Hacker News Reader

Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

In fact, Chollet links a whole series of essays worth reading:

1) The Myth of a Superhuman AI (https://www.wired.com/2017/04/the-myth-of-a-superhuman-ai/)

2) The Terminator Is Not Coming. (https://www.recode.net/2015/3/2/11559576/the-terminator-is-n...)

3) idlewords : Superintelligence - The Idea That Eats Smart People (http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm)

The frustrating thing is that people with insane amounts of resources and disposable income get swallowed up by these Basilisk-ian non-concerns, while very real pressing issues like Police Brutality, Wealth Inequality, Lack of HealthCare, etc. are deemed too boring for enthusiastic action.

View on HN

The Myth of Superhuman AI has to be a joke. Please tell me it's a joke.

> Intelligence is not a single dimension, so “smarter than humans” is a meaningless concept.

So "I'm smarter than my dog" is a meaningless sentence? My dog will be happy to hear that . . . if he could understand it.

> Humans do not have general purpose minds, and neither will AIs.

This statement (even if true) seems totally irrelevant to his argument. So I was really looking forward to read the long form version in section #2 and see if it somehow makes sense.

It doesn't seem to.

His point is that minds involve tradeoffs, so specialized agents might be better than a big general AI. Whose side is he arguing on here? He isn't showing that a general intelligence couldn't exist that's better than humans in every way. He's just saying that even it would be inferior in specialized tasks to even more inhuman, specialized minds. Comforting this is not.

> Emulation of human thinking in other media will be constrained by cost.

This section is kind of a hack too, but since at least the title makes sense lets give him a freebie.

> Dimensions of intelligence are not infinite.

Oh golly. He starts off by asserting that the core of the AGI people's ideas relies on intelligence being on an unlimited scale. It includes this gem: "Temperature is not infinite — there is finite cold and finite heat." My estimate of this being a joke article is going back up.

Alright, I agree that intelligence, like temperature, is not infinite. I still don't want be be competing for a job opening with Von Neumann. Von Neumann doesn't want to be competing for a job with future-AGI-silicon-Von-Neumann, whose brain is 500 million GPUs in a datacenter stretching across Montana.

> Intelligences are only one factor in progress.

Right, just wildly the most important one.

My honest opinion is that I feel a little bad for the author. He clearly just doesn't want to believe the plausibility of this idea, and is just throwing every argument he can against it and hoping one of them sticks. I sympathize, but this kind of squid-ink writing probably doesn't serve as a great foundation for future debate.

> In fact, Chollet links a whole series of essays worth reading:

Appeal to authority. You're not presenting any substantive rebuttals, just assuming it's not a concern because someone else with credentials said so. It's identical to alleging that I'm only worried because Elon Musk says so.

> The frustrating thing is that people with insane amounts of resources and disposable income get swallowed up by these Basilisk-ian non-concerns, while very real pressing issues like Police Brutality, Wealth Inequality, Lack of HealthCare, etc. are deemed too boring for enthusiastic action.

Nice strawman. It's also pretty disrespectful for you to assume my socioeconomic background. I live in the United States and have to deal with the issues you pointed out on a visceral basis. That has nothing to do with AI though so I'm not sure why you're even bringing it up.

That's not an appeal to authority. The essays themselves are substantive; he didn't say, "Chollet says so, thus it is so."

More importantly there is an element of misuse going on here: the "fallacy fallacy" if you will. Fallacies like ad hominem and appeal to authority are very often mis-cited without substantive refutations. But in the absence of other qualifying data it is absolutely relevant to a dialectic session that you mention authorities in a subject matter. When we talk about things like consensus in sciences (like climate change, for example), that is a valid appeal to authority.

You don't have enough time or expertise to verify specialized information or even qualify its context. At some point you absolutely need to appeal to authority just to be productive. If you can assess data yourself then that's obviously better, but in the absence of that capacity the assertion of various authorities is a valid first heuristic.

He wasn't talking about you, he was talking about Musk.

That's fair. Regardless of Musk's talking points, I'm still worried and I don't care how many people here think I'm paranoid. Engineers during the Industrial Revolution had no idea they were sowing the seeds of global warming [1]. We're putting a lot of money into AI under the assumption that it's all going to be a smooth ride. There's this notion that even if neural networks become more sophisticated than those of human brains, that AI will be completely subservient to us and we can just pull the plug whenever we want. If there's one thing humans are good at, it's self-destructive hubris.

[1] http://theconversation.com/the-industrial-revolution-kick-st...

> Appeal to authority.

??? I just gave you a ton of arguments you can read through.

You want me to copy-paste them here?

Ultimately, your "arguments" are refuted with a simple "There's zero reason to be afraid of what you're afraid of".

I would have appreciated at least an abstract or synopsis but okay. When I have time I'll read through these articles.

> Ultimately, your "arguments" are refuted with a simple "There's zero reason to be afraid of what you're afraid of".

Yes, I'm sure it's that black and white.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com