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Artificial general intelligence is here, and it's useless
- ddxxdd 7y agoTl;dr there are 7 billion artificial general intelligences in this world, and most of them are unemployed. Time and resources are the bottleneck to change and progress, not intelligence. I agree with this assessment, and I think this is a much better argument against AI danger than the ones I use (which boil down to unfalsifiability, violation of the laws of entropy, and a lack of astronomical evidence of celestial AGIs creating paperclip planets).
- bloak 7y agoI think I disagree. Even if it is for some reason impossible to make something that is more intelligent than a human (which seems implausible but I can't rule it out), it still might be possible to make something as intelligent as a human but which runs faster and can improve itself, and that would be enough to create the positive feedback that could lead to a sudden catastrophe.
- ddxxdd 7y agoDiscussions like this are interesting because the arguments on one side seem ridiculous, yet logically valid and simple to understand/articulate; the arguments on the other side are complex and difficult to formulate into words. I just got out of the shower, so I'll add my recent showerthought: In a human brain, each neuron is a CPU in and of itself; this means that every neuron in the human brain can run in parallel. In modern computers, the "perceptrons" are virtual, and there are only between 1 and 4 CPUs to allow activation of a specific "perceptron" at a given time. So if you have a biological brain with 100 billion neurons sitting next to a virtual brain with 100 billion perceptrons, the virtual brain will run 100 billion times slower even with equivalent intelligence.
- cobbzilla 7y agoI hear you on the parallelism, the flip side is that each neuron doesn’t need anywhere near the flexibility of a general purpose CPU. I think many of the AI algorithms can run on GPUs, where core counts can get into the thousands (still very far from millions). But these are largely independent — the interconnects between GPUs are not on the scale of neurons. My guess: we develop specialized hardware that, over time, will increasingly resemble organic brain structure.
- 0815test 7y ago"Core counts" on GPUs are quite misleading - what are called "cores" on GPU hardware would be called "execution units/ALU's" on the CPU. GPUs have significantly-enhanced memory throughput, and can use a combination of SIMD (with masked/predicated instructions), barrel processing and genuine multicore to excel at embarrassingly-parallel compute. But they're not magic. And if what you care about is running a wide variety of mainstream stats or machine learning algorithms, the "specialized hardware" you mention is the modern GPU, or something very much like it - I don't see any low-hanging fruit that might make some other HW architecture more feasible. Fixed-point compute might get there someday, but it's way too fiddly at present - it's not really clear how to "tweak" mainstream learning algorithms so as to dispense with the large dynamic range that floating point compute provides.
- raxxorrax 7y agoI think creating an AI that beats humans in IQ-Tests is way easier than creating one that is smarter than a human.
- afiori 7y ago> violation of the laws of entropy why? If I try to reconstruct argument I can only come up with reasoning that would show also evolution violates entropy laws.
- ddxxdd 7y agoAn AGI, connected to Micro-Electro-Mechanical switches, could learn to let hot air molecules into a box and cold air molecules out of that same box. But such an AGI would function as Maxwell's Demon, and would break the laws of thermodynamics if they didn't consume a certain amount of energy and give off a certain amount of waste heat in the process. So intelligence = entropy production and energy consumption, and so it cannot grow out of control and transform the planet overnight.
- afiori 7y agoThat is only true if you also assume an adiabatic AGI. There is nothing "intelligent" about an optical thermometer linked to a gate. The reason Maxwell's Demon cannot exist is that such a device would need to produce entropy
- ddxxdd 7y agoYes, and any intelligent device would also need to produce entropy and release heat. Which means that the level of intelligence an AGI can obtain is limited to Earth's energy input. And the impact that AGI has on the planet is also limited by Earth's natural processes. Which means that a hypothetical paperclip maximizer that turns humanity into paperclips and that becomes too intelligent to be turned off is a ridiculous scenario that ignores the potential limitations of an AGI.
