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> “This idea of surpassing human ability is silly because it’s made of human abilities.” Shows the level of insight from this "guru". The truth is we don't kno

> “This idea of surpassing human ability is silly because it’s made of human abilities.” Shows the level of insight from this "guru". The truth is we don't know how far the work being done on artificial intelligence is going to go. For now it will continue to develop and acquire more and more autonomy, just because that is the nature of our existence: better and more efficient will replace the lesser so. So, we may have potentially given birth to a new sentient being that will go on to live its own "life" (within 100, 500, 1000 years?), or we might be able to constrain it so it so that it will always be in the service of humans. We simply don't know at this stage, but my money is on the former TBH.

nathanaldensr 4y ago
"AI" is not currently autonomous; its algorithms that do exactly what their creators tell them to do. They run on binary computers that only do exactly as they are told.
- circuit10 4y ago
  That’s not true, current machine learning algorithms involve no manual programming past the training and inference code and it’s extremely difficult to predict what they will do without just trying it and seeing. I think this video is a nice introduction to the basic concept to how a computer can figure things out automatically without being manually programmed and without the creators understanding the “why”: https://youtu.be/qv6UVOQ0F44 https://youtu.be/qv6UVOQ0F44 ChatGPT is much more complicated than the AI in that video but it shows some of the basic concepts
  - goatlover 4y ago
    LLMs generate text. They're built to generate text. That they generate some kind of textual output is entirely predictable. Same with image generators. They will generate some kind of image given a prompt. They're not Skynet.
    - circuit10 4y ago
      That an AI will have some kind of output is obvious, it doesn’t mean that you can predict what that output will be. It’s like saying that you have solved physics by saying “something will happen”
      - goatlover 4y ago
        I'm confident the output of chatbot won't be literally taking over the world and killing all the humans.
      - philipov 4y ago
        I think the point he's trying to make is that AI does not have an independent Will. It lacks desires and the ability to operate in opposition to its programming. This makes it no different from any other tool we use to enhance our abilities. Whether or not you can predict a tool's output is irrelevant. I can't predict the output of a random number generator, but that doesn't make it sentient.
        blackbear_ 4y ago
        This is not necessarily true, however, for example in reinforcement learning there is a lot of work on "intrinsic motivation", i.e., creating systems that set and pursue their own goals. https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.06976 https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.06976
        philipov 4y ago
        I think it should be possible to build a sentient AI, but it hasn't been done yet. What remains to be seen is whether our current techniques will be suitable for making that self-retraining process efficient, or if we'll need to find better math to use as the basis for it. Part of what makes the brain so useful is that it fits in our skull, and is fast enough to learn in real time. But, either way, I think that's what's on the line for people who disagree about how to use the word "intelligence." They mean it as a synonym for sentience, and the people arguing against them are using it differently. Before we can evaluate the truth of an argument, we should first agree to use words the same way.
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    I think OP meant autonomous in the sense of motivation. It has no motivation to do anything aside from wait for someone to ask it to do something.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      I mean, if I was paying for the power bill every month and had a limited amount of computing capacity, I wouldn't want my AI behaving like my teenage daughter busy daydreaming when I ask her to clean her room. But I have no reason to believe this will always be the case. As these machines become more capable and our compute power grows, someone will give one a server cluster and some free time to 'think' on it's own.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Given that algorithms are "how to learn" and "show me what you infer", that's the same kind of overly reductionist view that you don't need to worry about being eaten by a tiger, because it's just a set of chemical reactions that merely follow the laws of quantum mechanics.
