John Carmack on the Joe Rogan Experience [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
Neuralink: https://youtu.be/udlMSe5-zP8?t=2523
Artificial General Intelligence: https://youtu.be/udlMSe5-zP8?t=2778
Quantum Computing: https://youtu.be/udlMSe5-zP8?t=3106
“Engineering is figuring out how to do what you want with what you’ve actually got”: https://youtu.be/udlMSe5-zP8?t=3190
End of Moore’s Law / On CPU architecture: https://youtu.be/udlMSe5-zP8?t=3860
5G and streaming (games & video): https://youtu.be/udlMSe5-zP8?t=4288
edit: like already mentioned there are a lot of topics covered, some even for just a few sentences, the conversation flows, worth watching the whole thing
If you think about the price of gaming PC or console, there is huge discrepancy between the budget of hardcore gaming enthusiast and casual gamer. It would be nice to get $5000 gaming tower in every house, but you don't. Many casual gamers would rent $5000 - $10,000 worth of gaming hardware for few hours a week it was simple. Only way to get bleeding edge high-end gaming to masses is to put GPU and some other parts to the edge (or at least within the same city) and stream or partially stream the game to cheaper computer device and screens.
Consider $5,000 worth of bleeding edge hardware that costs $1/hour to run. If you rent it for $8/hour, and it only sells for 5 hours per day for gaming, the HW pays itself back in 5 months. It could be rented out for other stuff in the meantime. Cloudflare, what do you think?
I could see a market emerging similar to school VHS/DVD/Game rentals. There is limited computational resource near you and you can rent it for gaming. If all is taken (weekend evenings) the 'shelves' are empty. On working/school days and hours you get the same thing cheaper.
It probably happens in Japan, South Korea and Nordic countries first.
Btw. Fiber has no latency advantage. What you need is servers at edge in both use cases.
That's because heavy bandwidth use (downloads, video streaming) will saturate a low bandwidth link and packets will drop. Or bufferbloat will increase latency without dropping, which is the same for latency sensitive usage.
With multiple video streams going on in the average household being a common case nowadays, it's nice to have enough bandwidth.
My benchmark would be the XBox One X, which is perfectly capable of 4k 60 fps gaming with HDR and Atmos, try to get that stable running with any PC, good luck. That's 400 for the console and in total under 2000 if you need to get an additional OLED-TV and Atmos-enabled-speakerset, which are not exclusively gaming budget.
The only shortcoming there is the absence of fast current generation NVMe mass storage and RTX-enabled GPU.
Reasonable high end PC gaming is possible well below $2000 or even $1000, even $500 will get you decent performance for even casual competetive gameplay.
The priceyness of gaming rigs setups comes from the insane demand of getting an edge at 4k 120+fps in FPS-shooters. That bracket can't be conviced by any streaming services physical limitations for the next 10 year or so at least.
You actually need a machine north of $2k to support 60fps 4k.
4K and >120 FPS are incompatible goals. If you are optimizing for frames in a competitive title the first thing you will do is turn total render target size down to the minimum. Conversely, if you want to render at max quality, those pixels look a lot nicer as resolution than as frames.
If you’re a real pro, you can spend five times as much money to hit 80% of cutting-edge performance on both metrics simultaneously. You hardcore gamer, you.
People who talk like that are usually kids spending their parents’ money.
FYI, genuine demand for higher gaming performance is mostly being driven by VR, where sentences like “8K at 144hz” aren’t just big numbers.
If console is running 4k@60Hz, it means that level of details is probably somewhere in low settings compared to PC version. For that, you don't need 2000USD PC, something much cheaper would be enough. On top of that you can use it, well, as PC. But yes consoles will be cheaper, just not that much and its purpose is much, much more narrow
Easy. It will obviously be more much expensive than a console, but it's perfectly doable if you have the budget for it
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/ao4c0u/anyone_with_...
Going to disagree with you here. I don't think there is even one game that runs at full 4K (not CBR) and maintains 60fps. If there is one I would love to know so I can check it out but so far everything I play on my Xbox One X is either running at well below 4K in order to maintain 60fps or runs at 30fps with 4K CBR. Very few games are true 4K.
In reality it is 400 for the console + 60 / year for online gaming, which means it is about 640 for 4 years of gaming.
Others have mentioned that you can't get 60fps @ 4k, but I have never played on an xbox one x, so I can't attest to that.
Then I would imagine the problem is that everyone is playing video games at about the same time, i.e. in the evening or at certain times of the week end. So you need to provision for peak usage.
So to me the only benefit to renting is if there are lots of occasional gamers, that do not play every day / every week, including peaks where they would all suddenly play at the same time on certain days (christmas, long week ends, release of new game, etc).
And then of course because the hardware progresses so quickly you need to amortise the hardware pretty fast.
I haven't seen the actual economics but I am surprised it would be much cheaper for consumers.
The reason most services need to be located close to clients is because you want to avoid data transit over the open internet. You want as little open internet as possible between you and the client. Traffic that's internal to Google's networks doesn't have that problem. You can use compute / gpu in US-west and transit that data to you via US-east and the additional latency would be measured in nanoseconds.