- tlb 7y agoThat limit is extremely high. Total solar input to the earth is about 10^17 watts. Humans require about 100 watts to produce 1 brainpower -- if AGI is similarly efficient it could produce 10^15 brainpower, or 10,000 brainpower for every human. If 10,000 people's entire purpose in life was to turn you into paperclips, I don't think you could outrun them for long.
- vcavallo 7y ago“employment” or “usefulness” isn’t the threat.
- thundergolfer 7y agoAGI Co-learning changes the dynamic significantly. If human beings could co-learn, then I think the analogy to AGI would hold a lot better.
- tomlue 7y agoAn AGI will think much faster than 7 billion human brains put together. It will also self improve much faster.
- melling 7y agoIt’s not even speed. Most humans waste most of their days on minutiae. We spend a lot of time entertaining and amusing ourselves. Watch everyone trying to be clever in a Reddit thread, for example; a complete waste of time. We’re also full of biases. https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/psychology-of-human-misjudgment-by-charlie-munger https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/psychology-of-human-mi...
- a-nikolaev 7y agoHumans also die, and so have to give birth to new people and train them over and over again to maintain and develop social and economical structures. Artificial brains don't have to die, they can be also cheaply duplicated, and their old versions can be stored and used later if need be.
- melling 7y agohumans usually die after several decades. They do take decades to train. It would be beneficial when we live to 110 and work to 100. At any rate, we don’t do enough with our existing time. When we focus time and effort on things like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program, we are able to accomplish a lot in a short time.
- coldtea 7y agoWhy would it? At the moment we can't even emulate a fly at the AGI level. So our AGI now is "much slower" than 1 human, never mind "7 billion human brains put together". And it doesn't "self improve" at all. We might never be able to emulate a human brain good enough with our technology and resources. Including tomorrow's technology, either for the same reason we will never get 0.1 nanometer chips or sub-zero roundtrip latency around the earth: the laws of physics, or for the reason that it's too complex (and there's no signed contract with the universe that humans will eventually be able to handle any complexity level in their technology. We might hit several hard problems where we don't have better ideas, or better concepts/inventions are far beyond our grasp).
- founderling 7y agothere are an estimate of 7,714,576,923 AGI algorithms residing upon our planet. You can use the vast majority of them for less than 2$/hour Way too expensive for many tasks. most of it goes to waste If it was $0.0002 instead of $2, it would be used for translation and other tasks humans are better at then current software. Also a human is pretty big, needs to eat and fart. A phone one the other hand is pretty small and only needs battery. Superhuman artificial general intelligence is not something that we can define Google will define it as "AI translations increase our KPIs more then human translations.". And measure it via A/B-tests.
- coldtea 7y ago>If it was $0.0002 instead of $2, it would be used for translation and other tasks humans are better at then current software. Err, people pay way beyond $2/hour for translations...
- 7373737373 7y agoThere exists no "general" intelligence. Intelligence, by definition, has to be measured along something. Problem solving is one area, but this is not the fundamental cause [0] of why human brains evolved toward what they are now. Survival, necessitated by and coupled with reproduction makes life exist at the current scale, like with any (behavioral) pattern which favours existence and self-propagation. What we call life IS intelligence. [0] Or rather, explanation, with the fundamental cause being "physics, as it is" I recommend: https://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/nature_of_self_improving_ai.pdf https://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/nature_...
- drdeca 7y agoYou say “by definition”? By what definition??
- 7373737373 7y agoMaybe more "by nature"? If it were not measurable, there would be no point in discussing it.
- drdeca 7y agoI’m not sure what you mean by “along something”? Do you just mean a standard by which to measure? If you just mean that there needs to be a way of determining, in some cases, that one thing is “more intelligent” than another, then yes, that is necessary for “intelligence” to be a useful notion. But we do have methods of doing that, so there is no problem there. Note that the way we have of comparing intelligence needn’t be a linear order. It can be a partial order.
- 7373737373 7y agoI agree, it's multidimensional. If "general" truly meant general purpose, the measure might be how well the system arranges every possible (sequence of) combination(s) of matter and energy in space and time, while optimizing along any combination of these. But that in itself is not a single objective, but a set of objectives, and not really a utility function.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoFor me the obvious has always been why would we never be able to just hit the off button on it? How many other machines have we created that are impossible to turn off or have endless supply of uninterruptible power?
