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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

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
    - mistercheph 4y ago
      That's not a car!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  a car can't walk, if it can't walk it cannot run. You're actually oversimplifying the matter to a point where an F-16 Hornet is a very fast runner. Which it isn't.
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    It's the other way around. Focusing on walking and running not being good comparisons rather than making valid comparisons is a distraction. Like a lot of the stuff being done with large models certainly isn't thinking, but they can clearly characterize sets of data in ways that an unassisted human can't.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      until the machine needs to run or think and "characterize sets of data" won't make it. being able to answer based on a probabilistic assumption is not that great in general, they do it fast on a frozen knowledge base, it can be useful, sometimes is surprisingly good, but not that great in general. When I asked for the 3 best wood shops near me it replied with a shop that does not sell wood, a shop that does not exist and a broken website of a former now closed wood shop. Now can an AI train another AI to become "smarter" than it is? It can't. Can an AI train another AI to become better at "characterize sets of data" than it is? It can't. An unassisted AI is as helpless as the unassisted person, but can't even rely on the intelligence of the species.
      - maxerickson 4y ago
        We don't know what the possibilty space looks like. We know that the current stuff can't do a lot of things, and it isn't really that interesting to enumerate them. A predictive text model having a poor grasp of wood shop and location doesn't seem hugely surprising.
        johnchristopher 4y ago
        People make the same arguments for time travel. "We dOnt KnoW wHat's poSsiBle yEt sO aNytHIng iS".
- pipo234 4y ago
  > But when it touches our ability to think we squirm. I think that's not the point. We're in awe by the machines' performances and then confused in how that compares to our abilities. The actual threat is that in our minds we narrow our own capabilities and limit the comparison such that the computer is in fact better. When computers were first doing math quicker than humans, that might have touch some humans, sure. Similarly now that "AI"s produce convincing spam faster or photo realistic creative images — that hurts some, jobs or maybe a lot. But it doesn't come close to being "human" or "intelligent". Quite the opposite, the point is that we are getting dumber by focusing on human traits that can be measured or emulated by machines.
  - lo_zamoyski 4y ago
    I think another general problem is that metaphors are quietly forgotten. The notion that computers "think" is something of a metaphor, but it is a superficial one that cannot be taken seriously as a literal claim. For example, when we say computers can "do math" more quickly than human beings can, this is fine as a matter of loose or figurative common speech. But strictly speaking, do computers actually do math? Do they actually compute? No, they don't. The computation we say a computer is doing is in the eye of the beholder. A better way to characterize what's happening is that human beings are _using_ computers _computationally_. That is, the physical artifacts we call computers participate in human acts as instruments, but _strictly speaking_, it makes about as much sense to say computers compute as it is to say that pencils write, hammers nail, vacuums cleaners clean, or cars drive. These things participate in the human act, but only as instrument. Whereas when human beings compute they are objectively computing, computation is not what computers are objectively doing (both Kripke and Searle make good arguments here). These artifacts only make sense in light of human intentions, as instruments of human intention and act. Human writing can be viewed similarly. Objectively, we only have some pigment arranged on some material. No analysis of a piece of written text will ever divulge its signification. Indeed, no analysis of a piece of text will demonstrate that what is being analyzed is a piece of text! Text, and even that something is a piece of text, needs to be interpreted as text to function as text in the eye of the reader. But the semantic content of the text is objectively real. It just exists in the mind of the reader. So we need to be careful because we can easily commit category mistakes by way of projection and confusion.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  Yep. This whole argument hinges on the fact that the word “runner” in this context happens to be used almost exclusively to refer to humans. Rephrase it even slightly and it falls apart. We do say “cars can move faster than humans.” Likewise we do say “machines can lift weights better than a human,” but we don’t say “machines are better weightlifters” because that particular word “weightlifter” is coincidentally only used to refer to humans.