Comment by danparsonson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danparsonson | Hacker News Reader

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If it seems like I don't understand the meaning of that very well-known phrase, then clearly I have failed to make my point. I'll try again. And please note that I will use some generalizations to make my point more clearly, rather than because I don't understand nuance; kindly grant me a charitable reading.

In recent years, I have commonly seen the phrase "you're moving the goalposts" deployed by the "it might be sentient" crowd to shoot down the "it's a stochastic parrot" crowd when the latter respond to a new development with "OK but...". In a well-understood field of inquiry, that would be a clear case of goalpost-moving, in the commonly-understood meaning of the phrase where requirements are retroactively changed in response to them having been met. Thank you OP. 'Artificial Intelligence', and indeed intelligence in general, is very much not a well-understood field of inquiry - in fact we don't even have a common agreement about what 'intelligence' is. We are therefore learning as we go (even after all this time!) but making rapid progress in recent years. When rapid progress is made in a poorly-understood field, then how can our definitions and requirements for success not change? This is arguably one of the most pathological development projects ever - what are the requirements? 'It thinks like a human'? What does that mean? And the answer is we don't know what that means, and we're working it out as we go - moving the goalposts. If we didn't move the goalposts, then by definition we already knew exactly where we were headed at the beginning, and we very clearly did not.

Side note that, in case it's not obvious, none of this detracts from how impressive LLMs are. They're a marvel of the modern age, all the problems notwithstanding. However I reserve the right to stay sceptical about their capabilities.

> When rapid progress is made in a poorly-understood field, then how can our definitions and requirements for success not change?

It's in how they change, not the fact that they change. The skeptics seem to have secret definitions for intelligence, sentience, consciousness, creativity, etc. that amounts to "a thing only humans have". Often that thing is equivalent to a soul. When yesterday's challenge (LLMs don't have X because they can't do Y!) is met, Y changes but X stays the same. This is not the process by which a field matures, it is a rhetorical technique used by skeptics to avoid honestly stating or confronting their internal definitions. That can be revealed by asking the skeptic the following:

"Forget LLMs. What if we made a completely physically accurate simulation of a human being?"

Many say no, that simulated human being still couldn't have (intelligence, consciousness, sentience, creativity, ...). This reveals that there is a necessary metaphysical component to those attributes, at which point any scientific-minded person will leave the debate.

OK, I see, thanks. That applies to some skeptics, though - I'm in the AI skeptic camp but only in the sense that I believe we should make sober assessments of what these things are actually capable of.

> That applies to some skeptics, though

Totally! Arguments like yours often get lost in the noise of the less interesting / nuanced arguments unfortunately :(

Thanks for this clarification of your position. The brief answer is:

> If we didn't move the goalposts, then by definition we already knew exactly where we were headed at the beginning, and we very clearly did not.

The criticisms are directed toward people who did clearly act like they knew, not the ones who were honest that they did not know.

> If we didn't move the goalposts, then by definition we already knew exactly where we were headed at the beginning, and we very clearly did not.

To me, the goalposts were already defined by the person you were responding to. "The impact of AI is getting undeniable", so, the goalposts are "the impact of AI". Probably something like "the impact of AI is high, or will be soon".

Note that this does not depend on things like AI sentience or defining "intelligence" more rigorously, it just depends on AI impact.

Take your point, although

> "The impact of AI is getting undeniable", so, the goalposts are "the impact of AI". Probably something like "the impact of AI is high, or will be soon".

those are not goalposts - that's an incredible vague 'goal'. What are we moving here exactly?

The "goal" here, not in the sense of what AI scientists are shooting for, but in terms of "goal", "goalpost", and the idiom of "moving the goalposts", would be to invalidate the current argument. Typically, you "goal" when you successfully disprove the other person's argument.

Thus "moving the goalposts" is for the defenders to shift what argument that the other side is trying to disprove.

If the argument is "the impact of AI is getting undeniable", you'd try to show that impact of AI is not that high, and not looking to be that high in the near future.

The other side might move the goalposts by saying something like "well, it doesn't matter if AI is actually that broadly impactful right now, all that matters is whether it's impactful in the field of mathematics". At which point, you might be frustrated because the effort you put into engaging their previous argument is now moot.

PS - yeah, yeah, I overexplained

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