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The AI Battle

aifuture.substack.com

91–100 of 137 posts

Re: The AI Battle

#91

Dark times ahead. If you haven’t already made it big with crypto or startups, you are toast and will be trapped in the permanent UBI underclass. That assumes that there will be a UBI at all. Combined with inflation this will mean that only those with $5 million or more in the bank will live what still count as middle class lifestyles. Those with less money will be forced into poverty. Many will adopt petty crime for…

Because graphic designers and software engineers will have some of their work AI-assisted...there will be no more jobs for anyone and the world is going to riot?

It's alarmist nonsense like this that I expect to find on Reddit.

Re: The AI Battle

#92

I'm not sure how the author could be so blind to the simple fact that computer generated articles and images are not useful. I mean if you want to replicate low quality blog spam and poorly written local news blurbs, maybe you could con a few companies into using your service. Or if you want to destroy the stock image market or the album art market (maybe that kind of "disruption" is somehow beneficial to you?) I gue…

OpenAI published an article about some of the things people are using DALL-E for:

https://openai.com/blog/dall-e-2-extending-creativity/

I thought this quote was particularly insightful:

> “Conceptualizing one’s ideas is one of the most gatekept processes in the modern world,” Kamp says. “Everyone has ideas — not everyone has access to training or encouragement enough to confidently render them. I feel empowered by the ability to creatively iterate on a feeling or idea, and I deeply believe that all people deserve that sense of empowerment.”

Images of astronauts on horses may have questionable commercial use or artistic merit, but DALL-E excels at concept art. The true value here isn’t using those images directly, it’s using them to brainstorm and test out creative ideas that can later be turned into something real (a product, a movie, art, etc.) by a human.

Re: The AI Battle

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> those systems are not a path to AGI If that's the actual meat of your claim, it's weird to just put it unsupported at the end. If you think it's an aside you've got a big problem, because without it the rest is pretty weak. We saw this with chess. Anybody who was clinging on to the idea that well, the machines can't really play chess, because technically there do seem to be a few humans who are better, was screwed…

Right on. When do you expect a productized AI that can replace your average skilled programmer?

AI vs average programmer, maybe 10 years.

Commercially viable AI vs skilled engineers, that’s going to take longer.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we could replace the average BA with an AI right now.

Re: The AI Battle

#94

Dark times ahead. If you haven’t already made it big with crypto or startups, you are toast and will be trapped in the permanent UBI underclass. That assumes that there will be a UBI at all. Combined with inflation this will mean that only those with $5 million or more in the bank will live what still count as middle class lifestyles. Those with less money will be forced into poverty. Many will adopt petty crime for…

It won’t happen because of Jevon’s Paradox and comparative advantage.

If everyone was unemployed then who would buy AI produced output?

Re: The AI Battle

#95

This very much requires acceptance of the worse-is-better model. That "beautiful" drawing of an an astronaut riding a horse is aesthetically... crap. It may take a person 5 hours to paint or draw that, but, arguably, a person wouldn't. GPT-3 might generate a novel, but, generally speaking the prose is jarring and awful to read, because there is no intent (danger: philosophically loaded word) behind it. It's all autom…

> That "beautiful" drawing of an an astronaut riding a horse is aesthetically... crap

I’ve walked through several of the world’s top art museums. Most art is aesthetically crap.

Re: The AI Battle

#96

AI that can do creative work is scary for its implications on humanity. Are we at best biological AI's ? I've played around with several of them. These artwork AI's are way more scary than GPT-3 et al because they seem to do something so creative with such good visible results. I don't think the genie goes back in the bottle. I think humanity has an existential crisis on its hands. Whats the point in doing things if…

> Whats the point in doing things if the AI can do it better than you ?

“countries engage in international trade even when one country's workers are more efficient at producing every single good than workers in other countries”

“Widely regarded as one of the most powerful[7] yet counter-intuitive[8] insights in economics”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

Re: The AI Battle

#97

AI that can do creative work is scary for its implications on humanity. Are we at best biological AI's ? I've played around with several of them. These artwork AI's are way more scary than GPT-3 et al because they seem to do something so creative with such good visible results. I don't think the genie goes back in the bottle. I think humanity has an existential crisis on its hands. Whats the point in doing things if…

> Whats the point in doing things if the AI can do it better than you ?