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  It's not just word play. Cars go faster than humans can by themselves, under some specific conditions. Cars go slower than humans, or rather cannot go at all, under other specific conditions. Two weeks ago my wife ran 30 miles on trails in southern Texas. A car could not have traversed any of the distance she travelled on, because a car cannot run. Cars make it easier for people to move themselves and stuff when there are appropriate roads to travel on. They have enhanced our abilities to do this, but they cannot run. You're squashing the meaning out words by trying to suggest that "running" is somehow equivalent to "any other method of a person moving from A to B". But that's not true. We can acknowledge the greater ease of cars for moving people and stuff without squashing the meaning out of words. Finally, even the notion that cars are "better" at moving people and stuff needs careful examination. Thus far I have said "make it easier" because I am aware that by a certain set of metrics (related to energy use, material use, impact on the environment) cars are actually worse most of the time.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >You're squashing the meaning out words by trying to suggest that "running" is somehow equivalent to "any other method of a person moving from A to B". But that's not true. That's just an accidental property of the english language. We can imagine a language where "runner" and "thing that moves from A to B fast" used the same term T, and if people referred to T with the english notion of "runner" (e.g. a person running in a marathon") it was just deduced from the context. There are many cases like that. In any case, the point is moot, as "thinking" doesn't have the same constraints. We might not call what a car does as running/runner (though we do use the former term) but we absolutely have considered AI as "thinking" and called AIs "thinking machines", even before AI (never mind AGI) even existed. >You're squashing the meaning out words by trying to suggest that "running" is somehow equivalent to "any other method of a person moving from A to B". But that's not true. This depends on the level of abstraction of the discussion. At some level of abstraction it's irrelevant if the move happened via running or via horse buggy or via a car. Sometimes we just care about the act of moving from A to B, and different methods to do so are only differentiated by their speed or other effectiveness. In that case, we can compare man and machine though, and just care for the speed (machine can answer in 0.1. secs, a man needs to think over 1-2 minutes to answer such questions) or effectiveness (e.g. machine is better at juggling many things at the same time when thinking, or man is better at subtle semantical nuance).
- jwalgenbach 4y ago
  Cars don't run. And even if they did, or you tortured the definition to include rolling on fairly straight prepared paths as running, it is only better for specific definitions of better. Cars are faster on reasonable traversable terrain. Are they more or less energy efficient? Under what circumstances? Do they self navigate the best path around obstacles? Better is really subjective. And this applies to the large language models too. Just like calculators, they are going to do some things better, or maybe cheaper. But I've played with them trying to get them to write non-trivial programs, and they really do fail confidently. I suspect the amount of source code online means that any common problem has been included in the training data, and the LLM constitutes a program. So, at this point for programming, it's fancy Google. And that has value, but it is not intelligence. I am not saying we (as a society) shouldn't be worried about these developments. Near as I can tell, they will mostly be used to further concentrate wealth among the few, and drive people apart because we already can't settle on a common set of (reasonably) objective facts about what is going on -- both problems are probably the same thing from different perspectives...
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  > 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. This tendency on HN to annihilate discussions by stating that, for instance, flying is the same as running because your feet also touch the ground at some point when flying (it happens only at take off and landing but it still counts as running, right ?) is really something. Stop torturing definitions, it makes Carmackgod sad and they randomly switch off a bit on the mainframe every time you do that.
- textninja 4y ago
  The hilarious thing is that we do say a car has power equivalent to that of, say, 887 horses, but when it’s about humans it suddenly becomes nonsensical to make a comparison.
stareatgoats 4y ago
That clarification didn't do it for me, I found it was like juggling semantics. Let's rephrase his comparison: "It's like saying a robot can run faster than a human runner. Of course it can (soon), and yet we don't say that the robot has become a better runner". It's just nonsense.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  A tractor is not better than humans at plowing, it is a plowing machine, so can do it at scale without suffering the same fatigue men experience, but it's not better at it, it simply does it mechanically in a way only a machine could do it. Running and plowing are not simply about doing it as fast as possible or as extensively as possible. So maybe what you are looking for is a definition of "better", it depends on what you mean. In my book a tailor made suit is always better than a machine made suit, because people are better tailors than machines for some definition of better.
  - stareatgoats 4y ago
    Yes, this is verily what I objected to. It's called "semantics", similar to when people say "hair" everyone knows what that means. But sooner or later someone will point ut that this hair is different from that hair and if you split one hair, now what do we have? This process is always a possibility in any discourse, but largely frowned upon, rightly so.