  - circuit10 4y ago
    https://twitter.com/nearcyan/status/1632661647226462211 https://twitter.com/nearcyan/status/1632661647226462211
    - ben_w 4y ago
      Yup, that's the thing I was thinking of. Wasn't even sure where I'd seen it, so thanks for the link!
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    Not entirely a fair comparison. The tiger is dangerous because whether you consider it a sentient, intentional killing machine or a bunch of atoms, it exists and manipulates the same physical space that you do (indeed, as the tweeted image points out implicitly, it is only a tiger when you consider at the same sort of physical scale that we exist at). Software, however, does not have this property. Ultimately it does exist as something in the physical world (voltages on gates, or whatever), but at that level it's equivalent to the "bunch of atoms" view. Software (by itself) does not operate in the physical space that we do, and so it cannot pose the same kind of threats to us as other physical systems do. The question is therefore a lot more nuanced: what types of control (if any) can (a given piece of) software exert over the world in which we operate? This includes the abstract yet still large scale world of things like finance and record keeping, but it also obviously covers the physical space in which our bodies exist. Right now, there is very (very) little software that exists as a sentient, intentional threat to us within that space. When and if software starts to be able to exert more force on that space, then the "it's just logic and gates and stuff" view will be inappropriate. For now, the main risk from software comes from what other humans will do with it, not what it will do to us (though smartphones do raise issues about even that).
- YetAnotherNick 4y ago
  This is a flawed analogy, it certainly breaks down even in simple case of random number generation. Computers could use external source like minor heat changes for that.
- krisoft 4y ago
  > its algorithms that do exactly what their creators tell them to do This is very much in doubt :) > They run on binary computers that only do exactly as they are told. This is true in first approximation. Every CPU instruction runs exactly as it is written, that is true. This is probably the interpretation of "only do exactly as they are told" to someone strictly technology minded. But even with much simpler systems the words "huh, that should have not happened", and "I wonder why it is doing that" are uttered frequently. The interpretation most humans would attach to "only do exactly as they are told" is that the maker can predict what the code will do, and that is far from the truth. After all if it so simple, why did the google engineers tell their computer to tell lies about the James Webb Space Telescope? Couldn't they just told it to only tell the truth?
  - mahoho 4y ago
    I think the machine code–level understanding is what's important. We can, in theory, put a person in a Chinese Room–style scenario and have them manually perform the code, and it will generate the same outputs (It would probably take millions or billions of years, but it is true in principle). A major difference is that we created the machine and the code and, at least as low as the level of digital logic design, we understand and control its behavior. The person in the room has a human mind with thoughts and behaviors completely out of the program designers' control and unrelated to the program; if they want to, they can break out of the room and punch the operator. The "unpredictability" of the machine is still constrained by the fundamental capabilities we give to it, so it might generate surprising outputs but it can't do things like punch people or launch nukes unless we connect it to other systems that have those capabilities.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      > A major difference is that we created the machine and the code and, at least as low as the level of digital logic design, we understand and control its behavior. The moment the software gets to interact with the world, whether via robotics or handling a mouse button event or some other type of sensor, we no longer fully understand or control its behavior. Pure computation (the dream of functional programming) is fully understandable and entirely predictable. When you add interaction, you add both randomness but also time - when something happens can lead to different outcomes - and this can rapidly cause predictability to spiral away from us.
