Artificial Intelligence: What’s to Fear?
the-american-interest.com
the-american-interest.com
Nope, the wave is energy transmitted, from the sun, to the wind, to the sea ... to the ship.
In the same way a mind is a wave, constrained and channeled by it's neuron substrate, and by external stimulii.
The article is nonsense to me, there is no such thing as passive - the universe is all active, seething.
This kind of topic is taken on by Stanislaw Lem in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible
Really liked this book.
This perfectly encapsulates why I'm so skeptical of AI alarmists. They tend to boil down the human experience to such coarse terms that it undermines their legitimate issues.
> AI is a collection of passive silicon and metal. It does not speak. It has no mind. Like an ocean wave, it forms part of an ordered sequence of passive realities moved by an agency not its own
No, AI is a series of numbers. I just wrote about this misconception the other day [0]. It would be great if people stopped anthropomorphizing AI just because it has the word intelligence in it and humans are said to be intelligent
https://medium.com/ml-everything/artificial-general-intellig...
That is one of the things people are explicitly worried about: the possibility that they might make a connection with someone they're communicating with over the internet and then discover it's not a real person.
There's an assumption that consciousness is just a series of numbers, and some more or less credible philosophical arguments for/against this point of view.
But believing there's more than that is faith-based, not empirical.
The Bekenstein Bound says that any finite volume of space must contain finite information. Finite information can be fully encoded as a number. Ergo, human consciousness is a number.
So unless you're going to suggest that the Bekenstein Bound has no empirical support, which would be a pretty wild claim, then yes, there is indeed empirical evidence that consciousness is just a number.
That would be "many numbers" not "a number." So many numbers that it's possible no digital machine can simulate it.
A distinction without a difference, honestly. Your computer conceptually has "many numbers", but its addressable storage is finite, and so is really just one big number.
> So many numbers that it's possible no digital machine can simulate it.
The very fact that the brain exists is proof that a machine of this size fully mimicking the brain's capabilities is feasible. Encoding information digitally is at best a constant factor difference from other numerical bases.
And this is assuming a quantum-level reproduction, which very likely isn't necessary.
The mind isnt a closed system unless it's drawn as lightcurves.
Sure, it _seems_ smart when it can tell you the volume of the moon or whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, but ask it to explain a joke if you want to see just how unimpressive current the state of the art is.
Intelligence is the ability to observe patterns and integrate that information into abstract concepts and models that describe (and predict) reality.
You'll know when we've cracked General Intelligence when your Tesla knows to slow down tonight because it's Halloween and there was a new Star Wars movie this year so there's going to be a lot of kids running around in hard-to-see Darth Vader costumes this year...
Also, should machines ever actually become sentient to our level (and beyond), the "artificial" is then misleading - and their intelligence, and default right to be considered human (or human-equal) is undermined by implication.
As for the second point, I don't think there is a mystical quality to human intelligence. I guess its mystical in the sense that no one really understands consciousness just yet. But I think something else is going on other than the brain being a rote inefficient chemical cruncher. I find the whole AGI, singularity, and AI hysteria reductive
Roughly as much as human reasoning is a series of numbers, yes.
Dworkin's critique is ... frankly, fairly bizarre to me. He himself is an anesthesiologist who's studied political philosophy, and his floundering in deep waters here shows. He's well out of his depth.
That does not mean, however, that there aren't very legitimate concerns to be made, and the have and are being made. Cathy O'Neil, Nick Bostrom, Jonathan Zittrain, Zynep Tufekci, and others, have raised numerous salient points.
Where most people see mysterious advanced help in day to day tasks, some corporations are seeing obedient, unaccountable and un-auditable workers. They are already starting to use them to perform their dirty deeds, and hiding behind the black box nature of these complex algorithms.
I would say the opposite. Insider trading? No, here are the inputs to our algorithm. Racist policies? No, here are the inputs to our algorithm.
Similarly, there's plenty of evidence that algorithms can reconstruct discrimination from inputs other than skin color - names are the obvious example, but address seems a likely risk too. Algorithms need anti-racism quality control on their output.
Ultimately, transparency and reproducibility are the key criteria I think, like it is in science.
If anything, the issues with machine learning are even more problematic that what the OP posted, as simply identifying that something like systemic racism in a machine learning model can be very hard to identify.
Try dealing with YouTube after a fraudulent copyright strike, or getting money from Amazon or PayPal after your account has been suspended for an arbitrary reason.
AI has the potential to automate bureaucratic corporate hostility and indifference to weaponised levels.
> An atomic bomb is a frantic explosion. Yet none of these phenomena is active; they are all passive. They lack the power of cause.
To me it’s completely incomprehensible that an obviously intelligent and well educated (MD PhD) person can think like this... How is it possible to deny that a thermonuclear explosion can cause... a lot of things...?
I’ve lately come to realize that there is much more variation in how people see the world and reason than I thought possible. I would genuinely like to understand those “modes of thinking” that are most far removed from my own. Can anybody explain how this particular worldview works or point me to something I can read?
For causality and the slipperiness of it, read Hume.
I don’t think going straight to Hume will be very meaningful for me. Is there anybody who has explained empiricism from a more hypothetical-deductive perspective?
Those are shockingly broad claims that are not even close to being accepted by even a minority of people.
here's the relevant djikstra. To be the agent of an event requires agency. We have it, principal component analysis doesn't.
I'm firmly of the opinion that anthropomorphization of code is a category error and a bad idea.
Agency remains undefined, just like "sentience" from your other post. Unless you actually define it, how can you possibly know that we have it and principle component analysis doesn't?
Even if we take a connotative definition of agency, ie. that it is some quality or behaviour that humans exhibit, then it remains to be shown that code cannot possibly have agency in this exact sense.
Certainly not all code will have agency, just like all code does not have a "sorter" property exhibited by sorting algorithms. I also agree with you that current forms of AI don't have what we recognize as agency, but I don't think we're as far off as some think, and I definitely don't see how it's a category error to talk about AI in this fashion. Whatever qualities you think humans have that grants agency, it might not be nearly as complicated as you assume.
tl;dr: Humanity is really good at adapting to coexist with technology. Stop Panicking.
combustion engine - what to fear ?
computer - what to fear ?
internet - what to fear ?
robots - what to fear ?
artificial intelligence - what to fear ?
?????? - what to fear ?
Maybe there is not point to fear ?
1. We _will_ eventually crack "general intelligence". If nature is able to do it with 9 months of build time and a few pounds of meat, there's no physical reason we can't do it on silicon (or whatever substrate is next)...
2. When we finally develop a half-way decent general intelligence, much like human intelligence, we're not going to have any idea how it works.
3. It will probably end up employing a lot of the same cognitive shortcuts that humans use (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases). And in doing so we're likely to end up with a general intelligence that, on the whole, is capable of much greater calculation, but ultimately will be a disaster as it will suffer from the same sort of psychological flaws.
Human survival is probably going to come down to humanity trying to talk a super-intelligent AI out of some crazy ass conspiracy theories. It will be like the ultimate Thanksgiving with your crazy uncle.
Nature had a couple billion years to figure it out.
shrug
We've seen this play out many, many times before...