    - philipov 4y ago
      I think semantics is important :( In my experience, most arguments are the result of people not agreeing on what a word means.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      My opinion is that this it is not about semantics, it's about looking at the whole picture and not only to some specific outcome (running faster for example) Firstly, faster doesn't necessarily means better. Secondly, why do people run? Nobody can't say for sure in general. Why machines do it? (or would if they were able to) Because someone programmed them to do it. 100%. it makes all the difference in the World.
coldtea 4y ago
>“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.” That's a pointless argument. We might not say it, but for all intents and purposes the car does go faster than any human runner. We just don't say it because running when it comes to humans mainly means using your feet. If it was a more generic term, like "fast-mover", we could still use it to compare humans and cars, and say cars are better "fast-movers" than humans.
- waboremo 4y ago
  No it's not pointless, language is important. Cars are not runners. "For all intents and purposes" is a cop out here. We're talking about LLMs, you know language learning models.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >No it's not pointless, language is important. Not that important, and not for this purpose. Things still work the same, even in languages with widely different semantics and ways to refer to them (I don't mean the trivial case where a house is called talo in Finnish etc., but languages where semantics and terms differ. Using language-specific (en. english specific, or german specific) word definition and etymology to prove some property of the thing reffered to is an old cheap philosophical trick that sounds more profound than it is insightful. Even more so, we might not say it for a car, but if we've built a human-looking robot with legs, we'd very much say it's a "better runner" if it started surpassing humans at running. Hell, we used to call employees doing manual calculations "calculators" in the past. Later, when machines doing that became available, we used the same term for them. So the idea that "human is runner but car is not runner", also means that "human is thinker, machine is not thinker", and this has some profound difference, doesn't make sense anyway. Human running is associated with legs, certain way of moving, etc. Thinking is more abstract and doesn't have such constraints. >Cars are not runners. That's just an accidental property of having a dedicated word for "runner" in English that doesn't also apply to a car going fast. The term "running" though is used for both a human running and a car going fast ("That car was running at 100mph"). >"For all intents and purposes" is a cop out here. For all intents and purposes means "in practice". Any lexicographical or conceptual arguments don't matter if what happens in practice remains the same (e.g. whether we decide an AGI is a "thinker" or a "processor" or whatever, it will still be used for tasks that we do via thinking, it will still be able to come up with stuff like ideas and solutions that we come up via thinking, and effectively it will quak, look, and walk like a duck. The rest would be semantical games. >We're talking about LLMs, you know language learning models. Which is irrelevant. LLMs being language learning models doesn't mean the language used to describe them (e..g "thinkers" or not) will change their effectiveness, what they're used for, or their ability to assist or harm us. It will just change how we refer to them. Besides, AI in general can go way beyond LLMs and word predictors, eventually fully modelling human neural activity patterns and so on. So any argument that just applies to LLM doesn't cover AI in general or "the danger than AI destroys us" as per TFA.
naasking 4y ago
> “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 analogy to running is flawed because rolling and running are different types of locomotion. It's not at all clear that computing and thinking are meaningfully different forms of information processing. In fact, we know that we can compute by thinking since I can reduce lambda calculus terms in my head. We also know computers can compute all computable functions, and we know that all physical systems like the brain necessarily contain finite information (per the Bekenstein Bound), therefore they can in principle by simulated by a computable function. There are therefore strong reasons to suspect an underlying equivalency that would suggest that "artificial intelligence" is a sensible term.
- krona 4y ago
  Then by that reasoning computers have, for decades, been 'artificially intelligent'?
  - naasking 4y ago
    No, thinking would be a specific type of computational process, just like computation requires a specific kind of thinking process.
ignite 4y ago
That reminds me of the very old arguments that people can't program computers to play chess better than they themselves did. Obviously false, as is this. There is no reason we can't build something that is smarter than we are. > “This idea of surpassing human ability is silly because it’s made of human abilities.” It's not made OF human abilities, it's made BY human abilities - a completely different thing. And, of course, Boston Dynamics will be delivering the "better runner" very soon.

