6 ms·

personally i find a lot of arguments against AGI coming any time soon couched in a culture of human exceptionalism, even those who wouldn't claim as much direct

personally i find a lot of arguments against AGI coming any time soon couched in a culture of human exceptionalism, even those who wouldn't claim as much directly. there is a DAMN surprising level of intelligence in significantly less complex life. we are just so attached to intelligence as defined by human culture to call it as it is.

1_2__4 6y ago
I don’t even know where to start.
Taek 6y ago
I firmly believe that raw intelligence has little to do with our lead as a species, and it may even be the case that there are numerous animals with more raw intelligence than humans, especially predators. Our advantage comes from our ability to pass information on to eachother. A piece of knowledge that took 10,000 hours of thinking, observing, and experimenting to come by may only take 4 hours to pass on. Humans can do this much better than any other animal. That's a skill borne of communication advantages, not raw intelligence advantages.
- dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
  Perhaps, but animals do not seem to understand abstract concepts as well as us. This may be linked to language too. Without the ability to make analogies in their brain, no crocodile will figure out the worlds made of atoms or if you rub sticks really quickly they make fire.
- qayxc 6y ago
  > I firmly believe that raw intelligence has little to do with our lead as a species This statement carries no meaning unless you define what "raw intelligence" is.
joe_the_user 6y ago
Well, logic-based "AI" (GOFAI), was much more about logic programming, automating explicit, human conscious reason and that's generally been considered a failure or at least a dead end. Deep learning and related approaches don't seem as human related as earlier - there's even deep worm that's trying to simulate worm behavior. The thing about hard arguments against AI, however, is that they have to come down to "there's a quality X that a machine can't emulate". And usually the X is intuitive/philosophical concept with great resonance to humans but which is actually quite ill-defined. If X was exactly defined, well, we'd be able to compute it after all. So you get X as "spark of life", "soul". "being in the world" etc. And that kind of again shows "human exceptionalism" as the perspective.
tsimionescu 6y ago
I think quite the opposite: the vast difference between living beings' ability to learm how to exist in their environment (including other living beings and sometimes social structures) and the very limited successes of even modern AI still show that we are very far away from AGI. We couldn't create an ant AI right now, imagining we are pretty close to a human is pretty absurd. And if we're taking about intelligence, human exceptionalism is hard to argue against (in the context of Earth, no point in speculating about alien life). There are pretty few creatures on earth trying to build AIs, and I for one would not consider something to be an AGI if it couldn't even understand the concept.
- LesZedCB 6y ago
  > We couldn't create an ant AI right now, imagining we are pretty close to a human is pretty absurd i dont care about "human level intelligence," just a general unsupervised learning agent that can interact with the world (i recognize the insufficiency of this definition. i'm not writing an essay here) will suffice for me. human level is just another iteration(s) after that.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    Agreed, but my claim is exactly that we are obviously far from that. In fact, all current training methods work only on very precisely defined problems. Both the relevant inputs and desired outputs must be very precisely defined, and come in rather small numbers, for any success with current methods. Trying to use the existing methods on a problem as open as living in the world would require so much computing power, and so many petabytes of training data (not that we would know how to generate this training data, a hard problem in itself, regardless of scale), that hardly anyone is even attempting it.
    - LesZedCB 6y ago
      yeah i think we are in agreement about current methods. i guess my real hypothesis is that there are more people than ever looking at AI. we don't have the right algorithm or framework yet, and currently models probably wont iterate to it. but a hard takeoff when we do find it is practically inevitable, in my opinion. i think AI experts are limited to thinking in terms of the field as it is, or where it will be in less than five years, not what will happen when somebody stumbles on the right model.
gnarbarian 6y ago
"The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim." Edsger Dijkstra I suspect you're right. I believe there's nothing that can be formally defined that is impossible for an AI to do and possible for a person to do. Furthermore, AGI is not formally defined or defined tightly enough to be a target we can actually hit. It's a hand wavy way of saying "AI as smart as a person". The "Anti AGI" crowd moves the goalposts every time a huge breakthrough occurs but as long as there is a goalpost (formal definition) to hit AI will surely hit it. The "Pro AGI" crowd is also guilty of not being precise with exactly what AGI is. I also fundamentally believe the whole concept of AGI is flawed and biased to what people perceive as intelligence rather than intelligence itself. This is partially why there is so much effort and hoopla around things like GPT-3, (or in the past the Turing test). These programs which demonstrate something like human intelligence which is difficult to nail down in terms of a formal definition of ability. Both groups point at it and claim victory or point at a flaw. AI progresses inexorably regardless of what the hell AGI even means.
