81–90 of 405 posts
So “guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people”. But for AI I’m not sure that preposition will hold indefinitely. Although I do think we are a far away from having actual AGI that would pose this threat. Still, the author has a good but obvious point.
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I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…
> Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution Well that's one reason you struggle to understand how it can be dismissed. I believe we were made by a creator. The idea that somehow nature "bruteforced" intelligence is completely nonsensical to me. So, for me, logically, humans being able to bruteforce true intelligence is equally nonsensical. But what the author is stating, and I completely agree with, is t…
Let’s assume there’s a creator: It is clearly willing to let bad things happen to people, and it set things up to make it impossible to prove that a human level intelligence should be impossible, so who’s to say it won’t allow a superintelligence to be a made by us?
I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…
If anyone knows of a steelman version of the "AGI is not possible" argument, I would be curious to read it. I also have trouble understanding what goes into that point of view.
The necessary conditions for "Kill all Humanity" may be the much more common result than "Create a novel thinking being." To the point where it is statistically improbable for the human race to reach AGI. Especially since a lot of AI research is specifically for autonomous weapons research.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's always been the case? Since we basically discovered... Fire? Tools?
Yes but the narrative tries to make it about the tools. "AI is going to take all the jobs". Instead of: "Rich guys will try to delete a bunch of jobs using AI in order to get even more rich".
I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…
Language is only an end product. It is derived from intelligence. The intelligence is everything that created the language and the training corpus in the first place. When AI is able to create entire thoughts and ideas without any concept of language, then we will truly be closer to artificial intelligence. When we get to this point, we then use language as a way to let the AI communicate its thoughts naturally. Such…
I'm not buying the "current AI is just a dumb parrot relying on human training" argument, because the same thing applies to humans themselves-- if you raise a child without any cultural input/training data, all you get is a dumb cavemen with very limited reasoning capabilities.
I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…
If anyone knows of a steelman version of the "AGI is not possible" argument, I would be curious to read it. I also have trouble understanding what goes into that point of view.
"Humans will do what they’ve always tried to do—gain power, enslave, kill, control, exploit, cheat, or just be lazy and avoid the hard work—but now with new abilities that we couldn’t have dreamed of." -- A pretty bleak, and also accurate, observation of humanity. I have to hope that the alternative sentence encompassing all of the good can lead to some balance.
No, it is not accurate at all. There are some people that do all of these sure, however the vast majority of people live pretty ordinary lives where they do very little of what is described. I actually think it is very intellectually lazy to be this cynical.
This is why it is important to have societies where various forms of power are managed carefully. Limited constitutional government with guaranteed freedoms and checks and balances for example. Regulations placed on mega corporations is another example. Restrictions to prevent the powerful in government or business (or both!) from messing around with the rest of us…
I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…
If anyone knows of a steelman version of the "AGI is not possible" argument, I would be curious to read it. I also have trouble understanding what goes into that point of view.
These books often get shallowly dismissed in terms that imply he made some elementary error in his reasoning, but that's not the case. The dispute is more about the assumptions on which his argument rests, which go beyond mathematical axioms and include statements about the nature of human perception of mathematical truth. That makes it a philosophical debate more than a mathematical one.
Personally, I strongly agree with the non-mathematical assumptions he makes, and am therefore persuaded by his argument. It leads to a very different way of thinking about many aspects of maths, physics and computing than the one I acquired by default from my schooling. It's a perspective that I've become increasingly convinced by over the 30+ years since I first read his books, and one that I think acquires greater urgency as computing becomes an ever larger part of our lives.
I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…
I think you could make AGI right now tbh. It’s not a function of intelligence. It’s just a function of stateful system mechanics. LLMs are just a big matrix. But what about a four line of code loop that looks like: ```while true: update_sensory_inputs() narrate_response() update_emotional_state() ``` LLMs don’t experience continuous time and they don’t have an explicit decision making framework for having any agency…
> not a particularly capable AGI
Maybe the word AGI doesn't mean what you think it means...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only thing I can come up with is that compressing several hundred million years of natural selection of animal nervous systems into another form, but optimised by gradient descent instead, just takes a lot of time. Not that we can’t get there by artificial means, but that correctly simulating the environment interactions, the sequence of progression, getting the all the details right, might take hundreds to thous…
> correctly simulating the environment interactions, the sequence of progression, getting the all the details right, might take hundreds to thousands of years of compute Who says we have to do that? Just because something was originally produced by natural process X, that doesn't mean that exhaustively retracing our way through process X is the only way to get there. Lab grown diamonds are a thing.