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Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

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Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#91

Post by bufferoverflow »

endisneigh wrote: post #67
bufferoverflow wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an unreasonable metric for AGI. You're basically requiring AGI to be smarter/better than the smartest/best humans in every single field. What you're describing is ASI. If we have AGI that is on the level of an average human (which is pretty dumb), it's already very useful. That gives you robotic paradise where robots do ALL mundane tasks.

What is your definition for AGI that isn't already met? Computers have already been superior to average humans in a variety of fields since the 90s. If we consider intelligence as the ability to acquire knowledge, then any "AGI" will be "ASI" in short order, therefore I make no distinction between the two.

AGI must be comparable to humans' capabilities in most fields. That includes things like

• driving (at human level safety)

• folding clothes with two robotic hands

• write mostly correct code at large scale (not just leetcode problems), fix bugs after testing

• ability to reason beyond simple riddles

• perform simple surgeries unassisted

• look at a recipe and cook a meal

• most importantly, ability to learn new skills at average human level. Ability to figure out what it needs to learn to solve a given problem, watch some tutorials, and learn from that.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#92

Post by throwup238 »

glial wrote: post #87
throwup238 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have any evidence to the contrary, I would love to hear it because it would upend biology and modern medicine as we know it and we'd both win a Nobel prize. As long as it's modern scientific evidence and not a 2,300 year old anecdote, of course.

The role of astrocytes in neural computation is an example. For a long time, the assumption was that astrocytes were just "maintenance" or structural cells (the name "glia" comes from "glue"). Thus, they were not included in computational models. More recently, there is growing recognition that they play an important role in neural computation, e.g. https://picower.mit.edu/discoveries/key-roles-astrocytes

The first several sentences from your article:

> Neurons do not work alone. Instead, they depend heavily on non-neuronal or “glia” cells for many important services including access to nutrition and oxygen, waste clearance, and regulation of the ions such as calcium that help them build up or disperse electric charge.

That's exactly what homeostatisis is but we don't simulate astrocyte mitochondria to understand what effect they have on another neuron's activation. They are independent. Otherwise, biochemistry wouldn't function at all.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#93

Post by arp242 »

mmaunder wrote: post #73

I think history has shown us that we tend to underestimate the rate of technological progress and it's rate of acceleration. It's tempting to look at Moore's law and use say the development of the 8080, z-80 and 6502 in 1975 as an epoch. But it's hard to use that to get a visceral sense of how much things changed. I think RAM - in other words, available memory - may be more helpful, and it does relate in a distant wa…

> I think history has shown us that we tend to underestimate the rate of technological progress and it's rate of acceleration.

It's also been overestimated tons of times. Look at some of the predictions from the past. It's been a complete crap-shoot. Many things have changed significantly less than people have predicted, or in significantly different ways, or significantly more.

Just because things are accelerating great pace right now doesn't really mean anything for the future. Look at the predictions people made during the "space age" 1950s and 60s. A well-known example would be 2001 (the film and novel). Yes, it's "just" some fiction, but it was also a serious attempt at predicting what the future would roughly look like, and Arthur C. Clarke wasn't some dumb yahoo either.

The year 2001 is more than 20 years in the past, and obviously we're nowhere near the world of 2001, for various reasons. Other examples include things like the Von Braun wheel, predictions from serious scientists that we'd have a moon colony by the 1990s, etc. etc. There were tons of predictions and almost none of them have come true.

They all assumed that the rate of progress would continue as it had, but it didn't, for technical, economical, and pragmatic reasons. What's the point of establishing an expensive moon colony when we've got a perfectly functional planet right here? Air is nice (in spite of what Spongebob says). Plants are nice. Water is nice. Non-cramped space to live in is nice. A magnetosphere to protect us from radiation is nice. We kind of need these things to survive and none are present on the moon.

Even when people are right they're wrong. See "Arthur C Clarke predicts the internet in 1964"[1]. He did accurately predict the internet; "a man could conduct his business just as well from Bali as London" pretty much predicts all the "digital nomads" in Bali today, right?

But he also predicts that the city will be obsolete and "seizes to make any sense". Clearly that part hasn't come true, and likely never will. Can't "remotely" get a haircut, or get a pint with friends, or all sorts of other things. And where are all those remote workers in Bali? In the Denpasar/Kuta/Canggu area. That is: a city.