- LesZedCB 6y ago
  > biased to what people perceive as intelligence rather than intelligence itself this statement is only reifying the presupposition that "intelligence" as a property of the universe, any more than something such as "crime" or "mental illness" is a fundamental property and not emergent from culture values and norms. the reason why "AI conservatives" keep moving the goalposts is because it is a myth in the collective consciousness of people who believe that intelligence is fundamentally not something a silicon substrate machine could possess. i think breaking out of the dichotomy of intelligent or unintelligent is necessary for the discussion. a "human level intelligence" is not real, so whatever does "human level intelligence" things is human level intelligence. if it quacks like a duck... it even may be imbued with "subjectivity" if you ask me.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    A 'human level intelligence' simply means something that is roughly capable of doing the same things as a human, all at the same time, at least at a pure cognitive level (Stephen Hawking was not physically able to make fire, but that does not disqualify him from being considered a human-level intelligence). At the very least, this involves understanding how to interact with the world, understanding basic physics, being able to create tools to interact with the world, and being able to communicate at least with others of your 'species' about ANY knowledge you have gained (so a crow isn't a human level intelligence, because it is unable to communicate more than a handful of kinds of information). For a machine without a physical realization, this becomes trickier to manage, anf often must rely on also specifically learning human language so that it can be probed aboht its understanding of the world. But if we built a robot that could walk around, gather food, build some tools or shelter, and teach another robot what it discovered, I think most people would be happy to call that AGI, even if it couldn't read Shakespeare and weep.
orwin 6y ago
Do you consider Church-Turing Thesis couched in a culture of human exceptionalism too? Or is this the one argument that is not? I consider this is the best theory against AGI, and if AGI come to fruition, it would mean that this thesis was invalid (i do like Turing, but i'm pretty sure i wouldn't be mad if he was wrong about this in 1936, when no computer existed). And also it put me in a comfortable position: as long as we don't create something more complex than ourselves, Turing was right, and there is no chance we're living in a simulation. If he was wrong, well, i think the argument was "if we could test human behavior in a lifelike simulation, we would", and life would loose a lot a meaning for a lot of people.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  How is the Church-Turing thesis an argument against AGI? If anything, it is an argument FOR AGI: it claims that a Turing machine is capable of solving any problem that can be solved, which directly implies that you can create a computer with the exact reasoning capacities of the human mind (or more). AGI would be a strong signal that the thesis is valid, though it remains un provable (as it is an assertion about an informal idea, 'functions that can be solved'). Thinking about simulations leads nowhere, so I won't engage, it's too far outside of what can be reasonably investigated, it's scientifically sounding religion.
- LesZedCB 6y ago
  > Do you consider Church-Turing Thesis couched in a culture of human exceptionalism too? there is a branch of philosophy called logical positivism or logical empiricism, which in my understanding only deals with statements that can be proven a priori or via verifiability. Church-Turing Thesis exists within this framework, as far as i can tell. i think that's supremely boring and leaves out the entire other half of epistemological discussion. but honestly i dont see how this thesis holds any bearing on AI, maybe you can bridge the gap for me. > life would loose a lot a meaning for a lot of people this is so loaded with metaphysical assumptions it's hard to engage with. to rephrase "if i was deterministic, my life would be meaningless" is exactly the kind of reasoning somebody who is a human exceptionalist would use without realizing that's what they are stating.
georgeecollins 6y ago
Then you should read Rodney Brooks for an argument against AGI coming soon with no mention of human exceptionalism. In fact, he argues that an artificially created organism with intelligence is more likely soon than an engineered one. >> there is a DAMN surprising level of intelligence in significantly less complex life. we are just so attached to intelligence as defined by human culture to call it as it is. Totally agree btw
mcguire 6y ago
How about this one: computational complexity doesn't imply AGI is impossible, it implies that human intelligence isn't all that wonderfully miraculous.
- LesZedCB 6y ago
  i think we agree on that point?
nradov 6y ago
Well then let's see an AGI that can operate at even the level of a rodent or sparrow. As soon as someone can show me that then I'll believe human level AGI is feasible soon. Today we haven't even reached the insect level, except for some very limited special cases that don't really satisfy the "G" part of AGI.

