The Thoughts the Civilized Keep
noemamag.com
The Thoughts the Civilized Keep
1–10 of 36 posts
Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep
#2> Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior, no matter how clever.
Ah, right, it won't work because it doesn't have a soul. Got it.
Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep
#3> Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior, no matter how clever. Ah, right, it won't work because it doesn't have a soul. Got it.
[deleted]
Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep
#4Why does this read to me like an overview of a D&D module where our intrepid PCs fight their way to the emotionless lich king at the heart of the keep? Is it the language use? The priming effect of the image?
Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep
#5> Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior, no matter how clever. Ah, right, it won't work because it doesn't have a soul. Got it.
I don't agree with the article, but hold on -- you don't need to buy "intelligence -> soul" for this.
There are plenty of things that can't (or can't efficiently) be represented in a single agent.
This is (for example) Hayek's main critique of central planning: "[price] understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior"; there are simply too many necessary details to fit into any one head/computer, and therefore we should prefer markets. (Markets being definitionally not located in any one isolated computation/behavior, but inter-agentially in lots of them.)
Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep
#6> Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
I can't help but read this as "automation".
I think there is an interesting philosophical overlap between automation and intelligence. Perhaps some virtuous cycle exists between these things. Like, consciousness is probably only feasible because so much of what happens in our biology occurs without actual intent. If you had to actively process the dilation of your blood vessels or digestion of food, there wouldn't be much room left over for other higher functions.
You see this in tech too. For instance, build automation makes it feasible to then go and do certain things that otherwise would have seemed too complex or costly if someone was baking software by hand.
Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep
#7> Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior, no matter how clever. Ah, right, it won't work because it doesn't have a soul. Got it.
I don't see any evidence of dualism in the article. I think it makes sense that as people try to make intelligent machines we will find out more and more about what that means. The goalposts shift themselves until perhaps one day you find yourself there. But at every point you should expect it to turn out to be more complicated than you thought. Surely.
As for humans losing the ability to understand - that does sound a little bit panicky.
Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep
#8> Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior, no matter how clever. Ah, right, it won't work because it doesn't have a soul. Got it.
No, if you study how GPT-3 works, it becomes pretty clear that that model can't really produce "understanding", even if we can't clearly define what that is very well.
And I don't just mean this from the old point of view of "if we understand it, it's not AI anymore", I mean, the model has serious fundamental limitations. One of them is that it's static, so, once trained, it doesn't learn from its future input. Another is that when it is doing its "what is the highest probability text output to follow this text" (which, itself, is not exactly the sort of question "Strong AI" is the answer to), it by construction can only use a fixed-size window of text. So, for instance, it is by construction simply impossible for GPT-3 to write a novel, or even a short story, because the only way to get it to keep outputting is to provide it a window of the last X KB of output (I don't recall exactly how big it is) for the next continuation, which means that as it is writing the X+5th KB of output, it has literally completely forgotten the first 5KB of output, as completely as if it never existed.
On the flip side, it is clearly very interesting and there is something there. However, I'd submit that what that something is is a something that we don't have an English word for, because up to this point humanity has never encountered anything with a cognitive model like GPT-3. So, it doesn't have "understanding", it has a quality-that-has-no-name (not to be confused with the "quality without a name" which GPT-3 most certainly does not have yet).
Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep
#9> Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior, no matter how clever. Ah, right, it won't work because it doesn't have a soul. Got it.
I don't agree with the article, but hold on -- you don't need to buy "intelligence -> soul" for this. There are plenty of things that can't (or can't efficiently) be represented in a single agent. This is (for example) Hayek's main critique of central planning: "[price] understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior"; there are simply too many necessary details to fit into any one head/computer, an…
I don't see any fundamental reason a human brain couldn't be simulated at the atomic level by a turing machine, so it follows intelligence should be able to come from a machine, as far as it can come from a human.
Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep
#10> Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior, no matter how clever. Ah, right, it won't work because it doesn't have a soul. Got it.
It doesn't come with PURPOSE unless you force it to have some. Which is a perfectly fine avenue to take, I think. But without purpose, what you get is hallucinatory mockeries of meaning: trippy, but if it was consciousness you'd be looking for severe organic damage.
Purpose doesn't automatically mean civilized, but you can't get to civilized without purpose. It's an okay word to use for outlining what's missing.
AI output is increasingly coherent but MEANINGLESS. If you want to look to meaning and purpose, a better place to look might be emergent behaviors of the YouTube Algorithm, or Facebook feed.
Those can easily take toxic swings because they're operating in the absence of a higher sense of what will happen: they're the consciousness of a worm or insect. But they show purpose, where the more coherent and intelligence-like outputs of GPT-3 keep on betraying a lack of meaning.
GPT-3 doesn't WANT anything. There's the problem (though at this stage I think it's just as well). Only that will bring real AI… which can be a daunting prospect.