Whats the point in doing things if someone else can do it better than you?

Re: The AI Battle

#98

The "AI battle" only rages for those who don't make AI; those that write AI know that battle is lost, we will not have an AGI in our lifetimes. We lack fundamental components, such as artificial comprehension. Lacking any form of comprehension, weak or not, all AI technology can ever produce is idiot savants and personality theater. It is not capable of writing original software, beyond the use of pre-composable comp…

Can you explain what you mean by comprehension?

A scientific foundation for artificial comprehension does not exist.

When comprehension tasks are discussed and researched within the AI field that is a statistical calculus applied to large bodies of text. The comprehension task is to predict follow-on text given starting text, which does not require any comprehension of the content of the text, only statistical probabilities over an extremely large training data set of human written text. This is, essentially, a misappropriation of the use of the word comprehension by AI Researchers - a common practice. The fact that this type of software development is called artificial intelligence and not applied statistical calculus is an example of how successful these appropriations have been.

Quantum computers or not, we still need some type of underlying scientific reasoning how comprehension itself functions.

Consider for a moment, when thinking about a yet-to-be-understood concept, what that activity of trying to understand is composed. A person will decompose complex concepts into smaller concepts, and then mentally create virtual logical versions of these smaller concepts, followed by experimentally, in their imagination, perform trial combinations of the raw concepts to determine if the complex idea can be reproduced. This process is roughly how comprehension is achieved, and it is a universal process human reasoning can apply to any situation. Human science and technology has no such fully transferrable and operational representation of raw concepts and ideas. The closest we have is software, and the closest form of software to something capable of artificial comprehension is… yet to be formally defined. What we call artificial intelligence is not software capable of decomposing complex ideas into smaller concepts because modern AI does not work with the content, the meaning, of the data it is trained, AI works with the landscape the data exists. Modern AI identifies a landscape the data associated with something of interest exists, and through the training of an algorithm that something of interest can be identified, with some level of statistical confidence. All this can and does take place without any comprehension capacity within the software, it is all just sophisticated pattern matching. It’s an idiot savant that can do but can’t tell you how, why, or is even aware it is doing what it does.

Comprehension is the recreation of an observed behavior or event, virtually, within one's imagination, with that recreation composed of the different ingredients that when composed in some new, unique, never before seen manner recreate this observed behavior or event. Comprehension is the process of mentally reverse engineering reality. Modern AI has nothing capable of such a grand calculus.

Re: The AI Battle

#99

This very much requires acceptance of the worse-is-better model. That "beautiful" drawing of an an astronaut riding a horse is aesthetically... crap. It may take a person 5 hours to paint or draw that, but, arguably, a person wouldn't. GPT-3 might generate a novel, but, generally speaking the prose is jarring and awful to read, because there is no intent (danger: philosophically loaded word) behind it. It's all autom…

Agree, this is like those AI anime character generator game startups that YC seems to enjoy investing in so much. They think they can leverage AI face generation to "somehow" make a game/experience/show/app/nft/whatever when that is the extent of their tech. With no consideration at all of any of the actual work that goes into making anything actually valuable. But I mean, who's the idiot - the company that boasts these claims, or the ones giving them money?

Re: The AI Battle

#100
post #90

The "AI battle" only rages for those who don't make AI; those that write AI know that battle is lost, we will not have an AGI in our lifetimes. We lack fundamental components, such as artificial comprehension. Lacking any form of comprehension, weak or not, all AI technology can ever produce is idiot savants and personality theater. It is not capable of writing original software, beyond the use of pre-composable comp…

How would you falsify this hypothesis? What specific task do you think AI will be unable to do in our lifetimes because of this lacking of comprehension?

One can not explain anything to an AI, it has no comprehension. You're talking to nothing, a brick. Lacking comprehension, using "intelligence" in the name of AI is a marketing joke. I write the stuff, at a very high level. All the "software engineer careers are doomed" crap is nonsense. Lacking comprehension, AI is an idiot savant and a damn good actor, and nothing more because there is literally nothing inside.
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