5 ms·

> It just doesn't scale. On what planet? I can give you about 7 billion reasons why it isn't this one.

by harry8 5y ago

samplatt 5y ago
That's just 7 billion reasons why it can't (or at least, doesn't) scale larger than ~3lbs.
salawat 5y ago
It doesn't scale in the "I want twice as many, right now, to use, abuse, and discard without guilt or strings attached". 9 women do not a baby in 1 month make. Once you have said bab(y|ies), you then have the inconvenience of them having a will of their own, you have to support and eventually pay them, and dear god, make too many of them and they might even just throw you away instead of going in the direction you want. That kind of not scaling. I mean... If no one else is willing to say it, I'll call a spade a spade; because that is precisely the major draw of the computer as ecpnomic/logistical lubricant. Doing jobs of people, but not getting paid or having to be accounted for as one.
- izzygonzalez 5y ago
  If we manage to create an artificial sentience then we need to legislate and protect their rights. AGI won't be a free lunch.
  - drdeca 5y ago
    Just because something is AGI probably needn't imply that it is sapient. It might have no internal experience, no feeling of desire, only a utility function which it optimizes.
    - krageon 5y ago
      This reasoning is why it will need rights. If it doesn't, people thinking these thoughts (which are impossible to answer, like they are for every other potential sapience. Not just AGI) will abuse that reasoning to create yet another creative modern form of slavery.
      - drdeca 5y ago
        I do agree that it probably makes sense to err on the side of being too quick to estimate that something is likely sapient than to err on the side of being too slow to do so. However, that doesn't make it impossible for a plan-producer to be both superhuman and non-sapient. Nor do I think the default is for an AGI to be sapient. (Though, possibly the default could be such that it isn't but in a way in which we couldn't be sufficiently confident that it isn't, and therefore be obligated to behave as if it is sapient) But, in the FOOM scenario, I would expect that "whether or not to treat it as if it has rights" would be the least of our worries. (the greatest of our worries would be, roughly, "whether it kills everyone".)
  - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
    Yeesh, hard enough to get people to consider non-humans as people let alone a computer program.
    - salawat 5y ago
      Or worse, the level of indirection in question where a computer program stands in for a work vertical that represents a large swathe of the population's livelihood. The unsexy part of CS. The Should I vs the could I.
  - unlikelymordant 5y ago
    Honest question, why would we need to do that? They arent human or animal, it seems to me like saying we need to protect the rights of chairs or PCs. I personally think letting AI have e.g. property rights would be catastrophic if you can just spin up another one.
    - drdeca 5y ago
      Whether an AGI should have rights depends on the specifics of the AGI. Being capable of acting in general environments, planning and taking actions in the world, etc. I think probably aren't in themselves enough for the agent to have moral patienthood. But, that's not to say that it wouldn't be eventually possible to make an AI which was a moral patient (like, suppose it was not just able to plan taking itself and its own planning capabilities into account, but was in addition, also sapient, in the sense of having an internal experience like that of our own. In this case (e.g. perhaps a computer emulation of a human mind) then I'm fairly confident that such an agent would be a moral patient. Such an agent being copyable as data would no more prevent them from being a moral patient than having a magic duplicator ray which could duplicate a living human including their body, would render all people not moral-patients, namely, not at all.) edit: that's not to say that it wouldn't be catastrophic, but, having such a duplicator ray might also be catastrophic for the same reasons, and the presence of such a magical duplicator array shouldn't render all people suddenly not moral-patients, and so the copyability of AIs shouldn't by itself prevent them from being moral patients either.
      - unlikelymordant 5y ago
        If there was a magical duplicator ray, governments would want to heavily regulate its use. A few million extra bodies would completely crash an economy, but might be good if you wanted to fight a war. I do think the duplicator ray is a great analogy. There would be a lot of tricky moral questions raised if such a technology existed. On the topic of a human mind in a computer, i dont think they should be afforded property rights either. If you can copy them into 10 bodies, and each one can own a house, then they are taking real resources from actual humans. This extends to owning other things too.
- harry8 5y ago
  > "I want twice as many, right now, to use, abuse, and discard without guilt or strings attached". The only thing that meets this definition of scaling is our fantasies. Absolutely everything else uses resources implying an opportunity cost and has non-zero latency in making any desired change.
  - salawat 5y ago
    How many IBM mainframes get paid and are given the capability to allocate their own capital? How many of the computers we use to program transaction processors and other things are seperate from the entities that operate them? How many human actors were displaced, and salaries saved by cutting of jobs we've automated away? We look at vehicle automation, machine learning, etc... Precisely because they open up new avenues through which money can be saved by not employing as many expensive bags of carbon and water in favor of throwing a handful of graphics cards, sensors, hard drives, and compute resources at problems that like it or not, we required fleets of humans for previously. If it weren't in some fashion more economically viable at some level, in some way, I'm fairly sure we wouldn't still be pursuing it. That's the thing I've noticed. It's the grim version of the more rosey "we're empowering fewer people to do more with less."