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
  - mistercheph 4y ago
    That's not a car!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
a car can't walk, if it can't walk it cannot run. You're actually oversimplifying the matter to a point where an F-16 Hornet is a very fast runner. Which it isn't.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  It's the other way around. Focusing on walking and running not being good comparisons rather than making valid comparisons is a distraction. Like a lot of the stuff being done with large models certainly isn't thinking, but they can clearly characterize sets of data in ways that an unassisted human can't.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    until the machine needs to run or think and "characterize sets of data" won't make it. being able to answer based on a probabilistic assumption is not that great in general, they do it fast on a frozen knowledge base, it can be useful, sometimes is surprisingly good, but not that great in general. When I asked for the 3 best wood shops near me it replied with a shop that does not sell wood, a shop that does not exist and a broken website of a former now closed wood shop. Now can an AI train another AI to become "smarter" than it is? It can't. Can an AI train another AI to become better at "characterize sets of data" than it is? It can't. An unassisted AI is as helpless as the unassisted person, but can't even rely on the intelligence of the species.
    - maxerickson 4y ago
      We don't know what the possibilty space looks like. We know that the current stuff can't do a lot of things, and it isn't really that interesting to enumerate them. A predictive text model having a poor grasp of wood shop and location doesn't seem hugely surprising.
      - johnchristopher 4y ago
        People make the same arguments for time travel. "We dOnt KnoW wHat's poSsiBle yEt sO aNytHIng iS".
pipo234 4y ago
> But when it touches our ability to think we squirm. I think that's not the point. We're in awe by the machines' performances and then confused in how that compares to our abilities. The actual threat is that in our minds we narrow our own capabilities and limit the comparison such that the computer is in fact better. When computers were first doing math quicker than humans, that might have touch some humans, sure. Similarly now that "AI"s produce convincing spam faster or photo realistic creative images — that hurts some, jobs or maybe a lot. But it doesn't come close to being "human" or "intelligent". Quite the opposite, the point is that we are getting dumber by focusing on human traits that can be measured or emulated by machines.
- lo_zamoyski 4y ago
  I think another general problem is that metaphors are quietly forgotten. The notion that computers "think" is something of a metaphor, but it is a superficial one that cannot be taken seriously as a literal claim. For example, when we say computers can "do math" more quickly than human beings can, this is fine as a matter of loose or figurative common speech. But strictly speaking, do computers actually do math? Do they actually compute? No, they don't. The computation we say a computer is doing is in the eye of the beholder. A better way to characterize what's happening is that human beings are _using_ computers _computationally_. That is, the physical artifacts we call computers participate in human acts as instruments, but _strictly speaking_, it makes about as much sense to say computers compute as it is to say that pencils write, hammers nail, vacuums cleaners clean, or cars drive. These things participate in the human act, but only as instrument. Whereas when human beings compute they are objectively computing, computation is not what computers are objectively doing (both Kripke and Searle make good arguments here). These artifacts only make sense in light of human intentions, as instruments of human intention and act. Human writing can be viewed similarly. Objectively, we only have some pigment arranged on some material. No analysis of a piece of written text will ever divulge its signification. Indeed, no analysis of a piece of text will demonstrate that what is being analyzed is a piece of text! Text, and even that something is a piece of text, needs to be interpreted as text to function as text in the eye of the reader. But the semantic content of the text is objectively real. It just exists in the mind of the reader. So we need to be careful because we can easily commit category mistakes by way of projection and confusion.
tshaddox 4y ago
Yep. This whole argument hinges on the fact that the word “runner” in this context happens to be used almost exclusively to refer to humans. Rephrase it even slightly and it falls apart. We do say “cars can move faster than humans.” Likewise we do say “machines can lift weights better than a human,” but we don’t say “machines are better weightlifters” because that particular word “weightlifter” is coincidentally only used to refer to humans.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
It's not just word play. Cars go faster than humans can by themselves, under some specific conditions. Cars go slower than humans, or rather cannot go at all, under other specific conditions. Two weeks ago my wife ran 30 miles on trails in southern Texas. A car could not have traversed any of the distance she travelled on, because a car cannot run. Cars make it easier for people to move themselves and stuff when there are appropriate roads to travel on. They have enhanced our abilities to do this, but they cannot run. You're squashing the meaning out words by trying to suggest that "running" is somehow equivalent to "any other method of a person moving from A to B". But that's not true. We can acknowledge the greater ease of cars for moving people and stuff without squashing the meaning out of words. Finally, even the notion that cars are "better" at moving people and stuff needs careful examination. Thus far I have said "make it easier" because I am aware that by a certain set of metrics (related to energy use, material use, impact on the environment) cars are actually worse most of the time.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >You're squashing the meaning out words by trying to suggest that "running" is somehow equivalent to "any other method of a person moving from A to B". But that's not true. That's just an accidental property of the english language. We can imagine a language where "runner" and "thing that moves from A to B fast" used the same term T, and if people referred to T with the english notion of "runner" (e.g. a person running in a marathon") it was just deduced from the context. There are many cases like that. In any case, the point is moot, as "thinking" doesn't have the same constraints. We might not call what a car does as running/runner (though we do use the former term) but we absolutely have considered AI as "thinking" and called AIs "thinking machines", even before AI (never mind AGI) even existed. >You're squashing the meaning out words by trying to suggest that "running" is somehow equivalent to "any other method of a person moving from A to B". But that's not true. This depends on the level of abstraction of the discussion. At some level of abstraction it's irrelevant if the move happened via running or via horse buggy or via a car. Sometimes we just care about the act of moving from A to B, and different methods to do so are only differentiated by their speed or other effectiveness. In that case, we can compare man and machine though, and just care for the speed (machine can answer in 0.1. secs, a man needs to think over 1-2 minutes to answer such questions) or effectiveness (e.g. machine is better at juggling many things at the same time when thinking, or man is better at subtle semantical nuance).
jwalgenbach 4y ago
Cars don't run. And even if they did, or you tortured the definition to include rolling on fairly straight prepared paths as running, it is only better for specific definitions of better. Cars are faster on reasonable traversable terrain. Are they more or less energy efficient? Under what circumstances? Do they self navigate the best path around obstacles? Better is really subjective. And this applies to the large language models too. Just like calculators, they are going to do some things better, or maybe cheaper. But I've played with them trying to get them to write non-trivial programs, and they really do fail confidently. I suspect the amount of source code online means that any common problem has been included in the training data, and the LLM constitutes a program. So, at this point for programming, it's fancy Google. And that has value, but it is not intelligence. I am not saying we (as a society) shouldn't be worried about these developments. Near as I can tell, they will mostly be used to further concentrate wealth among the few, and drive people apart because we already can't settle on a common set of (reasonably) objective facts about what is going on -- both problems are probably the same thing from different perspectives...
johnchristopher 4y ago
> 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. This tendency on HN to annihilate discussions by stating that, for instance, flying is the same as running because your feet also touch the ground at some point when flying (it happens only at take off and landing but it still counts as running, right ?) is really something. Stop torturing definitions, it makes Carmackgod sad and they randomly switch off a bit on the mainframe every time you do that.
textninja 4y ago
The hilarious thing is that we do say a car has power equivalent to that of, say, 887 horses, but when it’s about humans it suddenly becomes nonsensical to make a comparison.