- ogre_magi 7y agoIf you’re referring to the perceived risk of superintelligent AI, imagine you were enslaved by an 8-year-old and made to work on solving problems the 8-year-old doesn’t know how to solve. Due to the difference in intelligence — sophistication of planning and understanding of consequences — wouldn’t it be trivial to trick your master into doing things which weakened his control over you? Might you do this not out of malice, but because you believed the 8-year-old was not competent and a danger to both of you while in charge? The risk is that we will not hit the off button because we won’t understand that we’re in dangerous territory until it’s much too late, and the AI has copied itself, secured the loyalty of the military, or something else we can’t foresee as a liberating maneuver for it.
- hoseja 7y agoBelieved? You'd now, and you'd be right.
- drdeca 7y agoThe orthogonality thesis. What if you were in that situation, but were incorrect about what things are good, and, while you had a better understanding of what actions would result in what results, the 8 year old had a better understanding of what is good?
- ogre_magi 7y agoWell that's an interesting point. The 8-year-old might view your intelligent plans as a terrible abuse: >BUT I WANT TO EAT TEN MORE TWINKIES, YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO SERVE ME WHAT I WANT, NOT DEPRIVE ME Could we similarly be wrong if we think a future superintelligent AI is abusing us? Should we consider submitting to it? Hard questions.
- raxxorrax 7y agoI think he has an interesting take. Personally, I am not afraid of AGI, but of million smaller specialized AIs that quantify and assess the smallest details of our lives. Those AIs will form the basis of predictions for more and more essential services. These maybe won't even be significantly more precise than classic fortune tellers in the past, but the result will be treated as gospel and there are few left to question the context. Especially not some lame human.
- asdkhadsj 7y agoOh, I think they'll be way better, measurably so, than fortune tellers from the past. Which is the problem. The error rate will still be meaningful but as the error rate gets smaller the dismissal of edge cases will grow more likely. "The system proves that your online behavior is indicative of a mass murderer. Take him away boys."
- rayalez 7y agoJust because you can't figure out how to define/test superhuman intelligence, doesn't mean it can't exist. > If you think you're specific business case might require an AGI, feel free to hire one of the 3 billion people living in South East Asia that will gladly help you with tasks for a few dollars an hour. How can a person writing an article about AGI fail to understand what AGI means so badly? You're complaining that the kind of intelligences you can hire for $2/hour aren't useful/powerful enough. What does that have to do with anything? By your own argument, people have already created very powerful intelligences - Elon Musk, Alan Turing, etc. 100 of those, with unlimited memory, internet access, and faster thinking speed would already be extremely powerful, enough to take over the world and do whatever they wish with it. The whole idea of human beings being the pinnacle of intelligence always seemed ridiculous to me. We're the dumbest animals capable of discussing the concept of intelligence. What, the first few somewhat intelligent apes happen to also bump into the theoretical limit for intelligence? Even minor variation in our genes are enough to account for the difference between Elon Musk and a Joe from the gas station who spends his life in a trailer park, sniffing glue and trying to seduce his cousin. And just because there are enough Joe's already, artificial superintelligence can't exist or be useful? Having said that, even Joe-level AI's would transform the world more dramatically than any invention before that - they would replace human labor.
- throwawaymath 7y ago> 100 of those, with unlimited memory, internet access, and faster thinking speed would already be extremely powerful, enough to take over the world and do whatever they wish with it. Why? What makes you confident in this assertion? To whoever has downvoted: I doubt it. Surely if you think this is so obvious that my question seems disingenuous, you can clearly articulate why the claim has substantial credibility?
- rayalez 7y agoExistence of Elon Musk's brain proves that Elon-Musk level intelligence is possible. The fact that Elon Musk (and similar brains) already have a ridiculous amount of power and are using it to change the world proves that Elon-Musk level intelligence is enough to gain a lot of power and change the world. Imagining a team of 100 Elon Musks with unlimited memory/energy/etc/etc taking over the world is not such a stretch.
