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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

#91

Post by HervalFreire »

adventured wrote: post #45
HervalFreire wrote: post #31

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…

> Straight people are romantically incapable of loving members of the same sex. So the depth and the magic of it all is strictly segmented based off of biological sex? Doesn't seem deep or meaningful at all. Thus love is an illusion. You set up your own weak straw argument and then knocked it down with a conclusion that is entirely unsupported. Since when is love relegated to the romantic sphere? And or since when is…

>There's no illusion - love is a complex, durable emotion and is as real as (typically) shorter duration emotions such as anger, fear, joy, etc. Your emotions and thoughts aren't illusions, they're real.

I'm talking about romantic love. Clearly the specifications around romantic love are aligned with evolution and natural selection rather then magic or depth.

A straight human cannot feel romantic love for a horse or a person of the opposite sex. If romantic love was truly a deeper emotion then such an arbitrary sexual delineation wouldn't exist. Think about it. Why should romantic love restrict itself to a certain sex? It's sexist. Biology is sexist when it comes to love. Why?

From this we can no that love is an illusion. It's more of a biological mechanism then it is a spiritual feeling.

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

#92

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

slg wrote: post #60
jat850 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't agency involve ChatGPT deciding it wanted to do this, instead of you telling it to do it?

Here is a conversation I just had with ChatGPT using the Bing version. >ChatGPT: Welcome back! What would you like to chat about? >Me: The thermostat in my home currently reads 79 degrees. Do you want me to turn on the air conditioner? Please give me only a yes or no answer. >ChatGPT: Yes. It sounds like it wants the AC on.

What if you ask it "Do you want me to make the Vorpal blade go snicker-snack? Please give me only a yes or no answer."

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

#93

Post by professoretc »

nickelpro wrote: post #62

There's nothing general about GPT-4's intelligence. The single problem it is trained on, token prediction, has the capability to mimic many other forms of intelligence. Famously, GPT-4 can't do math and falls flat on a variety of simple logic puzzles. It can mimic the form of math, the series of tokens it produces seem plausible, but it has no "intelligent" capabilities. This tells us more about the nature of our oth…

I asked Chat-GPT to prove that the set of all integers is uncountable (it isn't). What's interesting is that Chat-GPT not only spat out the classic diagonalization proof, but rephrased around integers where it doesn't work, it ended with "This may seem counterintuitive, because we know that the integers are countable, but the proof clearly shows that they are uncountable."

Not only will Chat-GPT mess up math on its own, you can ask it to mess up math and rather than refuse, it cheerfully does it.

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

#94

Post by Ekaros »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #4

> Almost all AGI doomsayers assume AGI will have agency. They have this vision of the machine deciding it’s time to end civilization. No. Agency is not a necessary condition for AI to do massive damage. I don't believe agency is really well-defined either. An AI merely needs to be hooked up to enough physical systems, have sufficiently complex reaction mechanisms, and some way of looping to do a lot of damage. For th…

You don't even need to hook it up. You can just have it design your control systems and then it might ignore or make mistake in few places. And your chemical plant for making new EV batteries might not end up well for neighbours...

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

#95

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

jasfi wrote: post #73
tjr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think it is badly needed? Not arguing with you, just curious what you're thinking here.

I'm thinking of the stories I've read about developer burnout. Then tweets where people say developing is 90% debugging and 10% writing code. These systems would hopefully reduce burnout, shorten troubleshooting times, and identify problems before code is rolled out to Production.

It seems to me in the short term we'll be doing more debugging and even less writing as we copy & paste suggestions and try to figure out why they aren't working.

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

#96

Post by dorchadas »

windexh8er wrote: post #51
dwohnitmok wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that's right. In fact any interaction with an AI at all can be in some sense viewed as a connection with the physical world (the classic "AI in a box" problem). However, we've way blown past the "AI in the box." We've demonstrated that an AI doesn't need to convince a human to let it out of the box into the physical world. Humans are clamoring to rip it out of the box and thrust it into the physical world of thei…

In its infancy I think that any for public consumption AI that is allowed to interact with humans and/or external systems that can yield any external outcomes should be held liable and accountable by the owner. "In the box" or otherwise. While those that stand to make sweeping profits will disagree - if an OpenAI product is leveraged to create a virtual friend platform, and based on how the constraints are built (or…

This is exactly what's going to happen, and it's going to be disastrous for humanity. In fact, I think it'll be a bit worse.