It's half right and half wrong.

The take-away is that predicting the future is hard, and that anyone who claims to predicts the future with great certainty is a bullshitter, idiot, or both.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC3E2qTCIY8

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#94

Post by OJFord »

dogprez wrote: post #29
endisneigh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? By that same logic humans definitionally already have done everything they can or will do with technology. I believe AGI must be definitionally superior. Anything else and you could argue it’s existed for a while, e.g. computers have been superior at adding numbers basically their entire existence. Even with reasoning, computers have been better for a while. Language models have allowed for that rea…

The comparison of the accomplishments of one entity versus the entirety of humanity is needlessly high. Imagine if we could duplicate everything humans could do but it required specialized AIs, (airplane pilot AI, software engineer AI, chemist AI, etc). That world would be radically different than the one we know and it doesn't reach your bar. So, in that sense it's a misplaced benchmark.

I think GP is thinking that those would be AIs yes, but a A General I would be able to do them all, like a hypothetical human GI would.

I'm not saying I agree, I'm not really sure how useful it is as a term, seems to me any definition would be arbitrary - we'll always want more intelligence, it doesn't really matter if it's reached a level we can call 'general' or not.

(More useful in specialised roles perhaps, like the 'levels' of self-driving capability.)

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#95

Post by glial »

throwup238 wrote: post #92
glial wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The role of astrocytes in neural computation is an example. For a long time, the assumption was that astrocytes were just "maintenance" or structural cells (the name "glia" comes from "glue"). Thus, they were not included in computational models. More recently, there is growing recognition that they play an important role in neural computation, e.g. https://picower.mit.edu/discoveries/key-roles-astrocytes

The first several sentences from your article: > Neurons do not work alone. Instead, they depend heavily on non-neuronal or “glia” cells for many important services including access to nutrition and oxygen, waste clearance, and regulation of the ions such as calcium that help them build up or disperse electric charge. That's exactly what homeostatisis is but we don't simulate astrocyte mitochondria to understand what…

Sure, but if you continue:

> they showed in live, behaving animals that they could enhance the response of visual cortex neurons to visual stimulation by directly controlling the activity of astrocytes.

Perhaps we're talking past each other, but I thought you were implying that since some function supports homeostasis, we can assume it doesn't matter to a larger computation, and don't need to model it. That's not true with astrocytes, and I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually find out that other biological functions (like "junk DNA") fall into that category as well.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#96

Post by logtempo »

dmd wrote: post #64
gary_0 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what kind of simulation you're trying to run, though. You don't need to perfectly model the physically moving heads and magnetic oscillations of a hard drive to emulate an old PC; it may be enough to just store the bytes. I suspect if you just want an automaton that provides the utility of a human brain, we'll be fine just using statistical approximations based on what we see biological neurons doing. T…

> based on what we see biological neurons doing We have almost no idea what biological neurons are doing, or why. At least we didn't when I got my PhD in neuroscience a little over 10 years ago. Maybe it's a solved problem by now.

It made a big step forward, imagery is more powerfull now and some people are starting to grow organoids made of neurons. There is a lot to learn, but as soon as we can get good data, AI will step in and digest it I guess.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#97

Post by throwup238 »

glial wrote: post #95
throwup238 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first several sentences from your article: > Neurons do not work alone. Instead, they depend heavily on non-neuronal or “glia” cells for many important services including access to nutrition and oxygen, waste clearance, and regulation of the ions such as calcium that help them build up or disperse electric charge. That's exactly what homeostatisis is but we don't simulate astrocyte mitochondria to understand what…

Sure, but if you continue: > they showed in live, behaving animals that they could enhance the response of visual cortex neurons to visual stimulation by directly controlling the activity of astrocytes. Perhaps we're talking past each other, but I thought you were implying that since some function supports homeostasis, we can assume it doesn't matter to a larger computation, and don't need to model it. That's not tru…

> Perhaps we're talking past each other, but I thought you were implying that since some function supports homeostasis, we can assume it doesn't matter to a larger computation, and don't need to model it. That's not true with astrocytes, and I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually find out that other biological functions (like "junk DNA") fall into that category as well.

