24 ms·

There is no A.I.

• milleniall 4y ago
  This is not going to age well.
• chpatrick 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • atleastoptimal 4y ago
    This is correct. Expect 10000x more articles like this over the next couple years.
    • runarberg 4y ago
      But, the author is not wrong. > In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration. This is a very interesting take from a philosophy grandmaster who is well versed in the technology and statistics behind it. If we get 10 000x more articles like this in the next couple of years, we should consider our selves lucky. Grifters have controlled the debate about AI for far too long.
    • Der_Einzige 4y ago
      What percentage do you think of these will be LLM generated?
      • atleastoptimal 4y ago
        99.9% 2023 will be the last year when people will be able to distinguish AI written text because it's comparatively worse than human writing. 2024 and beyond, human writing will be distinguishable because it's noticeably worse than AI writing.
• williamtrask 4y ago
  For those who don’t know about the author, he is most well known a founder of the field of virtual reality. As a full time philosopher in the CTO’s office at MSFT, and the originator of concepts like data dignity, he’s uniquely qualified to write this kind of piece. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier
  • atdrummond 4y ago
    Jaron has an amazing publicist. I challenge anyone to read Wikipedia’s history of VR (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#History) and assess him to fairly be called a founder. There was serious work being done for over a decade before he even started his firm; VPL never came close to being a standard and the VR tech today has hardly any relation to his “post symbolic” language. He’s certainly a very smart and interesting guy but my alarm bells go off when his supposed achievements are used as justification for the piece being valid rather than… well, any of the arguments he made.
    • startupsfail 4y ago
      His thinking seems much clearer than most of the discourse around this technology. But I think that a better way of thinking about these systems is an imperfect world model analogy. Not a made-of-people analogy. These models are not made of people. People helped gathering data about the world around us. And that data allowed to build a world model. Which includes models of people, along with everything else. And it’s a world model, not a human civilization model. Data goes through the funnel of The Pile and the likes, but ultimately the predictive model is of the universe, not that of humans.
    • jes5199 4y ago
      he hasn’t given up on VPL, though, only few years back Vi Hart’s eleVR team was working on “sculptural” programming languages within VR, at Microsoft Research under Jaron. (…but I think that team disbanded a couple years back)
    • Animats 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  https://archive.is/FavAf https://archive.is/FavAf
• monero-xmr 4y ago
  It is possible that AI can perfectly replicate human intelligence. But because it is purely digital, I cannot kill it - I can delete it, copy it, recreate it, and so on but never kill it. Only biological organisms can die. Therefore no matter what happens, there is a distinction between human intelligence and AI. I can destroy an AI creature and the only penalty should be property damage (if relevant).
  • LeoPanthera 4y ago
    If an AI has mutable memory, and could be convinced to damage its memory in such a way that it no longer acts usefully (or does so by accident), is that functionally different from "death"? This doesn't really apply to GPT, where the core functionality is immutable.
  • burnished 4y ago
    This seems like a reach, like you started from your conclusion.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    Machines running AI can certainly die, that is why chaos monkeys and kubernetes etc. exist. They can be backed up, unlike humans though. Although humans are backed up by virtue of there being 8 billion of them, so if one dies, the world can keep going on pretty much as before, albeit with some sadness for some of the people. This sounds morbid, but hard to avoid when comparing humans to machines!
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    This is "begging the question".
  • sordina 4y ago
    So if you lost the weights how is that not killing the AI? Is it because it lacks the death experience? If so what about bitrotting the weights incrementally and degrading its inputs?
    • monero-xmr 4y ago
• thejarren 4y ago
  This article initially seems to be arguing over semantics, saying that AI isn't AGI, which most people would agree with. Then talks about data dignity, which is interesting but a bit of a tangent. My understanding of the concern over AGI, or even an all-powerful "AI" isn't that it's not truly self-aware, but rather that it's motives are not in line with humanity's motives. It doesn't matter if it trains on data by humans if it still doesn't have the moral compass of a human. Not really sure what data dignity will provide if we truly do have a misaligned "AGI"
  • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
    Data dignity would give us insight into how the AI “thinks” so we can better understand how it’s aligned.
  • majormajor 4y ago
    My read is that the author doesn't think today's tools are particularly close to AGI that has its own motives, or that it's at all useful to characterize these tools as "having motives" at all. There are those who disagree with how close we are to "AGI" with today's LLMs, but as an outsider, the author seems pretty well-qualified in his position at MS Research compared to some of the less-informed prognosticators. Even the linked-out discussion with Altman, who the author says is more pessimistic than he is, doesn't appear to be a case of Altman saying these models are close to AGI or dangerous for "alignment" reasons vs "they can be used for bad things." Worrying about the uses of tools is a VERY different thing than worrying about if the tools are gonna overthrow us, and I think that's what the author is really pushing for here. If we have that conversation we can get closer to real, specific policies, laws, etc to make sure the tools benefit us instead of the other way around.