wccrawford 4y ago
Yeah, it's like saying that machines can never be stronger than humans because they're built by humans. Computers already do things that humans can't on a massive scale. It's not hard to imagine that they could leverage that ability to take AI beyond us.
- devb 4y ago
  > it's like saying that machines can never be stronger than humans because they're built by humans. Did you even read the article? “This idea of surpassing human ability is silly because it’s made of human abilities.” He says comparing ourselves with AI is the equivalent of comparing ourselves with a car. “It’s like saying a car can go faster than a human runner. Of course it can, and yet we don’t say that the car has become a better runner.”
  - quantified 4y ago
    We put far too great an emphasis on the human specifics of an activity. For most utilizations of running (delivering goods or information, hunting prey, etc.) the car, or helicopter, or airplane far exceed the human runner. This is poetic nonsense like "speed of thought". When Boston Robotics gets a robotic runner that sprints faster than a human, then what? The ML systems are not made of human abilities. They are made of software processes. Jared is a smart and informed guy but that sentence is just nonsensical.
    - goatlover 4y ago
      > When Boston Robotics gets a robotic runner that sprints faster than a human, then what? It enters the Olympics and automates away all sprinters? Or it becomes self-aware and decides to eat all the humans? Or more likely, it gets sold to the military so they can have one more kind of drone that runs on land instead of flies through the air.
      - quantified 4y ago
        Right, sorry, I was directing my question at the "does it surpass human runners" train of thought. Obviously it won't feel a pounding heart, or a thrill of victory if it wins a race, or die of hypernatrimia during a marathon, so it won't surpass our specific cares. Not sure those make a significant difference in the arc of development. It absolutely goes to the military with built-in weapons.
headsoup 4y ago
I think the argument is more that they only work from past inputs, they interpret the world the way they are told to. It is not that 'AI' can do things humans can't (otherwise the argument fails for many technical things, like a car at speed). If your bet is on the former, how does it create an entirely new, irrational thought?
- rowanG077 4y ago
  That argument is totally defeated by AI destroying human players, even top of the world level, at countless games.
  - headsoup 4y ago
    Refer to my point on past inputs. If a human suddenly said to the machine "change of rules, now you have to play by these new rules" the AI suddenly gets immensely dumber and will apply useless solutions.
    - rowanG077 4y ago
      How is that relevant? A human will also get immensely dumber. Of course a lot less then an AI right now. The point is AI absolutely can do things a human can't.
      - headsoup 4y ago
        So can a PC, a car or a cat. You're not making any point here.
        rowanG077 4y ago
        You really have to start explaining exactly what you mean by that. Of course they can do things a human can't.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      This no longer appears to be the case. Self-trained systems, that play themselves extremely rapidly and can even infer the rules by encountering just notices of illegal moves, are now commonplace.
chadash 4y ago
This quote is taken out of context and is perhaps not a charitable meaning of what the author means. Here's the whole paragraph: > Lanier doesn’t even like the term artificial intelligence, objecting to the idea that it is actually intelligent, and that we could be in competition with it. “This idea of surpassing human ability is silly because it’s made of human abilities.” He says comparing ourselves with AI is the equivalent of comparing ourselves with a car. “It’s like saying a car can go faster than a human runner. Of course it can, and yet we don’t say that the car has become a better runner.” The author, Jaren Lanier, is a reasonably accomplished technologist, with some pretty groundbreaking work on VR in the 80s. He is most certainly aware that humans have been surpassed by computers in many ways. I think that line is arguing semantics about the word "intelligence" and clearly he knows that computers do many things far better than humans.
- SanderNL 4y ago