1_2__4 6y ago

I don’t even know where to start.

Taek 6y ago

I firmly believe that raw intelligence has little to do with our lead as a species, and it may even be the case that there are numerous animals with more raw intelligence than humans, especially predators. Our advantage comes from our ability to pass information on to eachother. A piece of knowledge that took 10,000 hours of thinking, observing, and experimenting to come by may only take 4 hours to pass on. Humans can do this much better than any other animal. That's a skill borne of communication advantages, not raw intelligence advantages.

dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
Perhaps, but animals do not seem to understand abstract concepts as well as us. This may be linked to language too. Without the ability to make analogies in their brain, no crocodile will figure out the worlds made of atoms or if you rub sticks really quickly they make fire.
qayxc 6y ago
> I firmly believe that raw intelligence has little to do with our lead as a species This statement carries no meaning unless you define what "raw intelligence" is.

joe_the_user 6y ago

Well, logic-based "AI" (GOFAI), was much more about logic programming, automating explicit, human conscious reason and that's generally been considered a failure or at least a dead end. Deep learning and related approaches don't seem as human related as earlier - there's even deep worm that's trying to simulate worm behavior. The thing about hard arguments against AI, however, is that they have to come down to "there's a quality X that a machine can't emulate". And usually the X is intuitive/philosophical concept with great resonance to humans but which is actually quite ill-defined. If X was exactly defined, well, we'd be able to compute it after all. So you get X as "spark of life", "soul". "being in the world" etc. And that kind of again shows "human exceptionalism" as the perspective.

tsimionescu 6y ago

I think quite the opposite: the vast difference between living beings' ability to learm how to exist in their environment (including other living beings and sometimes social structures) and the very limited successes of even modern AI still show that we are very far away from AGI. We couldn't create an ant AI right now, imagining we are pretty close to a human is pretty absurd. And if we're taking about intelligence, human exceptionalism is hard to argue against (in the context of Earth, no point in speculating about alien life). There are pretty few creatures on earth trying to build AIs, and I for one would not consider something to be an AGI if it couldn't even understand the concept.

LesZedCB 6y ago
> We couldn't create an ant AI right now, imagining we are pretty close to a human is pretty absurd i dont care about "human level intelligence," just a general unsupervised learning agent that can interact with the world (i recognize the insufficiency of this definition. i'm not writing an essay here) will suffice for me. human level is just another iteration(s) after that.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  Agreed, but my claim is exactly that we are obviously far from that. In fact, all current training methods work only on very precisely defined problems. Both the relevant inputs and desired outputs must be very precisely defined, and come in rather small numbers, for any success with current methods. Trying to use the existing methods on a problem as open as living in the world would require so much computing power, and so many petabytes of training data (not that we would know how to generate this training data, a hard problem in itself, regardless of scale), that hardly anyone is even attempting it.
  - LesZedCB 6y ago
    yeah i think we are in agreement about current methods. i guess my real hypothesis is that there are more people than ever looking at AI. we don't have the right algorithm or framework yet, and currently models probably wont iterate to it. but a hard takeoff when we do find it is practically inevitable, in my opinion. i think AI experts are limited to thinking in terms of the field as it is, or where it will be in less than five years, not what will happen when somebody stumbles on the right model.

gnarbarian 6y ago

"The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim." Edsger Dijkstra I suspect you're right. I believe there's nothing that can be formally defined that is impossible for an AI to do and possible for a person to do. Furthermore, AGI is not formally defined or defined tightly enough to be a target we can actually hit. It's a hand wavy way of saying "AI as smart as a person". The "Anti AGI" crowd moves the goalposts every time a huge breakthrough occurs but as long as there is a goalpost (formal definition) to hit AI will surely hit it. The "Pro AGI" crowd is also guilty of not being precise with exactly what AGI is. I also fundamentally believe the whole concept of AGI is flawed and biased to what people perceive as intelligence rather than intelligence itself. This is partially why there is so much effort and hoopla around things like GPT-3, (or in the past the Turing test). These programs which demonstrate something like human intelligence which is difficult to nail down in terms of a formal definition of ability. Both groups point at it and claim victory or point at a flaw. AI progresses inexorably regardless of what the hell AGI even means.