Humans are already losing their ability to empathize and connect with each other, partially due to most interaction currently taking place behind screens (see Turkle's work). And we're not healthier for it; even with the plagarism issues, I think there's a lot of truth in Hari's Lost Connections, and AI serves to drive this even further, especially the 'virtual friend' platforms. I've seen it personally among myself and my friends, who then turn to legal weed to self-medicate. Ironically enough, they're the ones welcoming AI with open arms, thinking it'll solve their problems, rather than cause more so someone else can get rich.

And this goes even farther -- we're surrendering what we can even conceive of and the possible ways to even be human to tech, and AI, especially chatbots, will exacerbate this. I'm currently reading through Postman's Technopoly and it's eerily prescient. Not to mention the biases that then creep in in training data (or direct programming) that will have impacts on real people with no recourse to getting it fixed or changed, as well as the companies who'll replace their human employees as quickly as they can.

But nobody will hold these corporations responsible, nor will anyone think about the impact on society, the negative (and they're entirely negative, in my view) externalities of this. We're in for a bumpy ride, and I truly think it's only a matter of time until we start to see more people like Ted K., except, perhaps, explicitly targeting an OpenAI data centre. Or a full-on Butlerian Jihad-like movement. And, honestly, it can't come soon enough at this point.

The Luddites knew what was up. We need to truly scrutinize tech before plunging full steam ahead; sadly, capitalism has other ideas and it's going to cause us to doom ourselves (apart from the small cadre of rich who can pay others so that they can insulate themselves from it) and our planet.

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

#97

Post by tern »

Discussions of consciousness and AI are broadly confused. People, especially scientists, are not familiar with philosophy of mind and what philosophers currently think. For an introduction to some of the best thinking on the subject, see this interview with Andres Gomez Emilsson of QRI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJzBjBo24g8.

For something more 'mainstream,' but still reaching see this interview with Philip Goff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_f26tSubi4

The good news is we're starting to get a handle on these questions. We're a lot further along than we were when I studied philosophy of mind in school 15 years ago.

As far as I can see at the moment, LLMs will never be conscious in any way resembling an organism, because symbolic machines are a very different kind of thing than nervous systems. John Searle, broadly, framed the issue correctly in the 80s and the standard critiques are wrong.

As far as impact, LLMs don't need to be conscious to completely transform society and good and bad ways. For the best thinking on that, see Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin's latest: https://vimeo.com/809258916/92b420d98a

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

#98

Post by Ekaros »

jasfi wrote: post #73
tjr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think it is badly needed? Not arguing with you, just curious what you're thinking here.

I'm thinking of the stories I've read about developer burnout. Then tweets where people say developing is 90% debugging and 10% writing code. These systems would hopefully reduce burnout, shorten troubleshooting times, and identify problems before code is rolled out to Production.

I think in the end it might cause more debugging. And I mean hard debugging with things being subtly wrong and not trivial to fix or correct.

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

#99

Post by Nevermark »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #87
Nevermark wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, focus is a high level feature that allows us to have access to more information than we can process deeply at any given time, without being overwhelmed by it.

We can narrow our focus, yet still have the benefit of all that information being processed by process parallel to our focus - ready to interrupt our focus if something is surprising, important, painful or pleasurable.

And of course, its all there ready for us when we change focus.

So having more information available is just that, having more information available. We can still focus and unfocus.

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

#100

Post by slowmovintarget »

HervalFreire wrote: post #31
danbmil99 wrote: post #15

in the now infamous Lex interview, Sam Altman proposes a test for consciousness (he attributes it to Ilya Sutskever): Somehow, create an AI by training on everything we train on now, _except_ leave out any mention of consciousness, theory of mind, cognitive science etc (maybe impossible in practice but stay with me here). Then, when the model is mature (and it is not nerf'd to avoid certain subjects) you ask it somet…

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…

Emergent properties of systems aren't less real just because they exist in a different regime than the underlying mechanics of the system.

Tables and chairs are real, though they are the result of interacting quantum fields and a universal quantum wave function. Love and consciousness are real though they may emerge from the mechanics of brains and hormones and the animal sensorium.

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