  "we don’t say that the car has become a better runner" We would if the car was to race against human runners. It's just word play. Cars are not used like runners, so we use different words. They definitely are better runners. Now that technology is touching our core business we get scared, but this has been going on for a long, long time. When it was our legs, we brush it off. But when it touches our ability to think we squirm.
  - mistercheph 4y ago
    Let's see your car bring you your dinner from the back of the kitchen!
    - vhcr 4y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdiHNIgrHmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdiHNIgrHmI
      - stareatgoats 4y ago
        and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-Jo9Lk3txI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-Jo9Lk3txI
geraneum 4y ago
To be fair, he brings up an interesting analogy. From the article right after he says this, he follows with > It’s like saying a car can go faster than a human runner. Of course it can, and yet we don’t say that the car has become a better runner. He has a point and I believe his point is that it's a different type of intelligence. His view is more nuanced than how you are trying to frame it.
- dist-epoch 4y ago
  But he is saying "cars are not dangerous because they are made by humans". Nuclear weapons are also made by humans abilities.
  - geraneum 4y ago
    It's not about the semantics of the sentence he said. This is obvious. He is pointing out a difference in nature of the attributes/properties of a human and a human creation. Not about something being more or less dangerous. He is trying to tell the resporter, or perhapes the reader, that they're asking the wrong question.
    - dist-epoch 4y ago
      From article: > This idea of surpassing human ability is silly because it’s made of human abilities At some point in history we were just "chimp abilities", so the argument would become "it's silly to imagine that something made of chimp abilities could surpass chimp abilities".
      - pixl97 4y ago
        I'm with you on this. People in these chains seem to be looking at all the wrong metrics. Single-mode LLMs are made of human abilities, but we're already going to multi-modal, though with what I would call rather limited interconnections. What does a LLM that takes language and mixes that with sensor data from the real world? You're no longer talking about human abilities, you're going beyond that.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
Jaron Lanier is being called "guru" by the article, but he's much more than that. As a pioneer and intellectual he's been arguing about the commodization of human knowledge for a long time, he's not simply saying that "machines won't surpass humans" and it's not accurate to describe him as someone who would say something like that. Please take the time to research what he's published over the last 4 decades.
- sirsinsalot 4y ago
  Lanier is brilliant, but sadly there any many brilliant people who've long seen the shifting sands and set out to capitalize first, rather than strategically build a future we fleshbags would like to be in. I wonder, how much will be enough?
  - ChatGTP 4y ago
    "fleshbag", cool way to degrade your actually awesome body ?
    - sirsinsalot 4y ago
      It is a pretty cool bag of flesh, I didn't rule that out.
flohofwoe 4y ago
Lanier has been around during the last AI hype cycle in the 80's, he's seen it all rise and collapse already (same with VR btw). In general he should know what he's talking about when it comes to tech hype cycles ;)
- lostmsu 4y ago
  That's only 25/75 baseline chance to guess correctly.
- asteroidz 4y ago
  > Lanier, 62, has worked alongside many of the web’s visionaries and power-brokers. He is both insider (he works at Microsoft as an interdisciplinary scientist And his unique perspective on AI is all the more valuable (and courageous) considering that Microsoft, recently laid off their AI ethics team. It's super important we don't let human considerations fall by the wayside in this rush. The potential of AI is limitless, but so are the potential risks.
coldtea 4y ago
Even without autonomous enhancement of AI, the argument that "[the] idea of surpassing human ability is silly because it’s made of human abilities" is BS... A theoritical AI which thinks like a person, but (due to computing power) can think through and evaluate 1,000,000 ideas the time it takes a person to think through 10 of them, it already has surpassed human ability by a big margin. Same for memory capacity etc. That the input the machine is trained on is the output created by "human abilities" is irrelevant to whether it can surpass human ability.
theptip 4y ago
Right, by that logic humans could not have surpassed chimps. QED, evolution is impossible.
roflyear 4y ago
What are your qualifications?