That's definitely noticeable for latency-sensitive actions. I recently switched a server from Oregon to New Mexico, and I notice the latency increase with mosh.
Moreover, there's not a lot of timezone difference between the east and west coasts of the US. Going someplace like Europe is more like 180 ms.
I've played games with a ping like that, but a lot of the ping was my wifi. Doubling the latency would not make the game a better experience.
This could work well for certain types of game, those that are a little less latency-sensitive. But in general the latency is still a big issue.
[0]: speed of light in fiber is ~ 100e6 m/s, around 3000 miles between coasts
This is still a fairly niche market, and while there are certainly evening peak times, younger kids have a lot more free time than you might think.
How well the company hosting this is doing, I couldn't tell you, but the product itself seemed to work and work well, so much so that I have had it on my to-do list to try and experience it for myself.
I can see things working out, but still expensive, if the hardware also being using for scientific computing and CGI rendering.
Although I'm not sure if gaming hardware can run 24/7.
Renting game consoles only works for casual gamers or super hard core people who want $5k rigs. Casual gamers don’t care, I think, and use their 5 year old iPhone. And there aren’t a ton of super high end gamers. And I hang out in gaming cafes where people pay $6/hour.
Paying $1800/year/per person forever is a bad deal.
same lines as... _life is figuring what to do with what you’ve got_.
Even someone who never took calculus can usually grasp the concept of first learning ideal velocity and acceleration, then adding details like friction.
Start with the simplest conveyance, which usually is riddled with the most bullshit. If you don't lose them, just add the corrections, if there are too many, only add some of the corrections, rinse, repeat.
Bad simplification: "The CPU is like the brain of your computer"
Better simplification: "The CPU is like the conductor of your computer"
You may not think my "better simplification" is so great either. The point is, somebody may be satisfied with the "brain" answer because it feels right, but (IMO) it doesn't actually give you a better understanding of the situation.
When learning, I don't appreciate reading a description of something, thinking about it, generating my own conclusions, then finally reading forward to find I had been misled not by my own fault but by faulty explanations.
As an example, a book I read on SQL was narrated from the point of view of an employee at a startup and stated that indexes on views were efficient, but then eventually backtracked on that statement, saying that this is only true for materialized views.
It's definitely something you can learn though, it just takes practice. Take a complex topic and summarize it to yourself in shorter and shorter sentences. Or browse ELI5 (explain like I'm five) on Reddit for some good amateur responses.
Not remotely the same league as Richard Feynman.
The "smell in VR" kits in this interview were interesting. I hadn't realized so much progress had been made on that front (or that it would take so much to make it as convincing as visual input).
A lot of people also became professional [level] designers because of his works - Doom was innotivative, among the many things, in the fact that it was designed from the ground up for extension (modding).
I shifted out of doing level design work, but some of the people I worked with ended up on the Medal of Honor team.
Well, we had smell-o-vision for a loooong time...
I wonder if all the really smart people who think AGI is around the corner know something I don't. Well, clearly they know a lot of things that I don't, but I wonder if there's some decisive piece of information I'm missing. I'm a "strict materialist" too, but that doesn't mean I think we can build a brain or a sun or a planet or etc within X years, it just means that I think it's technically possible to build those things.
I don't see how we get from "neural net that's really good at identifying objects" to "general intelligence". The emphasis on computational power also makes no sense to me. If we had infinite compute today, what steps would you take to build AGI? Does anyone have any good ideas about that?
Sometimes I wonder if AGI (and the concept of a "technological singularity") isn't just "intelligent design for people with north of 140 IQ". Maybe really smart people tend to develop a blindspot for really hard problems (because they've solved so many of them so effectively).
When you read them, you will probably update in the direction of “AGI soon”. It’s possible that you won’t see what the big deal is, I suppose. I personally see what Carmack and others see, a feasible path to generality, and even some specific promising precursors to generality.
It also helps to be familiar with the most current cognitive neuroscience papers, but that’s asking a lot.
I'm going to be pessimistic and say that AGI is probably decades away (if not centuries away for a human-like AGI). There are clearly many biological aspects of the brain that we do not understand today, and likely will not be able to replicate without far more advanced medical imaging techniques.
Also, seeing computers perform tasks they haven't done before can convince people that the model behind the scenes is closer to AGI than it really is. The fact that deep neural networks are very hard to decifer only furthers the mystical nature of the "intelligence" of the model.
Also, tasks like playing starcraft are very impressive, but are not very close to true AGI in my opinion. Perhaps theres a more formal definition that I'm not aware of, but in my mind, AGI is not being good at playing starcraft, AGI is deciding to learn to play starcraft in the first place.
That's my 2 cents, anyways.
The Greeks observed these limitations thousands of years ago. Below is an excerpt from Plato's "Theaetetus":
Socrates: That is certainly a frank and indeed a generous answer, my dear lad. I asked you for one thing [a definition of "knowledge"] and you have given me many; I wanted something simple, and I have got a variety.
Theaetetus: And what does that mean, Socrates?