stareatgoats 4y ago

That clarification didn't do it for me, I found it was like juggling semantics. Let's rephrase his comparison: "It's like saying a robot can run faster than a human runner. Of course it can (soon), and yet we don't say that the robot has become a better runner". It's just nonsense.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
A tractor is not better than humans at plowing, it is a plowing machine, so can do it at scale without suffering the same fatigue men experience, but it's not better at it, it simply does it mechanically in a way only a machine could do it. Running and plowing are not simply about doing it as fast as possible or as extensively as possible. So maybe what you are looking for is a definition of "better", it depends on what you mean. In my book a tailor made suit is always better than a machine made suit, because people are better tailors than machines for some definition of better.
- stareatgoats 4y ago
  Yes, this is verily what I objected to. It's called "semantics", similar to when people say "hair" everyone knows what that means. But sooner or later someone will point ut that this hair is different from that hair and if you split one hair, now what do we have? This process is always a possibility in any discourse, but largely frowned upon, rightly so.
  - philipov 4y ago
    I think semantics is important :( In my experience, most arguments are the result of people not agreeing on what a word means.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    My opinion is that this it is not about semantics, it's about looking at the whole picture and not only to some specific outcome (running faster for example) Firstly, faster doesn't necessarily means better. Secondly, why do people run? Nobody can't say for sure in general. Why machines do it? (or would if they were able to) Because someone programmed them to do it. 100%. it makes all the difference in the World.