nathanaldensr 4y ago

"AI" is not currently autonomous; its algorithms that do exactly what their creators tell them to do. They run on binary computers that only do exactly as they are told.

circuit10 4y ago
That’s not true, current machine learning algorithms involve no manual programming past the training and inference code and it’s extremely difficult to predict what they will do without just trying it and seeing. I think this video is a nice introduction to the basic concept to how a computer can figure things out automatically without being manually programmed and without the creators understanding the “why”: https://youtu.be/qv6UVOQ0F44 https://youtu.be/qv6UVOQ0F44 ChatGPT is much more complicated than the AI in that video but it shows some of the basic concepts
- goatlover 4y ago
  LLMs generate text. They're built to generate text. That they generate some kind of textual output is entirely predictable. Same with image generators. They will generate some kind of image given a prompt. They're not Skynet.
  - circuit10 4y ago
    That an AI will have some kind of output is obvious, it doesn’t mean that you can predict what that output will be. It’s like saying that you have solved physics by saying “something will happen”
    - goatlover 4y ago
      I'm confident the output of chatbot won't be literally taking over the world and killing all the humans.
    - philipov 4y ago
      I think the point he's trying to make is that AI does not have an independent Will. It lacks desires and the ability to operate in opposition to its programming. This makes it no different from any other tool we use to enhance our abilities. Whether or not you can predict a tool's output is irrelevant. I can't predict the output of a random number generator, but that doesn't make it sentient.
      - blackbear_ 4y ago
        This is not necessarily true, however, for example in reinforcement learning there is a lot of work on "intrinsic motivation", i.e., creating systems that set and pursue their own goals. https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.06976 https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.06976
        philipov 4y ago
        I think it should be possible to build a sentient AI, but it hasn't been done yet. What remains to be seen is whether our current techniques will be suitable for making that self-retraining process efficient, or if we'll need to find better math to use as the basis for it. Part of what makes the brain so useful is that it fits in our skull, and is fast enough to learn in real time. But, either way, I think that's what's on the line for people who disagree about how to use the word "intelligence." They mean it as a synonym for sentience, and the people arguing against them are using it differently. Before we can evaluate the truth of an argument, we should first agree to use words the same way.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  I think OP meant autonomous in the sense of motivation. It has no motivation to do anything aside from wait for someone to ask it to do something.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    I mean, if I was paying for the power bill every month and had a limited amount of computing capacity, I wouldn't want my AI behaving like my teenage daughter busy daydreaming when I ask her to clean her room. But I have no reason to believe this will always be the case. As these machines become more capable and our compute power grows, someone will give one a server cluster and some free time to 'think' on it's own.
ben_w 4y ago
Given that algorithms are "how to learn" and "show me what you infer", that's the same kind of overly reductionist view that you don't need to worry about being eaten by a tiger, because it's just a set of chemical reactions that merely follow the laws of quantum mechanics.
- circuit10 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/nearcyan/status/1632661647226462211 https://twitter.com/nearcyan/status/1632661647226462211
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Yup, that's the thing I was thinking of. Wasn't even sure where I'd seen it, so thanks for the link!
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  Not entirely a fair comparison. The tiger is dangerous because whether you consider it a sentient, intentional killing machine or a bunch of atoms, it exists and manipulates the same physical space that you do (indeed, as the tweeted image points out implicitly, it is only a tiger when you consider at the same sort of physical scale that we exist at). Software, however, does not have this property. Ultimately it does exist as something in the physical world (voltages on gates, or whatever), but at that level it's equivalent to the "bunch of atoms" view. Software (by itself) does not operate in the physical space that we do, and so it cannot pose the same kind of threats to us as other physical systems do. The question is therefore a lot more nuanced: what types of control (if any) can (a given piece of) software exert over the world in which we operate? This includes the abstract yet still large scale world of things like finance and record keeping, but it also obviously covers the physical space in which our bodies exist. Right now, there is very (very) little software that exists as a sentient, intentional threat to us within that space. When and if software starts to be able to exert more force on that space, then the "it's just logic and gates and stuff" view will be inappropriate. For now, the main risk from software comes from what other humans will do with it, not what it will do to us (though smartphones do raise issues about even that).
YetAnotherNick 4y ago
This is a flawed analogy, it certainly breaks down even in simple case of random number generation. Computers could use external source like minor heat changes for that.
krisoft 4y ago
> its algorithms that do exactly what their creators tell them to do This is very much in doubt :) > They run on binary computers that only do exactly as they are told. This is true in first approximation. Every CPU instruction runs exactly as it is written, that is true. This is probably the interpretation of "only do exactly as they are told" to someone strictly technology minded. But even with much simpler systems the words "huh, that should have not happened", and "I wonder why it is doing that" are uttered frequently. The interpretation most humans would attach to "only do exactly as they are told" is that the maker can predict what the code will do, and that is far from the truth. After all if it so simple, why did the google engineers tell their computer to tell lies about the James Webb Space Telescope? Couldn't they just told it to only tell the truth?
- mahoho 4y ago
  I think the machine code–level understanding is what's important. We can, in theory, put a person in a Chinese Room–style scenario and have them manually perform the code, and it will generate the same outputs (It would probably take millions or billions of years, but it is true in principle). A major difference is that we created the machine and the code and, at least as low as the level of digital logic design, we understand and control its behavior. The person in the room has a human mind with thoughts and behaviors completely out of the program designers' control and unrelated to the program; if they want to, they can break out of the room and punch the operator. The "unpredictability" of the machine is still constrained by the fundamental capabilities we give to it, so it might generate surprising outputs but it can't do things like punch people or launch nukes unless we connect it to other systems that have those capabilities.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    > A major difference is that we created the machine and the code and, at least as low as the level of digital logic design, we understand and control its behavior. The moment the software gets to interact with the world, whether via robotics or handling a mouse button event or some other type of sensor, we no longer fully understand or control its behavior. Pure computation (the dream of functional programming) is fully understandable and entirely predictable. When you add interaction, you add both randomness but also time - when something happens can lead to different outcomes - and this can rapidly cause predictability to spiral away from us.

