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We also tend to have decades of experience interacting with other humans and understanding what would be reasonable to want / moral / what would “make sense”.

We also tend to have decades of experience interacting with other humans and understanding what would be reasonable to want / moral / what would “make sense”. This is a big part of why I’m bearish on things like fully autonomous self-driving cars until general AI is achieved. Driving is fundamentally a social activity that you participate in with other humans, at least until we built out nation-wide autonomous-only lanes that only allow (through a gate or barrier) autonomous vehicles with self-driving engaged in a way that normal vehicles can’t “sneak in”…I’m not holding my breath. Maybe I’ll see it in my lifetime (30s), maybe not.

mjburgess 5y ago
"Bearish" understates my mood. I think we're drifting into charlatanism, fraud and pseudoscience.
- michaelpb 5y ago
  Perhaps religious cult territory too. "The Algorithm" [1] is already being used to tell fortunes -- which if it just stays as a few people having fun with horoscopes I don't really care, it seems harmless. But I could also totally picture some cryptocoin charlatan getting revelations about The Spiritual Algorithm or something and starts selling AI for getting into heaven. --- [1] By "The Algorithm" I just mean the public colloquially reference to trending formulas used on TikTok etc, which I'm sure probably uses machine learning somewhere
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    I agree. I have the same reactions to these guys as I did to religious zealots when I was a teenager; and later to "transhumanism". Alarm, disbelief, hostility. There is a new secular religion underneath this. "Uploading consciousness", "Aren't we all just data systems?", "We've built a neural network with as many (meaningless) neurones as the brain!" It's the same disgust and denial at being biological animals that all religions foster. Thankfully here, I think, the religion has predictions. It predicts a self-driving car, a "fourth industrial revolution", and so on. When these fail to materialise, some sanity will return. (Of course they have already failed, the question is when in the next 5-10yrs people will realise.)
    - michaelpb 5y ago
      > It's the same disgust and denial at being biological animals that all religions foster. Huh, I didn't think of it that way! Good point! I love history and a few weeks ago I read passage in a history book on a period in the early 19th century dominated by "American radicalism" (a liberal movement) and "transcendentalism" [1], when many hucksters and itinerant pastors profited off of the hype of industrialization. It immediately reminded me of the modern crypto / AI hype. In both cases, it actually is simply more smoke-and-mirrors to remove culpable human elements from a changing system --- by replacing it with "AI" and "crypto" (today), or the "invisible hand" and "radical self-reliance" (the 1820s-1830s US). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism - and history "rhymed" 100 years later - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1350508420910577 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/135050842091057... and I would argue that it "rhymes" once again today with Musk following in Ford's footsteps, although with perhaps less intent than Ford
noema 5y ago
Hubert Dreyfus's critiques of AI systems (particularly, their all but total inability to bodily engage with a social world) still remain relevant.

mjburgess 5y ago

"Bearish" understates my mood. I think we're drifting into charlatanism, fraud and pseudoscience.

michaelpb 5y ago
Perhaps religious cult territory too. "The Algorithm" [1] is already being used to tell fortunes -- which if it just stays as a few people having fun with horoscopes I don't really care, it seems harmless. But I could also totally picture some cryptocoin charlatan getting revelations about The Spiritual Algorithm or something and starts selling AI for getting into heaven. --- [1] By "The Algorithm" I just mean the public colloquially reference to trending formulas used on TikTok etc, which I'm sure probably uses machine learning somewhere
- mjburgess 5y ago
  I agree. I have the same reactions to these guys as I did to religious zealots when I was a teenager; and later to "transhumanism". Alarm, disbelief, hostility. There is a new secular religion underneath this. "Uploading consciousness", "Aren't we all just data systems?", "We've built a neural network with as many (meaningless) neurones as the brain!" It's the same disgust and denial at being biological animals that all religions foster. Thankfully here, I think, the religion has predictions. It predicts a self-driving car, a "fourth industrial revolution", and so on. When these fail to materialise, some sanity will return. (Of course they have already failed, the question is when in the next 5-10yrs people will realise.)
  - michaelpb 5y ago
    > It's the same disgust and denial at being biological animals that all religions foster. Huh, I didn't think of it that way! Good point! I love history and a few weeks ago I read passage in a history book on a period in the early 19th century dominated by "American radicalism" (a liberal movement) and "transcendentalism" [1], when many hucksters and itinerant pastors profited off of the hype of industrialization. It immediately reminded me of the modern crypto / AI hype. In both cases, it actually is simply more smoke-and-mirrors to remove culpable human elements from a changing system --- by replacing it with "AI" and "crypto" (today), or the "invisible hand" and "radical self-reliance" (the 1820s-1830s US). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism - and history "rhymed" 100 years later - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1350508420910577 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/135050842091057... and I would argue that it "rhymes" once again today with Musk following in Ford's footsteps, although with perhaps less intent than Ford

noema 5y ago

Hubert Dreyfus's critiques of AI systems (particularly, their all but total inability to bodily engage with a social world) still remain relevant.