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Interesting. In terms of critical thought, I guess I should mention that I used to be firmly against the possibility of a singularity. The views I shared in my

by mkaic 5y ago

Interesting. In terms of critical thought, I guess I should mention that I used to be firmly against the possibility of a singularity. The views I shared in my article are views I've only really switched too after careful consideration over the past two years or so -- I used to be convinced that a robot could never be "alive". Becoming an ML engineer changed things for me, though, because all of a sudden, this "AI" thing people always talked about got demystified. Once I understood the basic guiding principles of how AI actually works, my mind rapidly changed to be in favor of a singularity happening instead of thinking it's impossible. To each their own, though. I'm curious why you think that speaking about "The" Singularity is a sign of being in a "critical thought free zone"? I'd love to hear more about why you think that if you'd be so inclined.

marktangotango 5y ago
> Once I understood the basic guiding principles of how AI actually works It was the opposite for me, current machine learning seems fundamentally limited to me.
PaulHoule 5y ago
(Speaking as an engineer who has put neural-network products in front of end users.) One thing amazing about the 2020s is just the moral decay compared to past times. People said AI was a bubble in the 1970s but in the very beginning the people involved were clear about the limitations of what they were doing and what problems that had to be overcome. Now there is blind faith that if you add enough neurons it can do anything, Godel, Turing and all the rest of theoretical computer science be damned… In the 1960s the creator of the ELIZA program knew it appeared smart by taking advantage of the human instinct to see intelligence in another. It’s like the way you see a face in mars or in the cut stem of a leaf, or how g.w. Bush said he saw Vladimir Putin’s soul in his eyes. Today people embarrass themselves by writing blog posts everyday about how ‘I can’t believe how GPT-3 almost gets the right answer…’ and have very little insight into how they are getting played.

by mkaic 5y ago

marktangotango 5y ago

> Once I understood the basic guiding principles of how AI actually works It was the opposite for me, current machine learning seems fundamentally limited to me.

PaulHoule 5y ago

(Speaking as an engineer who has put neural-network products in front of end users.) One thing amazing about the 2020s is just the moral decay compared to past times. People said AI was a bubble in the 1970s but in the very beginning the people involved were clear about the limitations of what they were doing and what problems that had to be overcome. Now there is blind faith that if you add enough neurons it can do anything, Godel, Turing and all the rest of theoretical computer science be damned… In the 1960s the creator of the ELIZA program knew it appeared smart by taking advantage of the human instinct to see intelligence in another. It’s like the way you see a face in mars or in the cut stem of a leaf, or how g.w. Bush said he saw Vladimir Putin’s soul in his eyes. Today people embarrass themselves by writing blog posts everyday about how ‘I can’t believe how GPT-3 almost gets the right answer…’ and have very little insight into how they are getting played.