coldtea 4y ago

>“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.” That's a pointless argument. We might not say it, but for all intents and purposes the car does go faster than any human runner. We just don't say it because running when it comes to humans mainly means using your feet. If it was a more generic term, like "fast-mover", we could still use it to compare humans and cars, and say cars are better "fast-movers" than humans.

waboremo 4y ago
No it's not pointless, language is important. Cars are not runners. "For all intents and purposes" is a cop out here. We're talking about LLMs, you know language learning models.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >No it's not pointless, language is important. Not that important, and not for this purpose. Things still work the same, even in languages with widely different semantics and ways to refer to them (I don't mean the trivial case where a house is called talo in Finnish etc., but languages where semantics and terms differ. Using language-specific (en. english specific, or german specific) word definition and etymology to prove some property of the thing reffered to is an old cheap philosophical trick that sounds more profound than it is insightful. Even more so, we might not say it for a car, but if we've built a human-looking robot with legs, we'd very much say it's a "better runner" if it started surpassing humans at running. Hell, we used to call employees doing manual calculations "calculators" in the past. Later, when machines doing that became available, we used the same term for them. So the idea that "human is runner but car is not runner", also means that "human is thinker, machine is not thinker", and this has some profound difference, doesn't make sense anyway. Human running is associated with legs, certain way of moving, etc. Thinking is more abstract and doesn't have such constraints. >Cars are not runners. That's just an accidental property of having a dedicated word for "runner" in English that doesn't also apply to a car going fast. The term "running" though is used for both a human running and a car going fast ("That car was running at 100mph"). >"For all intents and purposes" is a cop out here. For all intents and purposes means "in practice". Any lexicographical or conceptual arguments don't matter if what happens in practice remains the same (e.g. whether we decide an AGI is a "thinker" or a "processor" or whatever, it will still be used for tasks that we do via thinking, it will still be able to come up with stuff like ideas and solutions that we come up via thinking, and effectively it will quak, look, and walk like a duck. The rest would be semantical games. >We're talking about LLMs, you know language learning models. Which is irrelevant. LLMs being language learning models doesn't mean the language used to describe them (e..g "thinkers" or not) will change their effectiveness, what they're used for, or their ability to assist or harm us. It will just change how we refer to them. Besides, AI in general can go way beyond LLMs and word predictors, eventually fully modelling human neural activity patterns and so on. So any argument that just applies to LLM doesn't cover AI in general or "the danger than AI destroys us" as per TFA.

naasking 4y ago

> “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 analogy to running is flawed because rolling and running are different types of locomotion. It's not at all clear that computing and thinking are meaningfully different forms of information processing. In fact, we know that we can compute by thinking since I can reduce lambda calculus terms in my head. We also know computers can compute all computable functions, and we know that all physical systems like the brain necessarily contain finite information (per the Bekenstein Bound), therefore they can in principle by simulated by a computable function. There are therefore strong reasons to suspect an underlying equivalency that would suggest that "artificial intelligence" is a sensible term.

krona 4y ago
Then by that reasoning computers have, for decades, been 'artificially intelligent'?
- naasking 4y ago
  No, thinking would be a specific type of computational process, just like computation requires a specific kind of thinking process.

ignite 4y ago

That reminds me of the very old arguments that people can't program computers to play chess better than they themselves did. Obviously false, as is this. There is no reason we can't build something that is smarter than we are. > “This idea of surpassing human ability is silly because it’s made of human abilities.” It's not made OF human abilities, it's made BY human abilities - a completely different thing. And, of course, Boston Dynamics will be delivering the "better runner" very soon.