wccrawford 4y ago

Yeah, it's like saying that machines can never be stronger than humans because they're built by humans. Computers already do things that humans can't on a massive scale. It's not hard to imagine that they could leverage that ability to take AI beyond us.

devb 4y ago
> it's like saying that machines can never be stronger than humans because they're built by humans. Did you even read the article? “This idea of surpassing human ability is silly because it’s made of human abilities.” He says comparing ourselves with AI is the equivalent of comparing ourselves with a car. “It’s like saying a car can go faster than a human runner. Of course it can, and yet we don’t say that the car has become a better runner.”
- quantified 4y ago
  We put far too great an emphasis on the human specifics of an activity. For most utilizations of running (delivering goods or information, hunting prey, etc.) the car, or helicopter, or airplane far exceed the human runner. This is poetic nonsense like "speed of thought". When Boston Robotics gets a robotic runner that sprints faster than a human, then what? The ML systems are not made of human abilities. They are made of software processes. Jared is a smart and informed guy but that sentence is just nonsensical.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    > When Boston Robotics gets a robotic runner that sprints faster than a human, then what? It enters the Olympics and automates away all sprinters? Or it becomes self-aware and decides to eat all the humans? Or more likely, it gets sold to the military so they can have one more kind of drone that runs on land instead of flies through the air.
    - quantified 4y ago
      Right, sorry, I was directing my question at the "does it surpass human runners" train of thought. Obviously it won't feel a pounding heart, or a thrill of victory if it wins a race, or die of hypernatrimia during a marathon, so it won't surpass our specific cares. Not sure those make a significant difference in the arc of development. It absolutely goes to the military with built-in weapons.

headsoup 4y ago

I think the argument is more that they only work from past inputs, they interpret the world the way they are told to. It is not that 'AI' can do things humans can't (otherwise the argument fails for many technical things, like a car at speed). If your bet is on the former, how does it create an entirely new, irrational thought?

rowanG077 4y ago
That argument is totally defeated by AI destroying human players, even top of the world level, at countless games.
- headsoup 4y ago
  Refer to my point on past inputs. If a human suddenly said to the machine "change of rules, now you have to play by these new rules" the AI suddenly gets immensely dumber and will apply useless solutions.
  - rowanG077 4y ago
    How is that relevant? A human will also get immensely dumber. Of course a lot less then an AI right now. The point is AI absolutely can do things a human can't.
    - headsoup 4y ago
      So can a PC, a car or a cat. You're not making any point here.
      - rowanG077 4y ago
        You really have to start explaining exactly what you mean by that. Of course they can do things a human can't.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    This no longer appears to be the case. Self-trained systems, that play themselves extremely rapidly and can even infer the rules by encountering just notices of illegal moves, are now commonplace.

chadash 4y ago

This quote is taken out of context and is perhaps not a charitable meaning of what the author means. Here's the whole paragraph: > Lanier doesn’t even like the term artificial intelligence, objecting to the idea that it is actually intelligent, and that we could be in competition with it. “This idea of surpassing human ability is silly because it’s made of human abilities.” He says comparing ourselves with AI is the equivalent of comparing ourselves with a car. “It’s like saying a car can go faster than a human runner. Of course it can, and yet we don’t say that the car has become a better runner.” The author, Jaren Lanier, is a reasonably accomplished technologist, with some pretty groundbreaking work on VR in the 80s. He is most certainly aware that humans have been surpassed by computers in many ways. I think that line is arguing semantics about the word "intelligence" and clearly he knows that computers do many things far better than humans.