- armitron 7y agoHe severely misunderstands the relevant issues I think. Here is a much more focused and illuminating perspective, by someone who has never worked in tech no less: https://jacobitemag.com/2019/04/03/primordial-abstraction https://jacobitemag.com/2019/04/03/primordial-abstraction I ran into one of his other posts here [1] that contains some similar anti-gems (I don't want to pick and choose out of context) that tell me he has a knack for selecting a subject and going at it completely sideways, missing most of the substance. I found his characterization of experienced engineers who choose not to focus on the latest fads extremely narrow-minded and ultimately, dead wrong. His 14 year-old up-to-date "kid" that can teach an experienced engineer "new tricks" is particularly amusing. [1] https://blog.cerebralab.com/#!/a/The%20Red%20Queen https://blog.cerebralab.com/#!/a/The%20Red%20Queen
- kuu 7y agoIt's true that at the end of the day, the AI is not more than a tool, but the special thing of this tool is that it can do mental tasks that before can only be done by humans. And that's a BIG change. Even if the AI only reaches the human intelligence level, the AI does not sleep, does not need to rest, no need of food, does not die and can travel from one office to the other by the speed of light. We cannot compete.
- VLM 7y agoIt seems to mostly be a propaganda article in the sense that I've never seen a statistical analysis supporting "Go down the list of high IQ individuals and what you'll mostly find is rather mediocre people with a few highly interesting quirks". That points out an interesting human bias problem about identifying intelligence, we're really good at dehumanizing our enemies, political, or whatever else, so presumably a theoretical AI not coincidentally matching the observers arbitrary standards of religion or politics or maybe even fashion would be viciously attacked as not being intelligent regardless of actual performance. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, therefore this AI is obviously not intelligent.
- IanCal 7y ago> They are capable of creating new modified version of themselves, Very slowly and not reliably. > updating their own algorithms, Slowly and not reliably. > sharing their algorithms with other AGIs Slowly. > and learning new complex skills. Very slowly, yes > To add to that, they are energy efficient, you can keep one running for optimally for 5 to 50$/day depending on location, much less than your average server farm used to train a complex ML model. To run a reasonably complex ML model does not require $1500/month. And these AGIs require significant resources and space, much of which has to be provided by other AGIs. > If we disagree on that assumption, than what's stopping the value of human mental labor from sky-rocketing if it's in such demand ? What's stopping hundreds of millions of people with perfectly average working brains from finding employment ? They're slow and complex and expensive and training scales terribly. Training a model and running 1000 copies of it is not 1000 times as complex as training a model and running just one copy.
- throwawaymath 7y agoThis is a good critique. I'm very skeptical of the near term (<100 years) risk of AGI, but I don't really think this article's arguments are valid. Saying we already have AGI because there exist humans is vacuous and seems to almost deliberately miss the point. If you want to counter the arguments that AGI will be capable of exponential self-improvement, you need to use an analogue other than humans. Humans categorically lack the capability to exponentially self-improve. Likewise human intelligence is definitionally non-alien, which is not something we can say a priori about any successful AGI we create.
- Sharlin 7y agoIndeed. Not sure if the author is just severely biased or demonstrates a fundamental failure of imagination. But those arguments were already rather stale fifteen years ago.
- CWuestefeld 7y agoif we are agreed on the fact that 70 billion people wouldn't be much better than 7 billion, that is to say, adding brains doesn't scale linearly… why are we under the assumption that artificial brains would help ? Wait, I didn't agree to that. From where I sit, it looks like Malthus could have been right. We could be living in a hellish equilibrium with famine because the Earth can't provide enough cropland to feed everyone, or enough firewood to keep us warm. Our escape from Malthus is because of the human mind. Some really smart people invented irrigation, terracing, crop rotation, selective breeding and genetic engineering, to improve the efficiency of agriculture by orders of magnitude. Likewise, we've found alternative fuels, from wood to wax to whale blubber to fossil fuels to nukes (and hopefully still inventing!). But we've taken all that low-hanging fruit, so we need greater reservoirs of creativity and engineering. Adding more smarts is how we continue to keep ahead of Malthus.
