"AI" is not currently autonomous; its algorithms that do exactly what their creators tell them to do. They run on binary computers that only do exactly as they are told.
I think this video is a nice introduction to the basic concept to how a computer can figure things out automatically without being manually programmed and without the creators understanding the “why”: https://youtu.be/qv6UVOQ0F44
ChatGPT is much more complicated than the AI in that video but it shows some of the basic concepts
Whether or not you can predict a tool's output is irrelevant. I can't predict the output of a random number generator, but that doesn't make it sentient.
But, either way, I think that's what's on the line for people who disagree about how to use the word "intelligence." They mean it as a synonym for sentience, and the people arguing against them are using it differently. Before we can evaluate the truth of an argument, we should first agree to use words the same way.
What is indeed missing from current implementations is continuous looping. Doing actions and taking stock of the results. I guess that’s kind of expensive right now. We’ll get there. I don’t see the fundamental problem.
Not really true, most AI is based on optimising some goal rather than following a fixed set of rules
Make a list of the things we do "entirely predictably".
Make a list of the things a given ML system does "entirely predictably".
One of these lists is (a lot) longer than the other. Interesting, no?
But I have no reason to believe this will always be the case. As these machines become more capable and our compute power grows, someone will give one a server cluster and some free time to 'think' on it's own.
The tiger is dangerous because whether you consider it a sentient, intentional killing machine or a bunch of atoms, it exists and manipulates the same physical space that you do (indeed, as the tweeted image points out implicitly, it is only a tiger when you consider at the same sort of physical scale that we exist at).
Software, however, does not have this property. Ultimately it does exist as something in the physical world (voltages on gates, or whatever), but at that level it's equivalent to the "bunch of atoms" view. Software (by itself) does not operate in the physical space that we do, and so it cannot pose the same kind of threats to us as other physical systems do.
The question is therefore a lot more nuanced: what types of control (if any) can (a given piece of) software exert over the world in which we operate? This includes the abstract yet still large scale world of things like finance and record keeping, but it also obviously covers the physical space in which our bodies exist.
Right now, there is very (very) little software that exists as a sentient, intentional threat to us within that space. When and if software starts to be able to exert more force on that space, then the "it's just logic and gates and stuff" view will be inappropriate. For now, the main risk from software comes from what other humans will do with it, not what it will do to us (though smartphones do raise issues about even that).
The idea of harm from the unemotional application of an unthinking and unfeeling set of rules, which is essentially what algorithms are, predates modern computing by some margin as it's the cliché that Kafka became famous for.
Yes, the software may be part of the apparatus of a cold unfeeling bureaucracy (private or state), but it is the decision of human beings to accept its output that causes the damage.
I should have probably dropped the term "sentience" - I agree it is not really relevant. I will need to think about examples like Therac-25. Not sure how that fits in my ontology right now.
I think you're using at least one of those words very differently than me, because to me software is nothing but the application of rules.
With your usage, you are of course correct.
Given how often humans just do whatever they're told, I don't trust that this will prevent even a strict majority of possible bad real-world actions, but I would certainly agree that it will limit at least some of the bad real-world actions.
This is very much in doubt :)
> They run on binary computers that only do exactly as they are told.
This is true in first approximation. Every CPU instruction runs exactly as it is written, that is true. This is probably the interpretation of "only do exactly as they are told" to someone strictly technology minded. But even with much simpler systems the words "huh, that should have not happened", and "I wonder why it is doing that" are uttered frequently.
The interpretation most humans would attach to "only do exactly as they are told" is that the maker can predict what the code will do, and that is far from the truth.
After all if it so simple, why did the google engineers tell their computer to tell lies about the James Webb Space Telescope? Couldn't they just told it to only tell the truth?
The moment the software gets to interact with the world, whether via robotics or handling a mouse button event or some other type of sensor, we no longer fully understand or control its behavior.
Pure computation (the dream of functional programming) is fully understandable and entirely predictable. When you add interaction, you add both randomness but also time - when something happens can lead to different outcomes - and this can rapidly cause predictability to spiral away from us.
It is very easily possible with normal currencies too. Obviously banks will need a human, or a legal entity to be the “owner” of the account but it is very easy to imagine someone hooking up an AI with an account to automate some business. Maybe initially it would involve a lot of handholding from a human, so the AI doesn’t have to learn to hustle from scratch, but if the money is flowing in and the AI is earning more money than it is spending it is easy to imagine that the human checks out and doesn’t double check ever single service or purchase the AI does.