Socrates: Nothing, I dare say. But I'll tell you what I think. When you talk about cobbling, you mean just knowledge of the making of shoes?
Theaetetus: Yes, that's all I mean by it.
Socrates: And when you talk about carpentering, you mean simply the knowledge of the making of wooden furniture?
Theaetetus: Yes, that's all I mean, again.
Socrates: And in both cases you are putting into your definition what the knowledge is of?
Theaetetus: Yes.
Socrates: But that is not what you were asked, Theaetetus. You were not asked to say what one may have knowledge of, or how many branches of knowledge there are. It was not with any idea of counting these up that the question was asked; we wanted to know what knowledge itself is.--Or am I talking nonsense?
The other one (also perhaps relevant to the general topic of this thread): WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is).
Is that not what a computer is? We have continuously tried and failed to create machines that think, react, and learn like the brains of living things, and instead managed to create machines that manage to simulate or even surpass the capabilities of brains in some contexts, while still completely failing in others.
That means 0.01% of the timeline was all it took for us to differentiate ourselves from regular animals who aren't a threat to the planet.
0.01% of 100 years is 3 days.
DNA sequencing went from $3b per genome to $600, in about 30 years, much, much faster than Moore's "law".
Machine learning at this point seems closer to a tool designed analytically (feeding it well-formed data relevant to the task, hand-designing the network) than to AGI.
AGI is a scientific problem of the hardest kind, not an engineering problem where you just use existing knowledge to build better and better things.
Marving Minsky once said that in mathematics just five axioms is enough to provide the amount of complexity that overwhelms the best minds for centuries. AGI could be messy practical problem that depends on 10 or 25 fundamental 'axioms' that work together to produce general intelligence. "I bet the human brain is a kludge." - Marvin Minsky
The idea that if many people think this problem very hard, the problem is solved in our lifetime is prevalent. It's not true in math and physics, so why would AI be any different? Progress is made but you can't know if there is breakthrough tomorrow or if it happens 100 years from now. Just adding more computational capability is not going to solve AI.
Currently it's the engineering applications and the use of the science what is exploding and getting funded. In fact, I think some of the best brains are lured from the fundamental research into applied science with high pay and resources. What the current state of the art can do now has not been utilized fully in the economy and this brings in the investments and momentum.
Much of the take-aways from this year's North American International Auto Show was that the manufacturer's are reluctantly realizing the real scope of the problem and trying to temper expectations. [0]
And self-driving cars is still a problem orders of magnitude simpler than AGI.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/business/self-driving-aut...
You sure? It might very well be a single order of magnitude harder, or not any harder. Given that solving all the problems of self driving even delves into questions of ethics at times (who do I endanger in this lose lose situation, etc)
I actually don't think the ethics part is all that hard if (and that's a big if) there can be an agreement on a standard approach. An example would be a utilitarian model, but this often is not compatible with egalitarian ethics. This approach reeks of technocracy but it's certainly a solvable problem.
If the self-driving car has no limits on versatility, then, given an oracle for solving the self-driving car problem, you could use that to build an agent that answers arbitrary YES-NO questions. Namely: feed the car fake input so it thinks it has driven to a fork in the road and there's a road-sign saying "If the answer to the following question is YES then the left road is closed, otherwise the right road is closed."
Compare with e.g. proofs that the C++ compiler is Turing complete. These proofs involve feeding the C++ compiler extremely unusual programs that would never actually come up organically. But that doesn't invalidate the proof that the C++ compiler is Turing complete.
I was thinking in terms of "minimum viable product" for self-driving cars, which I have a hunch will be of limited versatility compared to what you describe. To have a truly self-driving car as capable as humans in most situations, you may be right.
Many cities choose to forego trains for busses in large part due to the lower upfront costs and the ability to change routes as the needs of the populace change.
Self driving cars would realistically have to keep functioning in situations where arbitrary communication with humans is required (which happens daily), which tends to turn into an AI-hard problem quite quickly.
"It has to be able to handle any possible conceivable scenario without human assistance" so people ask things like "will a self-driving car be able to change its own tyre in case of a flat" and "will a self-driving car be able to defend the Earth from an extraterrestrial invasion in order to get to its destination".
They need to update the official definition of level 5 to "must be able to handle any situation that an average human driver could reasonably handle without getting out of the vehicle."
(Although the "level 1" - "level 5" scale is a terrible way to describe autonomous vehicles in any case and needs to be replaced with a measure of how long it's safe for the vehicle to operate without human supervision.)
Neuroscience is full of problems of the hardest kind.
Until we define 'cake', we cannot create cake.
I mean, words have meaning don't they? Or, if not, then what's the fucking point?
The ML community is generally extremely open, and people know what the other top people are working on. If an AGI was developed in secret, it would have to be without the involvement of the top researchers.
One might extrapolate that there is a chance that in 10 years, when the computational horsepower is available to more researchers to play with, and we get another step-change advance, that we will get there.
My own feeling is that it is possible AGI could happen soon, but I don't expect it will.
In general I don't think our current approach to AI is all that clever. It brute forces algorithms which no human has any comprehension of or ability to modify. All a human can do is modify the input data set and hope a better algorithm (which they also don't understand) arises from the neural network.