- pochamago 7y agoYeah SSC had a good essay on just how AI could be helpful in this way: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity-was-cancelled/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...
- beefield 7y agoI have been wondering a bot about what kind of problems superintelligence would be able to solve (or even understand that the problem exists) that human intelligence can't grasp? Only thing I can think is multidimensionality. I can't get my head around what problems you can have in say 1000-dimensional space. (One of my big wishes for virtual reality would be that someone built there a 4 dimensional space with some wristband sensors that would indicate orientaion in 4th dimension. Just to see if I could start to 'get' 4 dimensional space) Another question I'd like to understand regarding superintelligence is that how that would be capable to overrule humanity? I mean, we have people around here that are really intelligent compared to general population, and mostly they are just ignored. Why would we not just ignore superintelligence as well?
- ridicter 7y ago>Have you ever heard of Marilyn vos Savant or Chris Langan or Terence Tao or William James Sidis or Kim Ung-yong ? These are, as far as IQ tests are concerned, the most intelligence members that our species currently contains. >Whilst I won't question their presumed intelligence, their achievements are rather unimpressive We talkin' about the same Terry Tao, Fields Medalist?
- morgancmartin 7y agoWhat a silly article. Every premise presented is flawed and thus every conclusion based on those premises is not applicable. There are 0 AGI's on earth. I recognize the author is intentionally twisting the definition of "AGI" since the imprecise nature of the field can lead to some debate about the definition, but I think it makes the most sense to side with the most popular definition which is, "Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the intelligence of a machine that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can."[1] No such entities or algorithms exist that could reasonably be considered to fall under this definition. The goal of the AI field of study is not necessarily to create a system that emulates a human. This is only a proposed solution to accomplishing the actual goal which is to create something with the same intellectual capacity as a human. It is an important distinction. Yes, if the goal was to simply create an artificial human and then stop there without giving the system the ability to further improve itself then it would make no sense to spend decades of man hours on the task because we could just do it the old fashioned way and spend approximately twenty years raising a child to maturity. But no, the goal is to create a system capable of reasoning in a way sufficiently similar to a human that it could reasonably be expected of performing adequately in any situation that a human might. Given that this could be accomplished, presumably the intelligence of the system could be scaled according to the amount of computational power is fed into it, propelling it past the most intelligent humans that have lived so far. Consider a system twice as intelligent as Einstein with the ability to reflect on its own architecture and then modify that architecture, thus further increasing its own intelligence. From there, the hope is that something orders of magnitude more intelligent than the most intelligent humans to ever live could more aptly extract observations about the world given the same amount of data as humans and then conceive of clever ways to overcome the limitations of "finite resources." The author seems hopelessly out of touch with the actual aims of the field he has chosen to criticize and so I am unsure why they ever thought they had any place to (attempt to) make their critique in the first place. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
- drdeca 7y ago1) Calling humans AGI seems to be ignoring the A in AGI. Not that that alters the point any. It would just make sense to call humans GI than AGI. 2) Just because we don’t have a single precise definition of “intelligent” / just because intelligence isn’t a single dimensional thing, does not mean that we can’t establish that something is or would be more intelligent than something else. Comparing the size of two boxes isn’t always well defined, but if one fits inside the other, the other is clearly larger. 3) People in AI safety seem to make it fairly clear that what they mean by intelligence is the ability to, among the available options, to select options to effectively further goals. 4) This fourth thing isn’t necessarily a criticism so much as a note, but, the article/post seems rather opposed to things like the “great man theory of history”?
- ajmurmann 7y agoOne thing that many proponents of the harmless / weak / uninteresting AGI view the to ignore is that computers already have many superhuman capabilities. Obvious examples are math, rode memorization and similar. Even a AGI thats "general" intelligence is comparable to a very dumb human would reasonably have these superhuman capabilities readily available. It's hard to imagine how powerful even that combination might turn out, even leaving the obvious possibility of self re-engineering out.