SanderNL 4y ago
"we don’t say that the car has become a better runner" We would if the car was to race against human runners. It's just word play. Cars are not used like runners, so we use different words. They definitely are better runners. Now that technology is touching our core business we get scared, but this has been going on for a long, long time. When it was our legs, we brush it off. But when it touches our ability to think we squirm.
- mistercheph 4y ago
  Let's see your car bring you your dinner from the back of the kitchen!
  - vhcr 4y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdiHNIgrHmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdiHNIgrHmI
    - stareatgoats 4y ago
      and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-Jo9Lk3txI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-Jo9Lk3txI

geraneum 4y ago

To be fair, he brings up an interesting analogy. From the article right after he says this, he follows with > It’s like saying a car can go faster than a human runner. Of course it can, and yet we don’t say that the car has become a better runner. He has a point and I believe his point is that it's a different type of intelligence. His view is more nuanced than how you are trying to frame it.

dist-epoch 4y ago
But he is saying "cars are not dangerous because they are made by humans". Nuclear weapons are also made by humans abilities.
- geraneum 4y ago
  It's not about the semantics of the sentence he said. This is obvious. He is pointing out a difference in nature of the attributes/properties of a human and a human creation. Not about something being more or less dangerous. He is trying to tell the resporter, or perhapes the reader, that they're asking the wrong question.
  - dist-epoch 4y ago
    From article: > This idea of surpassing human ability is silly because it’s made of human abilities At some point in history we were just "chimp abilities", so the argument would become "it's silly to imagine that something made of chimp abilities could surpass chimp abilities".
    - pixl97 4y ago
      I'm with you on this. People in these chains seem to be looking at all the wrong metrics. Single-mode LLMs are made of human abilities, but we're already going to multi-modal, though with what I would call rather limited interconnections. What does a LLM that takes language and mixes that with sensor data from the real world? You're no longer talking about human abilities, you're going beyond that.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

Jaron Lanier is being called "guru" by the article, but he's much more than that. As a pioneer and intellectual he's been arguing about the commodization of human knowledge for a long time, he's not simply saying that "machines won't surpass humans" and it's not accurate to describe him as someone who would say something like that. Please take the time to research what he's published over the last 4 decades.

sirsinsalot 4y ago
Lanier is brilliant, but sadly there any many brilliant people who've long seen the shifting sands and set out to capitalize first, rather than strategically build a future we fleshbags would like to be in. I wonder, how much will be enough?
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  "fleshbag", cool way to degrade your actually awesome body ?
  - sirsinsalot 4y ago
    It is a pretty cool bag of flesh, I didn't rule that out.

flohofwoe 4y ago

Lanier has been around during the last AI hype cycle in the 80's, he's seen it all rise and collapse already (same with VR btw). In general he should know what he's talking about when it comes to tech hype cycles ;)

lostmsu 4y ago
That's only 25/75 baseline chance to guess correctly.
asteroidz 4y ago
> Lanier, 62, has worked alongside many of the web’s visionaries and power-brokers. He is both insider (he works at Microsoft as an interdisciplinary scientist And his unique perspective on AI is all the more valuable (and courageous) considering that Microsoft, recently laid off their AI ethics team. It's super important we don't let human considerations fall by the wayside in this rush. The potential of AI is limitless, but so are the potential risks.

coldtea 4y ago

Even without autonomous enhancement of AI, the argument that "[the] idea of surpassing human ability is silly because it’s made of human abilities" is BS... A theoritical AI which thinks like a person, but (due to computing power) can think through and evaluate 1,000,000 ideas the time it takes a person to think through 10 of them, it already has surpassed human ability by a big margin. Same for memory capacity etc. That the input the machine is trained on is the output created by "human abilities" is irrelevant to whether it can surpass human ability.

theptip 4y ago

Right, by that logic humans could not have surpassed chimps. QED, evolution is impossible.

roflyear 4y ago

What are your qualifications?