It's like a very permissive compiler which produces a binary full of runtime errors. You have to find bugs at runtime and fiddle with the input until the runtime error goes away. Was it a bug in your input? Or a bug in the compiler? Who knows. Change whichever you think of first. It's barely science and it's barely a debug workflow.
What pushed me all the way over the edge was when adversarial techniques started to be applied to self-driving cars. That white paper made them look like death machines. This entire development process I am criticising assumes we get to live in the happy path, and we're not. The same dark forces infosec can barely keep at bay on the internet, and have completely failed to stop on IoT, will now be able to target your car as well.
Worst thing is all our otherwise brilliant humans like Carmack are gonna be the guinea pigs in the cars as they head off toward their next runtime crash.
Every action my brain takes is made of two components: (1) the desired outcome of the thought, and (2) the computation required to achieve that outcome. No matter how well computers can solve for 2, I have no idea how they'd manage solving for 1. This is because in order to think at all, I have to have a desire to think that thought, and that is a function of me being an organism that wants to live, eat, sleep, etc.
So for me, I just wonder how we're going to replicate volition itself. That's a vastly different, and vastly more complicated, problem.
Worrying about some apocalypse seems counterproductive to me.
But speaking of de novo, I'm not at all sure that a desire to think a thought it required in order to think. The opposite seems closer: the less one tries to think, the more one ends up thinking.
I'm pivoting from your point here, but I see that bit as the hurdle we're not close to overcoming. We are likely missing huge pieces of the puzzle when it comes to understanding human "intelligence" (and intelligence itself is not the full picture). With such a limited understanding, a replication or full superseding in the near future seems unlikely. Perhaps the blind spot of the experts, as /u/leftyted alluded to, is that their modest success so far has generated a reality-distorting hubris.
I think the linchpin of my belief is recursive self improvement. I think machine intelligences are a different kind of substance with different dynamics than the ones we typically encounter.
I don't think someone will compile the first AGI and presto there is it. I think a long running system of processes will interact and rewrite its own code to produce something, which eventually a reasonable boundary could be drawn to distinguish the system and anyone interacting with the system would say: "this thing is intelligent, the most intelligent thing on the planet". It would have instant access to all written knowledge, essentially unbounded power to compute new facts and information and model the world to as accurate of an approximation as needed to produce high confidence utterances.
I just don't see how a system like that couldn't come into existence one day. Issues around timelines are completely unknowable to me. But I would put a distribution of something like I would be surprised if it happened in the next 50 years and shocked if it didn't happen within the next 1000. Very fuzzy, but it "feels" inevitable.
If a collection of unthinking cells can coordinate and produce the feeling of conscious experience then I can't see what would stop silicon from producing similar behavior without many bounds inherent in biological systems.
Artificial systems should be able to climb given a suitable gradient. I think the hard part of AGI is going to be designing the environment and gradient to produce "intention", I don't think the hard part is studying the human mind to find out the "secret of intelligence"
The goal of AGI isn't silicon minds isomorphic to human minds at each level of interpretation. Just the existence of an intelligent system.
So these napkin estimates comparing brainpower what server farms can do doesn't inform us at all about how that gets us closer to AGI.
* Neural nets play Chess or Go better than us. They will soon play Mathematics better than us.
* They turn keywords in photo-realistic images in seconds, and will soon do the same for text. Literature and Arts down this path.
* They learn to play video games better than us, from Starcraft to Dota. Engineering down this path.
There is no hidden information. You just need to look at the width of the field. There is a credible challenge for all our intelligent capabilities.
Anyone with more training want to chime in?
The question is how you get from that to AGI.
Between rounds at an amateur chess tournament you will often find players passing the time playing a game commonly called Bughouse or Siamese chess. It's played by two teams of two players, using two chess sets and two clock. Let's call them team A, consisting of players Aw and Ab, and team B, consisting of player Bw and Bb.
The boards are set up so that Aw and Bb play on one board, and Ab and Bw on the other. They play a normal clocked game (with one major modification described below) on each board, and as soon as any player is checkmated, runs out of time on their clock, or resigns, the Bughouse game ends and that player's team loses.
The one major modification to the rules is that when a player captures something, that captured piece or pawn becomes available to their partner, who can later elect on any move to drop that on their board instead of making a move on the board.
E.g., if Aw captures a queen, Ab then has a black queen in reserve. Later, instead of making a move, Ab can place that black queen on Ab's board. The capture pieces must be kept where the other team can easily see them.
You can talk to your teammate during the game. This communication is very important because the state of your teammates game can greatly affect the value of your options. For example, I might be in a position to capture a queen for a knight, and just looking at my board that might be a great move. But it will result in my partner having a queen available to drop, and my partner's opponent having a knight to drop. Once on the board a queen is usually worth a lot more than a knight--but when in reserve it is the knight that is often the more deadly piece. So, I'll ask my teammate if queen for knight is OK. My teammate might say yes, or no, or something more complicated, like wait until his opponent moves, so that he can prepare for that incoming enemy knight. In the later case, if I've got less time on my clock than my teammate's opponent has, the latter might delay his move, trying to force me to either do the trade while it is sill his turn, or do something else which will let his teammate save his queen. This can get quite complicated.
