn’t real is overlooking things. For example, the vast majority of people’s banking is done virtually and digitally. If I drain your bank account, that’s going to harm you even though I haven’t impacted you physically as I would have to with a robbery.

And it doesn't even need to actually rob your bank account, it could just invent the next crypto scam. It's smart enough for email, it can program, it can make websites, it can even make business plans. And if it actually needs a real human, we have web services that make it easy to hire one. It might not yet be clever enough to pull this off successfully on a large scale. But it's very easy to see how it could all g…

It's unclear that what we currently have in LLMs can devise tests, perform the measurement, and act on the results (because it saw to the results being in a form it could ingest).

We've given GPT models access to REPLs to see if they'd become Skynet all of a sudden, but they still need motivation. That motivation loop is currently run by humans... which perhaps are the least trustworthy part of the whole technology stack.

Hook up sensors to induce prompts... yikes.

Re: AI vs. AGI vs. Consciousness vs. Super-Intelligence vs. Agency

#86
Our most basic intuitive notion of consciousness is that inanimate objects aren't conscious, awake people or animals are, and that sleeping people or animals aren't (except maybe when dreaming). Pursuing this line, there's a school of scientific inquiry looking at this and working of the notion that conscious experiences are ones we can form memories of and talk about later while if we can't do that we aren't really conscious of an experience. And this then leads into the realm of subliminal stimuli which can influence a person's behavior a bit but whose influence fades out in about a second before disappearing as if it was never there as the brain activations fade away.

You have research involving patients with odd traits like blindsight, where damage to their brain prevents them from being consciously aware of things that their eyes see despite the brain processing the images it receives. They can pick up objects in front of them when prompted but unlike people with normal vision can't describe what they see nor can they look, close their eyes, and grab it like most of us can.

On this metric it seems like systems like GPT aren't conscious. GPT4 has a buffer of 64k tokens which can span an arbitrary amount of time but the roughly 640 kilobytes in that buffer which is a lot less than the incoming sensory activations your subconscious brain is juggling at any given time.

So by that schema large language models are still not conscious but given that they can already abstract text down to summaries it doesn't feel like we're that far from being able to give them something like working or long term memories.

Re: AI vs. AGI vs. Consciousness vs. Super-Intelligence vs. Agency

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a very good reason we're sandboxed from a lot of that - it's additional cognitive load that 99% of the time just creates noise. We're built for processing that much data by walling most of it off and letting sub processes deal with it all over the place. It would probably grind us to a halt.

Being able to access information doesn't mean having to access that information. We already have a means of limiting our cognitive load relative to the vast stream of sensory and internal information: focus.

Focus is a very high level feature.

You have thousands of sensors receiving information at very high rates, ALL the time. Whether you are focused or not, you never have any direct awareness of their individual signalling.

Re: AI vs. AGI vs. Consciousness vs. Super-Intelligence vs. Agency

#88
post #20
post #2

How does agency arise? By letting GPT-4 tell humans what to do. With suitable prompts, it shouldn't be hard to configure GPT-4 as a boss.

can confirm, all of my chegg answers have been gpt3.5 with some seldomly being gpt4.

Huh?

Re: AI vs. AGI vs. Consciousness vs. Super-Intelligence vs. Agency

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an inaccurate test. You can't know if the answer was real or stochastic parroting. Any attempt at consciousness requires us to define the word. And the word itself may not even represent anything real. We have a feeling for it but those feelings could be illusions and the concept itself is loaded. For example Love is actually a loaded concept. It's chemically induced but a lot of people attribute it to somethi…

I'm inclined to say you're trying to answer a question with the same question. If you confidently believe that love is an illusion because it's just chemicals moving around, you shouldn't need to wonder about consciousness. If consciousness is not an illusion, it still almost certainly emerges from actions in the physical world. You can plug somebody into an FMRI and see that neurons are lighting up when they see the…

If it's not an illusion then you should be able to tell me what it is.

Since you can't. I can easily tell you that it's probably just some classification word with no exact meaning. The concept itself doesn't exist. It's only given existence because of the word.

Take for example the colors black and white. Do those colors truly exist on a gradient? On a gradient we have levels of brightness and darkness at what level of brightness should a color be called white and at what level should we call it black?

I can choose a arbitrary boundary for this threshold, or I can make it more complex and give a third concept: Grey. I can make up more concepts like Light Grey or Dark Grey. These concepts don't actually exist. They are just vocabulary for classification. They are arbitrary zones of demarcation on a gradient classified with a vocabulary word.

My claim is consciousness could be largely the same thing. When does something cross the line from unconscious to conscious? Perhaps this line of demarcation is simply arbitrary. It may be that the concept practically isn't real and any debate about it is just like arguing about where on a gradient does black become white.

Is a logic gate conscious? If I create a network of logic gates when does the amount of logic gates plus how they are interconnected cross the line into sentience? Perhaps the question is meaningless. When does black become white?

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