5 ms·

I like the discussion, but this article 'feels' like more Luddite goalpost moving, and is reflective of a continuous sentiment I feel strains so much of the con

I like the discussion, but this article 'feels' like more Luddite goalpost moving, and is reflective of a continuous sentiment I feel strains so much of the conversation around intelligence, agentism, and ai going on today. I think that because we lack a coherent understanding of what it means to be intelligent at an individual level, as well as what it means to be an individual, we're missing much of the point of what's happening right now. The new line in the sand always seems to be justified based on an argument whose lyrics rhyme with identity, individual, self, etc. It seems like there will be no accepting of a thing that may have intelligence if there is no discernable individual involved. Chomsky is basically making the same arguments right now. I think we'll see something that we can't distinguish from hard advanced general intelligence, prob in the next 3-5 years, and probably still have not made any real advancement into understanding what it means to be intelligent or what it means to be an individual.

usgroup 4y ago
I think the basic things to take away from the article are: 1. that LLMs are just a massive “what word comes next given your training corpus” algorithm and scale has lead to the main effects of interest. 2. Surprisingly many human tasks can be represented by this simple “what word comes next” question given a big enough corpus. 3. But it has nothing to do with how a human executes those tasks because —- for example —- knowing the country south of Rwanda and knowing the likely completion of “the country south of Rwanda is ___” in a corpus, are not the same thing at all. 4. The key reason being that LLM has no access to semantic knowledge beyond correlation in its corpus, but you have access to causality. 5. So it is absurd to compare the LLM to people —- not because it’s like comparing submarines to fish, because in this case they do not both even “swim and live in the sea”. I think these things have little to do with definitions of “what intelligence is” and the like, and the author is far from a Luddite.
anyonecancode 4y ago
Increasingly I don't think the question of "what is intelligence" is so useful or relevant here. It feels a bit like arguing over whether the "artificial horse" that started appearing at the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th C were actually horses. Cars weren't, and still aren't, but that misses the point. AI isn't intelligent, and never will be, and I don't think that matters all that much.
- RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
  I think I agree in sentiment, and I'm wondering what your ake is on the article/ current discussions article. I guess my premise is that I don't think we have a useful enough definition of intelligence because the ones I see people writing articles on seem to be dependent or defined by agency, and specifically humanish forms of agency. So I guess your point would be "these systems aren't intelligent, but that's not relevant"? I suppose I out the issue at the currency of the definition of intelligence. It's seemed to be very much synonymous with "how humans do things", making it somewhat impossible to give charity to the arguments presented in this paper with the caveats on "not anthropomorphising". Like I can't compare these two things if your definition of intelligence is fundementally based on what "Anthros" do or do not do and simultaneously not engage in anthropromorism. To follow on your point, if these things aren't displaying "intelligence", but that's also not the point, what then are they displaying? It seems to me this is a failure of introspection on the part of AI philosophy to recognize how limited our understanding of "HI" is.
  - anyonecancode 4y ago
    I think the question of "what is intelligence" is an interesting one, and technology (especially computer technology) gives us some interesting angles to look at it, but I think it dominates the conversation disproportionately to its importance. Things like ChatGPT, and the technologies they presage, will absolutely have a significant impact on society, economics, etc, but getting tangled up in questions of "what is intelligence" impede rather than help us to think through these implications and prepare for them. Put another way -- I do not believe the future holds Blade Runner replicants. If we're not careful, though, it does hold Blade Runner corporations. While, philosophically, it's interesting to ask if androids dream of electric sheep, that question isn't very helpful in trying to nudge the future in a more utopic rather than dystopic direction.
plutonorm 4y ago
I 100% agree. I would also add that most of the arguments are driven by emotion. The truth is that we dont know what intelligence means and we dont know what kinds of system have intelligence. The only tools we have to measure intelligence are those designed for humans. When we test the machines they do better than terribly and they are improving very quickly. There is no possible logical argument you can put forward against their intelligence in the face of this evidence from these human tests - because we cannot define intelligence in any other way than these tests. Claims against intelligent machines always boil down to 'obviously they aren't' and the arguments have have to be this shallow simply because they have no firm footing from which to base their argument.
lambdatronics 4y ago
Edsger Dijkstra: "The question of whether Machines Can Think (…) is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."
- mannykannot 4y ago
  That's an amusing aphorism from a giant in the field, and it was a reasonable thing to say about the technology of that time, but it avoids, rather than answers, the much bigger question of whether machines could ever think.
  - kirkules 4y ago
    On the contrary, it highlights that the question is generally not well posed and trying to answer it before figuring out how to ask it is silly.
    - mannykannot 4y ago
      People have been asking grand but poorly-posed questions for millennia, and sometimes this leads to well-posed questions that elicit remarkable answers. What is poorly-posed about the question 'could a machine think'? 'Machine' seems acceptably well-defined, and not in a way that rules out, a priori, the possibility of any machine being able to think, so I'm guessing the problem lies in us not having a good definition of thinking - but if that is what makes the question poorly-posed, then surely it also makes the question 'what is thinking?' poorly-posed, yet people stubbornly persist in attempting to address it.
      - kirkules 4y ago
        Yes, the issue is that word, "think", and its variants. But "what is thinking?" isn't poorly posed in the case that "thinking" isn't well defined, because it is about establishing and agreeing on a definition. The approach some people take to answering "could machines think?" is to try to determine an actual subject in the real world to call "thinking" in a way that aligns with common intuitions, which to me seems like a good approach. But many (most?) approaches I've encountered instead just assume personal intuition about thinking is sufficient, and worse, in common with all other askers of the question.