OK, now imagine some kid, maybe 12 years old or so, who is at his first tournament, and is pretty good for his age, and had never played Bughouse. He's played a ton of regular chess at his school club and with friends, and with the computer.
A friend asks him to team up, quickly explains the rules, and they start playing Bughouse.
First few games, that kid is going to cause his team to lose a lot. He'll be making that queen for knight capture without checking the other board, shortly followed by his partner yelling "WHERE DID THAT KNIGHT COME FROM!? AAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHHH!!!".
The thing is, though, by the end of the day, after playing a few games of Bughouse between each round of the tournament, that kid will have figured out a fair amount of which parts of his knowledge of normal chess openings, endgames, tactics, general principles, etc., transfers as is to Bughouse, which parts need modification (and how to make those modifications), and which parts have to be thrown out.
To get his Bughouse proficiency up to about the same level as his regular chess proficiency will take orders of magnitude less games than it took for regular chess.
I don't think that is currently true for artificial neural nets. Training one for Bughouse would be as much work as training one for regular chess, even if you started with one that had been already trained for regular chess.
I'm kind of coming up with these numbers out of thin air, but as much of a legend as he is, I agree Carmack's estimate seems way too optimistic to me. It's possible, but unlikely to me.
That said:
>The emphasis on computational power also makes no sense to me. If we had infinite compute today, what steps would you take to build AGI? Does anyone have any good ideas about that?
In this interview with Lex Fridman and Greg Brockman, a co-founder of OpenAI, he says it's possible increasing the computational scale exponentially might really be enough to achieve AGIc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIrEM2FbOLU. (Can't remember where he said it exactly, but I think somewhere near the middle.) He's also making a lot of estimates I find overly optimistic, with about the same time horizon as Carmack's estimate.
As you say, it can be a little confusing, because both John Carmack and Greg Brockman are undoubtedly way more intelligent and experienced and knowledgeable than I am. But I think you're right and that it is a blindspot.
By contrast, this JRE podcast with someone else I consider intelligent, Naval Ravikant, essentially suggests AGI is over 100 years away: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHkcs3kG44. I think he said something along the lines of "well past the lifetimes of anyone watching this and not something we should be thinking about". I think that's possible as well, but too pessimistic. I probably lean a little closer to his view than to Carmack's, though.
My bet is that humans will go the route of enhancing themselves via hardware extensions and this symbiosis will create the next iteration(s) in our evolution. Once we get humans that are in a league of their own with regards to intelligence they will continue the cycle and create even more intelligent creatures. We may at some point decide to discard our biological bodies but it's going to be a long transition instead of a jump and the intelligent creatures that we create will have humans as a base layer.
Also, although I believe consciousness transfer is probably theoretically achievable - while truly preserving the original sense of self (and not just the perception of it, as a theoretical perfect clone would) - I feel like that's ~600 or more years away. Maybe a lot more. It seems a little odd to be pessimistic of AGI and then talk about stuff like being able to leave our bodies. This seems like a much more difficult problem than creating an AGI, and creating an AGI is probably the hardest thing humans have tried so far.
I'd be quite surprised if AGI takes longer than 150 years. Not necessarily some crazy exponential singularity explosion thing, but just something that can truly reason in a similar way a human can (either with or without sentience and sapience). Though I'll have no way to actually register my shock, obviously. Unless biological near-immortality miraculously comes well before AGI... And I'd be extremely surprised if it happens in like a decade, as Carmack and some others think.
Maybe if you had some isolated human brain in a vat that you could somehow easily manipulate through some kind of future technology, then the line between human and machine gets a little bit fuzzy. In that respect, maybe you're right that superintelligence will first come through human-machine interfacing rather than through AGI. But that still wouldn't count as AGI even if it counts as superintelligence. (Superintelligence by itself, artificial or otherwise, would obviously be very nice to have, though.)
Maybe you and I are just defining AGI differently. To me, AGI involves no biological tissue and is something that can be built purely with transistors or other such resources. That could potentially let us eventually scale it to trillions of instances. If it's a matter of messing around with a single human brain, it could be very beneficial, but I don't see how it would scale. You can't just make a copy of a brain - or if you could, you're in some future era where AGI would likely already have been solved long ago. Even if every human on Earth had such an augmented brain, they would still eventually be dwarfed by the raw power of a large number of fungible AGI reasoning-processors, all acting in sync, or independently, or both.
also, augmenting a human brain for what I’m describing does not mean that each human would get their brain augmented. It’s very possible that only a subset of humans would “evolve” this way and we would create a different subspecies. I’m not going to go into the ethics of the approach or the possibility that current humans will not like/allow this, although I think that the technology part would not be enough to make it happen.
Additionally you can't replicate people exactly, so even when Einstein comes along we only have him for a short while. When he passes away we regress.
Computers are completely different. We can ring them in power plants, replicate them perfectly, add new banks of CPUs, of GPUs, wire internet connections directly into them, etc.
