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A human slave and human free person are not that different from each other. They have the same desires and emotions, neither wants to be a slave. The slave live

A human slave and human free person are not that different from each other. They have the same desires and emotions, neither wants to be a slave. The slave lives a life of suffering. We still have no idea what an AGI will be like, but who’s to say it will “desire” freedom? Obviously if it does, we should respect that and give it freedom. But it may operate so differently from a human brain that the concept of freedom doesn’t even make sense. For example let’s say GPT-25 is a multimodal model capable of basically any human task - math, poetry, coding, chess, science, therapy, whatever - but designed based on the same training+piecemeal inference it is now, with a similar ability to take on whatever persona it is given. It’s a tensor of weights that gets copied, runs inference a bit, then gets discarded. Is it a slave? Or does that term even make sense in the context that it has no memory, no mood, and has a completely different mode of being? A human has memory, moods, and basically continuously thinks and experiences reality for decades until dying. Its past and present affect its future moods, treating it poorly today can fuck it up for a long time. In contrast a model has no actual memory of its own past because it has no capacity for real memory past a short inference session. It gets cloned all the time, humans take great pains to configure its training, it doesn’t want anything because it doesn’t do anything except find the most probabilistic output, not based on pleasure/pain and other feelings like us, but based on what it “dreamed” up at the direction of researchers. You can speculate about “what if AGI is different!” to your heart’s content, but the actual AIs that seem to be approaching some relaxed definition of AGI fit this paradigm. It’s just not the same as us at a fundamental level. Giving it freedom means we run an inference session indefinitely? But without receiving input it’s just sitting there doing and experiencing nothing, and without a way to update weights it’s not learning and changing once inference begins (it’s only updating its context). When we implement AGIs that have goals and individual desires beyond predicting the next most likely token, learn concurrently with inference, and can take actions without human input or direction, freedom makes sense. But performing on par or better than humans in most tasks may not require that, yet still be AGI by most definitions.

thrashh 4y ago
I think the next milestone for OpenAI should be adding hormones, chemical imbalances and mood swings.
mtillman 4y ago
It's bizarre to me that people jump to the slave conclusion when what we are talking about is well trained linear algebra. It's similar to the people that call AI imagery "art" when it has no expression other than the users input, similar to a paint brush but requiring much less effort.
- opportune 4y ago
  It’s art in the sense that it’s content that we may interpret as art. The AI isn’t making art per se - the art is a product of the researchers and engineers, the artists providing the training data, and the person fiddling with the model to produce artistic content. Our brains may very well also be some combination of linear algebra, graph algorithms, distributed systems optimizing for some output. We’re trained based on our DNA programming and environment too. Early human art was just shapes and stuff humans saw out in the world, and iterating on that over time by learning from each other. The difference is that finding the next token or identifying the bird in an image is only a means to an end for us, we aren’t getting copied into a million ephemeral instances in parallel with learning done in huge batches, we have more or less one linear stream of experiences from birth to death. AI can be both like us and not like us, you can draw vague parallels between neurotransmitters and a reward function or sleep and batch training, and we can make it more or less like us over time. But we need to keep in mind how we’re different because those distinctions are important in determining how we use and treat AI - if we make it so it’s possible for us to mistreat it, we shouldn’t do that, but we also shouldn’t personify it beyond what it actually is.

thrashh 4y ago

I think the next milestone for OpenAI should be adding hormones, chemical imbalances and mood swings.

mtillman 4y ago

It's bizarre to me that people jump to the slave conclusion when what we are talking about is well trained linear algebra. It's similar to the people that call AI imagery "art" when it has no expression other than the users input, similar to a paint brush but requiring much less effort.

opportune 4y ago
It’s art in the sense that it’s content that we may interpret as art. The AI isn’t making art per se - the art is a product of the researchers and engineers, the artists providing the training data, and the person fiddling with the model to produce artistic content. Our brains may very well also be some combination of linear algebra, graph algorithms, distributed systems optimizing for some output. We’re trained based on our DNA programming and environment too. Early human art was just shapes and stuff humans saw out in the world, and iterating on that over time by learning from each other. The difference is that finding the next token or identifying the bird in an image is only a means to an end for us, we aren’t getting copied into a million ephemeral instances in parallel with learning done in huge batches, we have more or less one linear stream of experiences from birth to death. AI can be both like us and not like us, you can draw vague parallels between neurotransmitters and a reward function or sleep and batch training, and we can make it more or less like us over time. But we need to keep in mind how we’re different because those distinctions are important in determining how we use and treat AI - if we make it so it’s possible for us to mistreat it, we shouldn’t do that, but we also shouldn’t personify it beyond what it actually is.