usgroup 4y ago

I think the basic things to take away from the article are: 1. that LLMs are just a massive “what word comes next given your training corpus” algorithm and scale has lead to the main effects of interest. 2. Surprisingly many human tasks can be represented by this simple “what word comes next” question given a big enough corpus. 3. But it has nothing to do with how a human executes those tasks because —- for example —- knowing the country south of Rwanda and knowing the likely completion of “the country south of Rwanda is ___” in a corpus, are not the same thing at all. 4. The key reason being that LLM has no access to semantic knowledge beyond correlation in its corpus, but you have access to causality. 5. So it is absurd to compare the LLM to people —- not because it’s like comparing submarines to fish, because in this case they do not both even “swim and live in the sea”. I think these things have little to do with definitions of “what intelligence is” and the like, and the author is far from a Luddite.

anyonecancode 4y ago

Increasingly I don't think the question of "what is intelligence" is so useful or relevant here. It feels a bit like arguing over whether the "artificial horse" that started appearing at the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th C were actually horses. Cars weren't, and still aren't, but that misses the point. AI isn't intelligent, and never will be, and I don't think that matters all that much.

RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
I think I agree in sentiment, and I'm wondering what your ake is on the article/ current discussions article. I guess my premise is that I don't think we have a useful enough definition of intelligence because the ones I see people writing articles on seem to be dependent or defined by agency, and specifically humanish forms of agency. So I guess your point would be "these systems aren't intelligent, but that's not relevant"? I suppose I out the issue at the currency of the definition of intelligence. It's seemed to be very much synonymous with "how humans do things", making it somewhat impossible to give charity to the arguments presented in this paper with the caveats on "not anthropomorphising". Like I can't compare these two things if your definition of intelligence is fundementally based on what "Anthros" do or do not do and simultaneously not engage in anthropromorism. To follow on your point, if these things aren't displaying "intelligence", but that's also not the point, what then are they displaying? It seems to me this is a failure of introspection on the part of AI philosophy to recognize how limited our understanding of "HI" is.
- anyonecancode 4y ago
  I think the question of "what is intelligence" is an interesting one, and technology (especially computer technology) gives us some interesting angles to look at it, but I think it dominates the conversation disproportionately to its importance. Things like ChatGPT, and the technologies they presage, will absolutely have a significant impact on society, economics, etc, but getting tangled up in questions of "what is intelligence" impede rather than help us to think through these implications and prepare for them. Put another way -- I do not believe the future holds Blade Runner replicants. If we're not careful, though, it does hold Blade Runner corporations. While, philosophically, it's interesting to ask if androids dream of electric sheep, that question isn't very helpful in trying to nudge the future in a more utopic rather than dystopic direction.

plutonorm 4y ago

I 100% agree. I would also add that most of the arguments are driven by emotion. The truth is that we dont know what intelligence means and we dont know what kinds of system have intelligence. The only tools we have to measure intelligence are those designed for humans. When we test the machines they do better than terribly and they are improving very quickly. There is no possible logical argument you can put forward against their intelligence in the face of this evidence from these human tests - because we cannot define intelligence in any other way than these tests. Claims against intelligent machines always boil down to 'obviously they aren't' and the arguments have have to be this shallow simply because they have no firm footing from which to base their argument.

lambdatronics 4y ago

Edsger Dijkstra: "The question of whether Machines Can Think (…) is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."

mannykannot 4y ago
That's an amusing aphorism from a giant in the field, and it was a reasonable thing to say about the technology of that time, but it avoids, rather than answers, the much bigger question of whether machines could ever think.
- kirkules 4y ago
  On the contrary, it highlights that the question is generally not well posed and trying to answer it before figuring out how to ask it is silly.
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    People have been asking grand but poorly-posed questions for millennia, and sometimes this leads to well-posed questions that elicit remarkable answers. What is poorly-posed about the question 'could a machine think'? 'Machine' seems acceptably well-defined, and not in a way that rules out, a priori, the possibility of any machine being able to think, so I'm guessing the problem lies in us not having a good definition of thinking - but if that is what makes the question poorly-posed, then surely it also makes the question 'what is thinking?' poorly-posed, yet people stubbornly persist in attempting to address it.
    - kirkules 4y ago
      Yes, the issue is that word, "think", and its variants. But "what is thinking?" isn't poorly posed in the case that "thinking" isn't well defined, because it is about establishing and agreeing on a definition. The approach some people take to answering "could machines think?" is to try to determine an actual subject in the real world to call "thinking" in a way that aligns with common intuitions, which to me seems like a good approach. But many (most?) approaches I've encountered instead just assume personal intuition about thinking is sufficient, and worse, in common with all other askers of the question.