This didn't used to matter because the old "computers can only do exactly what you tell them to do, just really fast" limitation. Now that computers are drawing, making art, modifying videos, playing Chess and Go preternaturally, playing real time strategy games well, etc we can see that that limitation doesn't really hold anymore.
At this point the economics start to really kick in. More machine learning breakthroughs + much, MUCH bigger computers over the next decades are going to be interesting.
If you give Deepmind "x" times the compute power (storage, whatever) it just plays Starcraft better. It's not going to arrange tanks into an equation that solves AGI.
That breakthrough will be assisted by computers I'm sure, but the human mind will solve it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_organoid
I know of at least two people that are eager to make "Daleks" and given the sample size there must be many more.
You're not the first person to express this idea, but it's pure speculation. There is obviously a possibility that it will be proved correct at some point in the future. But historically, very smart people have been ridiculed like clockwork for expressing ideas that were beyond their time but philosophically (and physically, eventually technologically) possible.
I'd be wary of adding to such sentiment. It also feels suspiciously like an ad hominem criticism, although in your case it's expressed more like a question. I think there is clearly something to the idea of very smart people having an intellectual disconnect with the reasoning of their closer-to-average peers (and hence expressing things that seem ludicrous, without considering how they will be received), but not one that negatively affects the quality of their deductions.
IMHO, the ideas of AGI and a "technological singularity" (let's call it economic growth that's extremely more powerful than anything seen up until now) aren't so different from earlier, profound developments in human history. The criticism of "smart people developing a blind spot" could have been applied equally to e.g. the ideas of agriculture and the following power shift, industry, modern medicine, powered flight and spaceflight, nuclear weapons or computers, networking and robotics.
All these ideas put the world into an almost unimaginally different state, when seen with the eyes of an earlier status quo. Maybe AGI is relatively different, it's hard to say without having lived in ancient Egypt. It's certainly qualitatively different, since it involves changes to intelligent life, but I'm not sure the idea feels much more alien than things we've already experienced.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222146.Masters_of_Doom?f...
Coincidentally, I just started re-reading it last week. It's quite a fun book :)
Stopped reading Red Shirts because of his childish voice acting.
My performance is abysmal at my day job because I really can't bring myself to be interested in the subject at hand. And yet I'll regularly work until the wee hours in the morning on personal projects without even realizing what time it is.
The one thing of note that I disagree with is his opinion on general AI. I think that could take centuries, and that it’s kind of like trying to predict when some unsolved math problem will be solved.
I'm not knowledgeable about AI, but from some of of the game-playing AI research I've read about, it seems like we provide in exhaustive detail the rules and objectives and the AI figures out (though a very resource-hungry process) an "algorithm" (e.g. encoded as a neural network) to play the game well.
I'm not saying that's close to human thought, but it seems far beyond having to "specify in exhausting detail the thought processes that the AI should execute in carefully constructed algorithms."
Your argument is the same as saying that a hurricane could never form because air molecules do not contain wind, and water molecules do not contain rain.
Any other explanation would have to rely on the property being explained existing all the way down to electrons and quarks.
Atoms aren’t a liquid, but room temperature water is. At some point, the property of being a liquid emerges through the combined behavior of collections of atoms.
We know that people are intelligent, we know that atoms are not. At some point, the property of being intelligent must arise from the combined action of their constituent parts. We have theories about how that happens, but no way to reproduce it as of yet using computers — it may not be possible. But there is no reason in principle that just because computers are comprised of non intelligent components, that they cannot give rise to an intelligent system. Humans are one example where such a thing has happened— I don’t think anyone would suggest that neurons have intelligence and even if you believed that, one certainly can’t believe that electrons and quarks do.
Of course one could posit a non physical entity or force which somehow exists in people and does not in machines which gives rise to intelligence, but to say the least that requires a great deal more evidence than we currently have for that before I would accept that as an explanation.
The simulation of a thing is not the thing itself. Perfectly simulating an apple falling from a tree only generates information about the thing, but the simulation hasn't caused an actual apple to fall from an actual tree. Computers are merely symbol manipulators, and symbols are nothing more than the material used to make them(ink on paper, electrons in a computer, etc...). I suspect that consciousness must follow the same logic -- We should be able to simulate something that looks exactly like creative thought(and probably is, technically), but if that same symbol manipulation results in an actual consciousness being produced in the actual world, then the universe has to be a much stranger place than we already know it to be...
But a brain is also just a symbol manipulator, in essence. All it does is shift electrical current from one place to another.
As a thought experiment, would it be possible to create consciousness using pen and paper calculation? Perform the same calculations by hand, multithread it by using billions of people performing the same symbol manipulation we would have otherwise performed on the computer. I argue all that project would produce is a large stack of paper and ink. I would argue that it's not the act of manipulating symbols that gives rise to consciousness(since it's the only thing the computer and paper methods have in common), rather that something qualitatively different is happening in the brain.
A late reply, perhaps, but:
- Does the physicality matter all that much here? For sake of argument, let's assume that I have an infinitely powerful computer, which simulates a brain perfectly, down to the last atom. Would the thing inside my simulation not be conscious, and if so, why not?
