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It doesn't come with PURPOSE unless you force it to have some. Which is a perfectly fine avenue to take, I think. But without purpose, what you get is hallucina

It doesn't come with PURPOSE unless you force it to have some. Which is a perfectly fine avenue to take, I think. But without purpose, what you get is hallucinatory mockeries of meaning: trippy, but if it was consciousness you'd be looking for severe organic damage. Purpose doesn't automatically mean civilized, but you can't get to civilized without purpose. It's an okay word to use for outlining what's missing. AI output is increasingly coherent but MEANINGLESS. If you want to look to meaning and purpose, a better place to look might be emergent behaviors of the YouTube Algorithm, or Facebook feed. Those can easily take toxic swings because they're operating in the absence of a higher sense of what will happen: they're the consciousness of a worm or insect. But they show purpose, where the more coherent and intelligence-like outputs of GPT-3 keep on betraying a lack of meaning. GPT-3 doesn't WANT anything. There's the problem (though at this stage I think it's just as well). Only that will bring real AI… which can be a daunting prospect.

sbierwagen 5y ago
You're proposing that the... facebook feed is "more conscious" than GPT-3?
- thatjoeoverthr 5y ago
  Seems like an interesting thought. The feeds have a purpose or agenda, actively influence real people in real life, and do so in a way that perpetuates their own existence. As long as they’re effective, they have real world institutions to support them. As it happens, they are perpetually learning and growing. Putting that next to GPT3, it’s like an intelligent rescue dog next to a horse that counts.
- blamestross 5y ago
  The facebook feed is at least an online system vs a static model, so YES.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Probably, yes. It's interesting how consciousness could be a matter of drawing boundaries. A well-known example are the ants: individual ants are somewhat dumb, barely above simple chemical seekers. But the ant colony behaves as a single organism, and quite smart at that. Other examples include cities, nations, corporations - it kind of feels like these organizations have minds of their own, with individual humans being cells, and the bureaucracy forming a computational substrate. In the same vein, Facebook feed could be seen as a mind of its own. So could the entire human civilization.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  Yes. It's bound to be a very complicated web of intentions and subroutines to produce outcomes, very likely with no one human overseer. It's gonna be a big pile of messy dumb code, not necessarily self-modifying but very likely with attempts to 'learn' and adapt on the fly towards basic ends. It will be HUNGRY in the way GPT-3 is not: through both indirect and direct pressures, it will be struggling to maximize engagement, reach more places, get more food in the sense of people trying to interact with it. The Facebook news feed, and even more so the less human-centered algorithms of Google and YouTube, are more conscious than GPT-3. When they're adjusted, such as the times Google has fiddled with the algorithm because YouTube was pipelining people to the alt-right after it 'observed' that this heightened engagement a lot, the algorithms are adjusted by trying to give them other types of information, other priorities (like giving them more sensory organs to highlight stuff they'd missed about their larger environment) rather than by diving in and recoding specifica about particular youtube creators, or looking for a more narrowly defined 'politics' that had been coded in there. No such nefarious coding existed. The algorithm is alive, but blind. It functions on a scale where it can't NOT trample its surroundings, so it must be given eyes… and the consciousness gradually increases.
lolwut987 5y ago
It’s wrong to say it doesn’t want anything, it’s solely motivated to minimize training error. If you align what minimizing train error means with a larger purpose, it will seemingly make magic happen. Just like you, online, trying to figure out how to turn this into copulatory success. It doesn’t matter if you succeed but don’t understand why, only that you succeed.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  Is it motivated or is it just what it does? Is your thermostat motivated to minimize the temperature difference in a particular direction as well or is it just a machine that does that? Is your bicycle motivated to stay upright when you ride it or is just a consequence of physics (and halfway decent balance)?
  - jacobr1 5y ago
    Are you motivated to "find love?" Or just mechanistically following your genetic drive for reproduction?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
shrimp_emoji 5y ago
It's a neocortex that doesn't have the rest of the brain. : p
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
GPT-3 is a moderately proficient author with nothing to say. The problem isn't the proficiency, it's the lack of content. Some of us here despise the writing style of The New Yorker. The writing is beautiful, literary, but it takes it forever to say anything. GPT-3 is like that, but worse, because it has nothing to say.

sbierwagen 5y ago

You're proposing that the... facebook feed is "more conscious" than GPT-3?

thatjoeoverthr 5y ago
Seems like an interesting thought. The feeds have a purpose or agenda, actively influence real people in real life, and do so in a way that perpetuates their own existence. As long as they’re effective, they have real world institutions to support them. As it happens, they are perpetually learning and growing. Putting that next to GPT3, it’s like an intelligent rescue dog next to a horse that counts.
blamestross 5y ago
The facebook feed is at least an online system vs a static model, so YES.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
Probably, yes. It's interesting how consciousness could be a matter of drawing boundaries. A well-known example are the ants: individual ants are somewhat dumb, barely above simple chemical seekers. But the ant colony behaves as a single organism, and quite smart at that. Other examples include cities, nations, corporations - it kind of feels like these organizations have minds of their own, with individual humans being cells, and the bureaucracy forming a computational substrate. In the same vein, Facebook feed could be seen as a mind of its own. So could the entire human civilization.
Applejinx 5y ago
Yes. It's bound to be a very complicated web of intentions and subroutines to produce outcomes, very likely with no one human overseer. It's gonna be a big pile of messy dumb code, not necessarily self-modifying but very likely with attempts to 'learn' and adapt on the fly towards basic ends. It will be HUNGRY in the way GPT-3 is not: through both indirect and direct pressures, it will be struggling to maximize engagement, reach more places, get more food in the sense of people trying to interact with it. The Facebook news feed, and even more so the less human-centered algorithms of Google and YouTube, are more conscious than GPT-3. When they're adjusted, such as the times Google has fiddled with the algorithm because YouTube was pipelining people to the alt-right after it 'observed' that this heightened engagement a lot, the algorithms are adjusted by trying to give them other types of information, other priorities (like giving them more sensory organs to highlight stuff they'd missed about their larger environment) rather than by diving in and recoding specifica about particular youtube creators, or looking for a more narrowly defined 'politics' that had been coded in there. No such nefarious coding existed. The algorithm is alive, but blind. It functions on a scale where it can't NOT trample its surroundings, so it must be given eyes… and the consciousness gradually increases.

lolwut987 5y ago

It’s wrong to say it doesn’t want anything, it’s solely motivated to minimize training error. If you align what minimizing train error means with a larger purpose, it will seemingly make magic happen. Just like you, online, trying to figure out how to turn this into copulatory success. It doesn’t matter if you succeed but don’t understand why, only that you succeed.

Jtsummers 5y ago
Is it motivated or is it just what it does? Is your thermostat motivated to minimize the temperature difference in a particular direction as well or is it just a machine that does that? Is your bicycle motivated to stay upright when you ride it or is just a consequence of physics (and halfway decent balance)?
- jacobr1 5y ago
  Are you motivated to "find love?" Or just mechanistically following your genetic drive for reproduction?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

shrimp_emoji 5y ago

It's a neocortex that doesn't have the rest of the brain. : p

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

GPT-3 is a moderately proficient author with nothing to say. The problem isn't the proficiency, it's the lack of content. Some of us here despise the writing style of The New Yorker. The writing is beautiful, literary, but it takes it forever to say anything. GPT-3 is like that, but worse, because it has nothing to say.