LesZedCB 6y ago
> biased to what people perceive as intelligence rather than intelligence itself this statement is only reifying the presupposition that "intelligence" as a property of the universe, any more than something such as "crime" or "mental illness" is a fundamental property and not emergent from culture values and norms. the reason why "AI conservatives" keep moving the goalposts is because it is a myth in the collective consciousness of people who believe that intelligence is fundamentally not something a silicon substrate machine could possess. i think breaking out of the dichotomy of intelligent or unintelligent is necessary for the discussion. a "human level intelligence" is not real, so whatever does "human level intelligence" things is human level intelligence. if it quacks like a duck... it even may be imbued with "subjectivity" if you ask me.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  A 'human level intelligence' simply means something that is roughly capable of doing the same things as a human, all at the same time, at least at a pure cognitive level (Stephen Hawking was not physically able to make fire, but that does not disqualify him from being considered a human-level intelligence). At the very least, this involves understanding how to interact with the world, understanding basic physics, being able to create tools to interact with the world, and being able to communicate at least with others of your 'species' about ANY knowledge you have gained (so a crow isn't a human level intelligence, because it is unable to communicate more than a handful of kinds of information). For a machine without a physical realization, this becomes trickier to manage, anf often must rely on also specifically learning human language so that it can be probed aboht its understanding of the world. But if we built a robot that could walk around, gather food, build some tools or shelter, and teach another robot what it discovered, I think most people would be happy to call that AGI, even if it couldn't read Shakespeare and weep.

orwin 6y ago

Do you consider Church-Turing Thesis couched in a culture of human exceptionalism too? Or is this the one argument that is not? I consider this is the best theory against AGI, and if AGI come to fruition, it would mean that this thesis was invalid (i do like Turing, but i'm pretty sure i wouldn't be mad if he was wrong about this in 1936, when no computer existed). And also it put me in a comfortable position: as long as we don't create something more complex than ourselves, Turing was right, and there is no chance we're living in a simulation. If he was wrong, well, i think the argument was "if we could test human behavior in a lifelike simulation, we would", and life would loose a lot a meaning for a lot of people.

tsimionescu 6y ago
How is the Church-Turing thesis an argument against AGI? If anything, it is an argument FOR AGI: it claims that a Turing machine is capable of solving any problem that can be solved, which directly implies that you can create a computer with the exact reasoning capacities of the human mind (or more). AGI would be a strong signal that the thesis is valid, though it remains un provable (as it is an assertion about an informal idea, 'functions that can be solved'). Thinking about simulations leads nowhere, so I won't engage, it's too far outside of what can be reasonably investigated, it's scientifically sounding religion.
LesZedCB 6y ago
> Do you consider Church-Turing Thesis couched in a culture of human exceptionalism too? there is a branch of philosophy called logical positivism or logical empiricism, which in my understanding only deals with statements that can be proven a priori or via verifiability. Church-Turing Thesis exists within this framework, as far as i can tell. i think that's supremely boring and leaves out the entire other half of epistemological discussion. but honestly i dont see how this thesis holds any bearing on AI, maybe you can bridge the gap for me. > life would loose a lot a meaning for a lot of people this is so loaded with metaphysical assumptions it's hard to engage with. to rephrase "if i was deterministic, my life would be meaningless" is exactly the kind of reasoning somebody who is a human exceptionalist would use without realizing that's what they are stating.

georgeecollins 6y ago

Then you should read Rodney Brooks for an argument against AGI coming soon with no mention of human exceptionalism. In fact, he argues that an artificially created organism with intelligence is more likely soon than an engineered one. >> there is a DAMN surprising level of intelligence in significantly less complex life. we are just so attached to intelligence as defined by human culture to call it as it is. Totally agree btw

mcguire 6y ago

How about this one: computational complexity doesn't imply AGI is impossible, it implies that human intelligence isn't all that wonderfully miraculous.

LesZedCB 6y ago
i think we agree on that point?

nradov 6y ago

Well then let's see an AGI that can operate at even the level of a rodent or sparrow. As soon as someone can show me that then I'll believe human level AGI is feasible soon. Today we haven't even reached the insect level, except for some very limited special cases that don't really satisfy the "G" part of AGI.