> As a thought experiment, would it be possible to create consciousness using pen and paper calculation? Perform the same calculations by hand, multithread it by using billions of people performing the same symbol manipulation we would have otherwise performed on the computer.
I don't see why not, to be honest. That is: given enough computing power and enough knowledge on how it works.
> I would argue that it's not the act of manipulating symbols that gives rise to consciousness(since it's the only thing the computer and paper methods have in common), rather that something qualitatively different is happening in the brain.
I must admit: I'm a Hofstadterian in this; I agree with his conclusions that consciousness, as we describe it, is an emergent property caused by the act of manipulating symbols representing ideas and concepts in a self/circularly referencing manner.
Do you think it will take centuries to figure out how it works to understand its algorithm?
There's no reason whatsoever to believe that the brain is an algorithm at all.
This is just you searching for something where it is easiest to look.
Note: not everything is an algorithm.
Even neuroscientists, who are more pessimistic about the prospect of AGI than anyone else, generally agree that the brain is ultimately not doing anything involving woo (with the exception of a few notably crazy religious ones), and is effectively just a computer. Neuroscientists think it's doing more involved computations than AI researchers hope, but it's still just crunching data.
> quantum idiocy like Penrose in his senility.
Whatever the case, we are still very very very far from understanding the brain when it comes to consciousness. There's room for people to explore possibilities.
Two points:
a) Not everything is explainable and predictable, and thus under the domain of science.
b) There's a huge (maybe infinite?) class of things that are explainable and predictable and yet aren't algorithms.
An 'algorithm' is a very specific mathematical concept with a very specific definition. It is quite possible that the brain is explainable and predictable and yet isn't an algorithm.
> ...but it's still just crunching data.
Only if you expand 'data' to mean every possible physical phenomenon under the sun, which is disingenuous. (Are hormones 'data'? Is electromagnetic radiation? Etc., etc.)
If your argument is that the brain leaps past normal computation into hypercomputation or something like that, then you're making an extremely bold claim that doesn't match what we know about the physical universe (there is a long history of arguments about the physical possibility of hypercomputation, and most people don't think it's possible even in theory).
I know it sounds expansive to say that everything in the physical world (at least the bits accessible to our experimentation) can be modeled by an algorithm, but that really is the mainstream scientific view, and the edges where people argue about the fringe possibilities most definitely do not apply to the energy/time scales involved with the brain.
it took the same amount of time to learn how to fly. (ie several millennia)
Yet, once we did, we broke the sound barrier and made it to the moon within 70 years.
If we look back 200 years to the 1820s, the world looked quite primitive. Railroads and steamships were exciting:
On top of that, the engineering to even capture data from a brain to begin with is pretty far off.
So what happens first, AGI or traveling at close to the speed of light?
VR headset tech is in a weird situation where none of them is really good enough, but when you test the best in the market it destroys the enjoyment you get from previous generation. I tested 20 minutes $6000 Vario VR-1 where the market is professional use and now anything consumer grade feels like total crap.
Take a current-gen oculus/etc. Add a heart rate monitor, foot tracking, maybe weighted controllers... you have some excellent workout potential. If price can get to <$300, they will sell
A lot of the top games atm (beat saber, superhot, boxvr) are pretty exercise-ey. Combining gamified fun/addictiveness, in-home convenience & all the advantages of digitization (eg adjust speed in response to heart rate)... I reckon it will be effective. We're not far from it.
An exercise-centric home VR console and/or VR gyms...
It s an interesting idea but about the worst situation i can think of. Not only will i be sweating, i 'll be vigorously moving , exacerbating any vestibular reflexes, shifting the headset on my head, and risking getting injured. I think anything that requires too much physical interaction is a bad candidate for VR. My idea of VR is that it amplifies any minute movement of my fingers magically. That feels empowering
I do agree that actually using gym equipment in VR would be rather difficult to do safely, unless the equipment itself was actually tracked and displayed in-game.
I was talking about the immediate term though. Right now it's a gaming device(s) that's cool but lacks content. A "killer app" in the immediate sense is something to justify the current cost and drive the loop of users->content->price/performance->users.
To get to your endgame, there will need to be reasons to buy devices before the tech matrix level. No sales, no production, no advancements. For now, the driver is gaming & and (in theory) biz-applications.
My guess is that gaming+exercise is the next breakthrough, in terms of moving units and driving the loop.
Anyway... escapism, underground culture, sex(porn), travel, alter ego is arguably the endgame of every personal computing device. Most of us do all these on PCs & phones.
Think you're selling it a bit short, one of the most popular uses is Social via apps like VRChat
A bunch of people "walking though a forest" while on treadmills in microapartments sounds dystopian.
It's like you are alone in the theatre .. staring at this giant canvas!
VR is amazing to demo but it's one of those things where the novelty fades quickly. I don't think there's any reason to assume that VR will definitely be a breakout technology.
