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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

> Even lovemaking is at risk, as artificially intelligent robots stand poised to enter the market and provide sexual services and romantic intimacy.

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...

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Don't let bad, misguided, or low-quality alarmism distract your from legitimate concerns or cautions.

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.

It's not clear to me from your post or essay whether you are saying the current state of AI is absurdly overhyped and is not even remotely close to producing actual intelligence (I agree strongly); or if you are claiming it's not possible with computers even in principle because "numbers", in which case I don't understand the justification at all, as it implies a mystical quality to human intelligence you rightly dismiss in the current hype.

Definitely your first point.

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

Yeah I'd agree with most of that, consciousness (as opposed to cognition) definitely fascinatingly different to ponder.

And humans are not just a series of numbers?

No. There is absolutely no empirical evidence that consciousness is just a series of numbers.

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.

> No. There is absolutely no empirical evidence that consciousness is just a series of numbers.

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.

> 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.

That would be "many numbers" not "a number." So many numbers that it's possible no digital machine can simulate it.

If human reasoning can fit in say a 2m^3 object, you can (in theory) always build a machine that encodes the information in 2m^3 or less.

But probably not a digital machine using today's form of digital technology.

> That would be "many numbers" not "a number."

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.

No, a set of "many numbers" trivially maps 1:1 to a single number with the same information content. Constructs like space-filling curves are a manifestations of this relationship. The property is occasionally exploited in algorithm designs in order to modify the number of elements in a set.

We can't in principal encode it as a numeric copy; it's not measurable. Position or momentum.

The mind isnt a closed system unless it's drawn as lightcurves.

>No, AI is a series of numbers.

Roughly as much as human reasoning is a series of numbers, yes.

AI is the perfect term for what we have now - it's artificial intelligence. It _seems_ intelligent, but the reality is that all we have now is pretty good pattern recognition coupled with an index of an incredible amount of information. That's not intelligence.

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...

I'm uncomfortable with any term involving "intelligence" just because it's so misleading when describing the current state of affairs with computers.

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.

It's a nice dovetail with American prudishness. The same utterance, with only a few words changed, could justify an anti-prostitution stance.

Who said anything about prudishness? I'm saying that there is a deeper connection people make with other human beings, rather than some inanimate piece of matter.

However, making a real connection is difficult, and there's a huge profit potential in selling people (usually, but not exclusively, men) a fake connection. At what point do AIs start passing the "phone sex Turing test"?

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.

I don’t see why there is any need to worry about that, you can make fake connections with a real person to. They might be your world but from their end they might not actually give a fuck about you, they just pretend they do. Ever get worried about that?

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