Hacker News Reader

Comment by mvdtnz | Hacker News Reader

There is absolutely no chance whatsoever that robots that are so real they are indistinguishable from people will come about in our lifetimes. The amount of breathless speculation since OpenAI released a kind-of-decent text completion program is so far beyond ridiculous at this point.

View on HN

The first sentence is true, but the second raises the question: are we so gullible that the robots don't need to be indistinguishable in order to fool most people?

While the tech is great, if anything I feel like what OpenAI has revealed to us is that we're still a bunch of superstitious apes that are just not cognitively equipped to reason about what we've created.

It feels like a new age of religion is dawning in which we construct myths about the tools we build, instead of myths about the forces of nature. At one point we blamed bad weather on the gods. Our gods now are technological. The cryptocurrency movement was more belief than tool. The AI panic is more belief than tool.

We are apes and we have always worshiped falsehoods but now the falsehoods we worship are unknowable artifacts of technology, Arthur C. Clarke was prescient when he said - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

ChatGPT could fool a lot of people already. Unless you’re looking to probe and check it’s an AI you probably won’t detect it over a chat session, especially with the right prompt giving it a background, context and the right speech/chat patterns.

Maybe in a text chat, but in a fluid one-on-one in-person conversation, or in a group conversation? Absolutely no chance, and no reason to believe it will get to this level, maybe ever.

I mean, have you tried chatGPT’s latest multimodal speech update. The voice generation is pretty damn human like. Again with the right prompt you could definitely fool someone for a while using voice, since that mode is pretty conversational and includes the AI asking relevant, context specific follow up questions.

For an in person, we would need to generate full fledged bodies that probably isn’t happening soon but it’s not insane to think of a mechanical robot under structure covered by artificially generated meat (which we can make now) with a chatGPT brain from 10 years in the future.

They are talking about physical robots. Replicants/cylons, as referenced in the article. I agree with them.

Sci-fi style androids will definitely be feasible soon. Some of them will be capable of acting like humans, displaying convincing emotions, forming relationships, etc. However, they will definitely not be indistinguishable from humans at a physical level; not even remotely close.

Even AGI will not achieve that in our lifetimes, unless it first cures aging and disease thus extending our lifetimes indefinitely, which I also (sadly) regard as exceedingly unlikely in our lifetimes.

AGI may only be a momentary transitional state. It is assumed that ASI almost immediately follows AGI as once the machine is self aware and can improve itself then exponential intelligence takeoff is achieved.

They can start with virtual dolls (MMD) right now, except gpt has no idea how to move a body, virtual or not.

Generalized robotic skills may have just been solved.

The paper

https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/DeepMind.com/B...

Explanation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZdytTKeGYM

A single person can also fool a lot of people.

My gripe is that, if a robot does something, it is not post truth, it is actual, real, truth. We should not confuse discourse on truth with discourse on identity.

Maybe you're much sharper than I am, but I am thoroughly convinced that what already exists could fool me for a long time under the right circumstances.

Makes me think of:

"Never, no matter what the development of science, will men, who have concern for their reputation, attempt for forecast the weather"

https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/users/brooks/public_html/future/te...

Humans perform terribly at exponential estimation. Many AI scientists and researchers are now saying AGI will be within our lifetimes and some are saying within a few years.

If that happens, lifelike robotics will be one of the lesser achievements.

If your opinion is that we will not achieve AGI, then I would say your outlook is probably consistent.

> There is absolutely no chance whatsoever that robots that are so real they are indistinguishable from people will come about in our lifetimes.

Yet the Prince of Nigeria keeps sending emails to good effect. Makes you think :)

I would be 0% surprised to find out this comment was written by a bot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com