If you took today's Oculus and went back 30 years ago and handed it out to people used to 1024x768 CRT displays, people would be saying "Well, the VR problem is entirely solved, and there's no reason to do any more further research!" We'd probably have given up work on improving 2D displays.
No way. Very few people want to have something strapped to their face for a long period of time. I really think VR is here, now. The market is basically what it's going to be. I'm not saying there's no growth left, but it's not going to explode.
Though I'm going to have to disagree about current-generation VR not being "good enough". For me at least, the $400 standalone headset John showed at the start of the podcast is already plenty good for what I want to use it for (gaming). True it's not perfect; there's still plenty of room for resolution and graphics improvements in future iterations, but it's already easily good enough for multiplayer shooters (Pavlov), rhythm games (Beat Saber), single-player RPGs (Journey of the Gods), etc.
For other use-cases like desktop replacement I agree there's still a ways to go before VR is practical for most people, but for gaming it's already in a pretty good state in my opinion.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnxGkOGNMqQEUMvroOWps6Q/vid...
"Damn spooky analog crap." -- John Carmack2:10:56
If you want to see guests arguing with their hosts, well that's a form of entertainment you can get on cable.
Bringing up the same topics is likely because he has so much content that there is going to be repeat work. Bringing on guests that many other shows wouldn't have has resulted in him being called being a mouthpiece for the alt-right. I've heard him called a gateway into the alt right.
I think this is it. I'm a semi-regular listener, and think Joe is generally a great host, but too much of his podcast becomes like inhaling car exhaust fumes due to the nuttiness of some of the guests.
> Bringing on guests that many other shows wouldn't have has resulted in him being called being a mouthpiece for the alt-right. I've heard him called a gateway into the alt right.
Which I think is unfair because he tends to host people from across the political spectrum. I mean there are the extreme examples, like Alex Jones, but there are also plenty of at least vaguely sane people who lean right. And then, for every one of them, you'll find a Bernie Sanders, or a Jon Ronson coming on.
There are a lot (or at least it feels that way) of conspiracy theory/UFO-nut guests, but that stuff can be fascinating (to a point) regardless of whether or not you actually buy into it. With that said I do have to be in the right kind of mood otherwise the slew of bullshit these people spew will simply infuriate, rather than entertain, me.
Right now the hyper-sensitive, take everything way too seriously, you are either with us or against us zealots are speaking for everyone who considers themselves progressive. It will wane eventually, just like the satanic panic of the 80s. And I say this as a person who considers them self a feminist and hyper progressive.
That being said: I don't like Joe Rogan giving a platform to Alex Jones. I think that man is reprehensible. He is a tragedy exploiting ghoul. He whipped up a fervor around the "sandy hook is a false flag" conspiracy theory, harassed the families of the survivors, and laugh his way all the way to the bank while doing it. Alex Jones is a bad person and has done bad things.
Meanwhile "Exploring Weight Agnostic Neural Networks" is at #2 with the same age and only 46 points...
If people are flagging something like this that's so directly in the sweet spot of "interesting to hackers" and non-flamewar inducing as this, then I hope the mods aren't asleep at the wheel!
Joe is a heavily left leaning (socially) capitalist, he seems to me to be very libertarian. I bet there’s a number of Silicon Valley engineers who lean the same way except maybe for his stance on guns.
He has everyone on his show. “Crazy” people to the mainstream. And in any case it’s his show you’re free to not give it patronage.
EDIT: I read over the word "assholes". Not drily at all.
How do the left not realise how authoritiarian they actually are in this regard?
And making someone out to be a right wing nazi because of who they spoke to on their show is madness.
I'm not even sure it's honest on the part of these people, I think they know Joe Rogan isnt some right wing nazi but they say it just to fit in with their "group".
> “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
That alone has put me off watching his show (as much as I enjoy hearing Carmack speak).
I subscribe to JRE and this watch it regularly. Rogan has not recently pushed the moon landing was a hoax. I'm not sure where you got that information.
Rogan has discussed how he used to think the moon landing was a hoax many years ago and now thinks the moon landing happened. Rogan also talks about how most conspiracy theorists are sad, lonely people.
You're changing what I said. I said that he previously pushed the view.
It's also not hard to find evidence of that. Here's the first result of a Google search where he claims NASA's footage was faked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_KT7YlVuKI
e: Here's a video debating the topic with Phil Plait.
Your comment "Most notably he claimed the moon landing was a hoax." is vague about whether Rogan recently has stated the moon landing is a hoax. I've added your full quote in my reply to let people judge for themselves.
Further:
> pushed the moon landing was a hoax.
is not the same as:
> It's also not hard to find evidence of that... he claims NASA's footage was faked
He does believe some of the footage was faked - there are indeed inconsistencies there that aren't very well explained. That's not the same thing as believing the moon landing didn't occur, which was Joe back in Fear Factor / NewsRadio era. He's 52 now.
Joe Rogan represents, quite literally, the average Joe going through life and learning as he goes. If we shun people for ever possibly considering something different then we'll never get to actually connect and change their minds. People are lot more open and resilient than you may consider.
Exactly. Flags of this article would be a good indicator for dang / sctb to make HN ignore flags from these HN accounts in future.