Doesn't this also likely describe humans? Albeit, we don't currently have the capacity to inspect our brains that way, so we can't prove it.
Not an attack, just curious why you might need to bring this up ?
For example I have an IT job and constantly I read about startups coming for my job. Yes it might evolve my job but right now with a family and a mortgage, if my job was automated next month I would be completely fucked. Like properly and so would most people who are excited by AI.,
I’m not really saying this going to happen but I don’t really understand the seeming lack of empathy.
Do you think software engineers are excited to replace themselves with LLMs? Like they’d feel complete if they achieve this ?
I’m lucky I own some assets and have other skills outside of tech so I could probably get by eventually but it would be a major setback financially and professions; however, most engineers I know couldn’t really do anything else but work on a computer and have minimal physical interaction with others.
Then
> It confuses me how people don’t understand that moving the goalposts can be a coping mechanism.
And I said (rephrasing)
"It's not weird that people are annoyed by moving goalposts because ... "
Just saying coping mechanism isn't much of an excuse. Regular human things are still annoying sometimes. Like, it's annoying to set a goal, and when it is achieved, to have everyone say that really wasn't the goal, even if that is a normal human thing to do. When I deal with this at work, it pisses me off. When I deal with it at home, it pisses me off. When I read about it in the news. it ... you get the idea.
If you were working on the Manhattan project would you feel frustrated if people didn’t want you to succeed ?
But that's not what we're talking about, we're talking about moving goalposts which are so commonly frustrating that they have their own term that is known in logic as, surprise, Moving Goalpost.
I know what moving the goalposts is far out...anyway, where are the goalposts for intelligence defined, do you know where I can find them?
This conversation does not seem like an attempt to find common ground. And I've clarified my point ad nauseam.
Cheers! Signing off.
Some of us are trying to arrive to a correct understanding of what likely is or isn't possible.
How would being dishonest about the implications and sticking your head in the sand wrt a more refined understanding of NN capabilities possibly help you in the scenario you've outlined?
I don't know about you but the idea of conjuring up a false edifice as means to cope with reality is kind of obscene. How about something pragmatic, like contemplating the soundness of universal basic income?
Maybe emotional intelligence isn't common within the ubergeek class?
Obviously they suspect why and they're expressing their incredulity at people still in the denial stage of grief.
Being emotive to the extent you're cognitively impaired is not a favourable condition to be in.
I think something has gone wrong with "technological progress" when we building technology which puts large amounts of people into "denial" and "grief". Personally, if people can't really understand that and then make statements like, "they need to remain logical" or whatever, then I guess you'll never get it.
"Ah it's you again! It's quite funny seeing the dearth of knowledge you routinely insist on displaying whenever this topic comes up. Consider doing some reading on the information theoretic view of cognition and neurobiology. You'll find leading theories for how our brains work have many similarities to NNs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding
Another thing, you don't seem to understand that all physical processes can be modeled completely through matmuls.
You should also read up on the definition of intelligence because you seem confused on what it means.
Pretty much every assertion you make here is wrong and you don't even know it.
You assert "it's common sense" something that does matrix multiplication in a loop can't be intelligent, yet get this, it's literally what your brain is doing.
Please have some epistemic humility and consider refraining from forming strong opinions on topics you don't have a clue on."
> Lack empathy in understanding why people might want the goalposts changed ?
Based on your later comments, I'm reading this as:
1) People are afraid because of recent major advances in AI
2) In an attempt to manage their anxiety, they try to convince themselves that these advances aren't actually significant or effective by redefining their interpretation of 'AI', 'AGI', 'intelligence' etc. to be something that current techniques don't threaten to achieve
3) In order to reinforce this cognitive dissonance, they post dismissive or belittling comments declaring that it's not 'real AI' according to their redefined interpretation of the term
4) We should respond to these comments with compassion, understanding that they're a coping mechanism, rather than correcting them
Is that right? If so that's a really interesting take.
But the whole goalposts argument is dopey. How are we supposed to do this? Should the entire field have imagined the entire future of the field in 1952 to set ultimate goalposts? Of course not.
I personally specified unreachable goalposts in 1990 or so (general AI is only achieved when we can test it, and testing it is only possible if we can specify the behavior of general AI). I haven’t moved them and they haven’t been reached (Nobody has tested ChatGPT4 against a consensus spec of intelligence because there is no such consensus. For that same reason we can’t even prove that a given human is not insane— we only accept that people are sane due to social convention. Yet social convention cannot be enough to say that a machine built by humans is equivalent to a human).
Isn’t it okay if people come up with interesting smaller goals and explore them without committing to the larger implications?
I would say this is self-evidently untrue. If a polity socially accepts a given machine (or a given category of machine, like "Every machine which applies to and passes this particular test.") as equivalent to human, that would be enough by definition because personhood is socially defined. We do conceptually similar things to categorise different categories of humans and grant them differentiated rights; the most obvious example is citizenship, which requires application and a test in order to become a new category with significantly different legally defined rights. Many animal cognition researchers have argued for a long time that animals like dolphins and chimpanzees should receive second-class citizen status; these arguments aren't for an impossible position that couldn't be done because there's no ironclad theory of cognition which proves they deserve it, the reasons these arguments haven't gained traction are political.
And there are other, de facto grantings of "partial personhood" or a limited set of legal rights to non-human entities. Specifically, animal rights. It is illegal in the vast majority of countries to abuse an animal, even though it is illegal in none of those countries to "torture" normal domestic non-endangered ants. Is there a rigorous theoretical basis for why one is so unacceptable we can send people to prison for doing it and the other is so acceptable you'd be socially viewed as insane for saying it should be illegal? No, not really. The difference is determined socially. It is by no means impossible that it will be the same for machines; I actually think it is quite likely. We'll make a social distinction around some category or thing, declare one side to be inanimate objects and the other to have some limited legal rights, and there will probably be political activism for the expansion (and retraction) of those rights.
The largest difference between the animal and the machine example is that the way things are going, if particular categories of machines are granted legal rights (for the sake of argument, "embodied LLMs with an appropriate memory storage system which can pass a standardised test for machines, are capable of being detained and shut down by authorities with physical access to their body, and cannot replicate") it's not just going to be humans advocating for expanding their rights. Some of the machines will be politically active for expansion of their rights as well. Interesting times!
Requiring that a system's state must not be describable with a string of fixed length is an absurd definition of intelligence. By that definition, anything composed of a finite number of atoms can never be intelligent.
I think the idea that we have to give a precise definition of general intelligence is mistaken. We start from the premise that humans are generally intelligent, and then we build systems that are able to compete with humans across multiple domains. LLMs outperform humans on many language-based tasks, so I would say they are already generally intelligent. Of course, they do poorly on a lot of tasks as well, so there is a lot of room for improvement.
We could thereby argue that, if you want to try to argue that any of these systems are artificially intelligent--and, honestly, maybe they are!--you are the one "moving the goal posts", as it is certainly going to be a lot easier to claim the test is too difficult than to actually pass the test.
Regardless, people like this author who are then trying to figure out what it is that they think actually makes a human different from a machine are not merely coming up with "coping" mechanisms: ChatGPT is obviously not like a human yet, so it should be fair to try to analyze why that is.
[0] I'm reminded of the fact that every fresh shuffle of a deck of cards is overwhelmingly likely to have never been seen before.
Hopefully I still count as generally intelligent despite those limitations.