> It just doesn't scale. On what planet? I can give you about 7 billion reasons why it isn't this one.

by harry8 5y ago

> It just doesn't scale. On what planet? I can give you about 7 billion reasons why it isn't this one.

samplatt 5y ago

That's just 7 billion reasons why it can't (or at least, doesn't) scale larger than ~3lbs.

salawat 5y ago

It doesn't scale in the "I want twice as many, right now, to use, abuse, and discard without guilt or strings attached". 9 women do not a baby in 1 month make. Once you have said bab(y|ies), you then have the inconvenience of them having a will of their own, you have to support and eventually pay them, and dear god, make too many of them and they might even just throw you away instead of going in the direction you want. That kind of not scaling. I mean... If no one else is willing to say it, I'll call a spade a spade; because that is precisely the major draw of the computer as ecpnomic/logistical lubricant. Doing jobs of people, but not getting paid or having to be accounted for as one.

izzygonzalez 5y ago
If we manage to create an artificial sentience then we need to legislate and protect their rights. AGI won't be a free lunch.
- drdeca 5y ago
  Just because something is AGI probably needn't imply that it is sapient. It might have no internal experience, no feeling of desire, only a utility function which it optimizes.
  - krageon 5y ago
    This reasoning is why it will need rights. If it doesn't, people thinking these thoughts (which are impossible to answer, like they are for every other potential sapience. Not just AGI) will abuse that reasoning to create yet another creative modern form of slavery.
    - drdeca 5y ago
      I do agree that it probably makes sense to err on the side of being too quick to estimate that something is likely sapient than to err on the side of being too slow to do so. However, that doesn't make it impossible for a plan-producer to be both superhuman and non-sapient. Nor do I think the default is for an AGI to be sapient. (Though, possibly the default could be such that it isn't but in a way in which we couldn't be sufficiently confident that it isn't, and therefore be obligated to behave as if it is sapient) But, in the FOOM scenario, I would expect that "whether or not to treat it as if it has rights" would be the least of our worries. (the greatest of our worries would be, roughly, "whether it kills everyone".)
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
  Yeesh, hard enough to get people to consider non-humans as people let alone a computer program.
  - salawat 5y ago
    Or worse, the level of indirection in question where a computer program stands in for a work vertical that represents a large swathe of the population's livelihood. The unsexy part of CS. The Should I vs the could I.
- unlikelymordant 5y ago
  Honest question, why would we need to do that? They arent human or animal, it seems to me like saying we need to protect the rights of chairs or PCs. I personally think letting AI have e.g. property rights would be catastrophic if you can just spin up another one.
  - drdeca 5y ago
    Whether an AGI should have rights depends on the specifics of the AGI. Being capable of acting in general environments, planning and taking actions in the world, etc. I think probably aren't in themselves enough for the agent to have moral patienthood. But, that's not to say that it wouldn't be eventually possible to make an AI which was a moral patient (like, suppose it was not just able to plan taking itself and its own planning capabilities into account, but was in addition, also sapient, in the sense of having an internal experience like that of our own. In this case (e.g. perhaps a computer emulation of a human mind) then I'm fairly confident that such an agent would be a moral patient. Such an agent being copyable as data would no more prevent them from being a moral patient than having a magic duplicator ray which could duplicate a living human including their body, would render all people not moral-patients, namely, not at all.) edit: that's not to say that it wouldn't be catastrophic, but, having such a duplicator ray might also be catastrophic for the same reasons, and the presence of such a magical duplicator array shouldn't render all people suddenly not moral-patients, and so the copyability of AIs shouldn't by itself prevent them from being moral patients either.
    - unlikelymordant 5y ago
      If there was a magical duplicator ray, governments would want to heavily regulate its use. A few million extra bodies would completely crash an economy, but might be good if you wanted to fight a war. I do think the duplicator ray is a great analogy. There would be a lot of tricky moral questions raised if such a technology existed. On the topic of a human mind in a computer, i dont think they should be afforded property rights either. If you can copy them into 10 bodies, and each one can own a house, then they are taking real resources from actual humans. This extends to owning other things too.
harry8 5y ago
> "I want twice as many, right now, to use, abuse, and discard without guilt or strings attached". The only thing that meets this definition of scaling is our fantasies. Absolutely everything else uses resources implying an opportunity cost and has non-zero latency in making any desired change.
- salawat 5y ago
  How many IBM mainframes get paid and are given the capability to allocate their own capital? How many of the computers we use to program transaction processors and other things are seperate from the entities that operate them? How many human actors were displaced, and salaries saved by cutting of jobs we've automated away? We look at vehicle automation, machine learning, etc... Precisely because they open up new avenues through which money can be saved by not employing as many expensive bags of carbon and water in favor of throwing a handful of graphics cards, sensors, hard drives, and compute resources at problems that like it or not, we required fleets of humans for previously. If it weren't in some fashion more economically viable at some level, in some way, I'm fairly sure we wouldn't still be pursuing it. That's the thing I've noticed. It's the grim version of the more rosey "we're empowering fewer people to do more with less."