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Comment by csneeky | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure I’m a machine that’s drawn all my conclusions by statistically analyzing all the input I’ve received since birth… I don’t really know how else I would learn what I have… and I don’t understand how being “just that” is what differentiates modern approaches to AI and my brain.

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Exactly this. A lot of these type of articles on AI make the simultaneous mistakes of understating what even the current iterations of models are capable of, while overstating the complexity of our own intelligence.

As these models get larger, and we start moving up the ladder of emergent behaviours, there will come a point (possibly quite soon) where the sort of distinctions being drawn are irrelevant.

“Oh that’s just an advanced multimodal model with some sensors and goal seeking behaviour. Stop anthropomorphising it!”

That doesn't address the alignment problem. As Yudkowski has pointed out, the space of possible minds is vast. Humans only occupy a small area. The models were are designing are not animal/biological minds. They don't have the same evolutionary drives. We're creating minds in a different part of the mind space, and there's a good chance they will figure out solutions that are not beneficial to us.

Absolutely, I would just addressing the ‘it’s just statistical’ argument. The vast majority of human behaviour is learned. We’re all implicitly ‘saying what seems right to achieve some underlying fitness function’ all of the time. That’s what fashion is about. But yes, definitely no reason to assume an AI will think like us underneath it all.

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