I was only referring to the internal processes of a cell. We don't need to simulate 90+% of the biochemical processes in a neuron to get an accurate simulation of that neuron - if we did it'd pretty much fuck up our understanding of every other cell because most cells share the same metabolic machinery.

The characteristics of the larger network and which cells are involved is an open question in neuroscience and it's largely an intractable problem as of this time.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#98

Post by gary_0 »

dmd wrote: post #64
gary_0 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what kind of simulation you're trying to run, though. You don't need to perfectly model the physically moving heads and magnetic oscillations of a hard drive to emulate an old PC; it may be enough to just store the bytes. I suspect if you just want an automaton that provides the utility of a human brain, we'll be fine just using statistical approximations based on what we see biological neurons doing. T…

> based on what we see biological neurons doing We have almost no idea what biological neurons are doing, or why. At least we didn't when I got my PhD in neuroscience a little over 10 years ago. Maybe it's a solved problem by now.

I'm referring to the various times biological neurons have been (and will likely continue to be) the inspiration for artificial neurons[0]. I acknowledge that the word "inspiration" is doing a lot of work here, but the research continues[1][2]. If you have a PhD in neuroscience, I understand your need to push back on the hand-wavy optimism of the technologists, but I think saying "almost no idea" is going a little far. Neuroscientists are not looking up from their microscopes and fMRI's, throwing up their hands, and giving up. Yes, there is a lot of work left to do, but it seems needlessly pessimistic to say we have made almost no progress either in understanding biological neurons or in moving forward with their distantly related artificial counterparts.

Just off the top of my head, in my lifetime, I have seen discoveries regarding new neuropeptides/neurotransmitters such as orexin, starting to understand glial cells, new treatments for brain diseases such as epilepsy, new insight into neural metabolism, and better mapping of human neuroanatomy. I might only be a layman observing, but I have a hard time believing anyone can think we've made almost no progress.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_neural_n...

[1] https://ai.stackexchange.com/a/3936

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-84813-6

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#99

Post by novagameco »

ehsanu1 wrote: post #80
novagameco wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm optimistic in that I hope we don't have AGI by 2100 because it sounds like a truly dystopian future even in the best case scenario

What kind of best case are you imagining? I don't quite understand why the very best case would be dystopian.

I believe the best case scenario is one where humans have all of our needs met and all jobs are replaced with AI. Money becomes pointless and we live in a post-scarcity society. The world is powered by clean energy and we become net-zero carbon. Life becomes pointless with nothing to strive toward or struggle against. Humans spend their lives consuming media and entertaining ourselves like the people in Wall-E. A truly meaningless existence.

Francis Fukuyama wrote in "The Last Man":

> The life of the last man is one of physical security and material plenty, precisely what Western politicians are fond of promising their electorates. Is this really what the human story has been "all about" these past few millennia? Should we fear that we will be both happy and satisfied with our situation, no longer human beings but animals of the genus homo sapiens?

It's a fantastic essay (really, the second half of his seminal book) that I think everyone should read

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#100

Post by idopmstuff »

arp242 wrote: post #93
mmaunder wrote: post #73

I think history has shown us that we tend to underestimate the rate of technological progress and it's rate of acceleration. It's tempting to look at Moore's law and use say the development of the 8080, z-80 and 6502 in 1975 as an epoch. But it's hard to use that to get a visceral sense of how much things changed. I think RAM - in other words, available memory - may be more helpful, and it does relate in a distant wa…

> I think history has shown us that we tend to underestimate the rate of technological progress and it's rate of acceleration. It's also been overestimated tons of times. Look at some of the predictions from the past. It's been a complete crap-shoot. Many things have changed significantly less than people have predicted, or in significantly different ways, or significantly more. Just because things are accelerating g…

> What's the point of establishing an expensive moon colony when we've got a perfectly functional planet right here?

I think this is the big difference between what you're describing and AI. AI already exists, unlike a moon colony, so we're talking about pushing something forward vs. creating brand new things. It's also pretty well established that it's got tremendous economic value, which means that in our capitalist society, it's going to have a lot of resources directed at it. Not necessarily the case for a moon colony whose economic value is speculative and much longer term.

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