    • zarzavat 4y ago
      Why would AGI need to have its own motives? AGI = artificial, general intelligence. Meaning intelligence that is generally applicable to all domains. AGI doesn’t mean building an artificial human with all human quirks.
  • 4y ago
• snitzr 4y ago
  You Are Not a Gadget is a great book by Jaron Lanier.
• nemo44x 4y ago
  This is a Trojan horse article designed to deliver the authors ideas of “data dignity”.
  • CodexArcanum 4y ago
    100% my thoughts as well.
• sundarurfriend 4y ago
  If ChatGPT is "social collaboration", it's an involuntary collaboration between our past selves, with no active control or choice over what we're "collaborating" on. At which point, we're really stretching the meaning of the word collaboration.
• drewcoo 4y ago
  There is no AI, there are only pedantic verbal prescriptivists? That's deep dude. What if dog meant god? Pass the bong!
• ggm 4y ago
  Don't like Lanier, massive self publicist but he's doing gods work here, having a voice, being heard and speaking truths. So dislike of the individual aside, like what I'm reading this time.
• wintorez 4y ago
  If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck…
  • senectus1 4y ago
    then it could be an amazingly clever mechanical duck like character. still not a duck though.
• tracerbulletx 4y ago
  All of these arguments seem to think that the brain isn't also generating a statistical ordering of semantic words and actions. Obviously the brain has a way more complex network of subsystems with various specialties than the artificial models we have today and is able to generalize language, math, and positional reasoning and mix it with the older parts of the brain for reward and training mechanisms and it can do it in real time, but it kind of seems like modern models are showing so much flexibility at different tasks and so much generality it's feeling like they have something in common with the building blocks of the brain that might get us there.
  • xz0r 4y ago
    Correlation is not causation. It feels more like smarter automation to me.
    • Swizec 4y ago
      > It feels more like smarter automation to me. Yep. Elevators used to be proof that machines can think. Then compilers, and chess, and go, and search, and … The problem with AI is that as soon as it works, we stop thinking about it as “artificial intelligence” and it becomes “just automation”. Then AI moves to the next goalpost.
      • throwaway8503 4y ago
        The problem seems to be with defining good tests for intelligence. FWIW, because GPT4 answers have a detectable pattern, they should presumably fail the Turing test. At some level, intelligence requires logic, rationality, and conceptualization, all of which are topics which have evaded clear definition despite millennia of philosophy directly addressing the issues.
        • ekianjo 4y ago
          Humans also answer in predictable ways so if you place such criteria for a turing test humans will fail to pass it too
• ncr100 4y ago
  Summary (very high level): The article is about purposeful action. It points out how AI, among other technologies, is being designed by us types here on HN & our employers, and consumed by our users, to serve the ends of the technologies themselves. > If society, economics, culture, technology, or any other spheres of activity are to serve people, that can only be because we decide that people enjoy a special status to be served. My take: We do seriously need to decide on the limits for AI. Then, as a tech maker culture, push requirements into the AI field. I agree with the author that we should anticipate our users' desires to protect their information, and also to respect the rights of the originators of the model data our AIs are trained in. For AI, it will be damaging for us (techies) to do like we usually do, and blindly run up against the wall of Regulation and Societal blow-back as we zealously expand & apply our new toy inventions, since AI is dramatically impactful to all human labor. Motivating questions: When should any given AI be disassembled? How should this happen? [Meta tip: read this article from the end paragraph to the beginning]
• hprotagonist 4y ago
  by the same author: http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html
• eointierney 4y ago
  Can we just backronym AI to Approximate Intelligence and carry on? There are so many dangers and possibilities of AI that are fascinating, and none of them are even remotely as interesting as those of actual animal and human intelligence. It's as if AI is held up as a mirror to our stupidity, and the Turing Test is how we measure ourselves against our models of computation. I'm really weirded out by the fear and exploitation being demonstrated. There's more to reality, and intelligence, than mathematical models we currently use and pretend to understand. “Why should I refuse a good dinner simply because I don’t understand the digestive processes involved?” — Oliver Heaviside
  • gitfan86 4y ago
    Thank you, the philosophers and religious people are more than welcome to discuss what is "true" intelligence or humanity I'm more focused on the fact that GDP as it was measured in 2020 is going to 100x in the next 5 years.
    • tuatoru 4y ago
      GDP is measured both as production and as consumption. The figures have to be the same, within a "statistical discrepancy". The consumption is final consumption: goods and services used by households. You are asserting that households will each have 100 times the income that they do now (and be spending the same proportion of income as they do now). Edit: I believe that if most companies, or even a significant minority of them, can make effective use of LLMs, the most likely short term effect is a prolonged recession (i.e. steadily declining GDP, not increasing) with high unemployment.
      • gitfan86 4y ago
        I'm saying that many things that cost $100 in 2020 will cost less than $1 for the exact same thing in 2028. It is already happening in 2023. How much would it cost in 2020 to get a 2000 word essay written at a 10th grade level? What is the cost of the same service today? When a service costs goes down 99% that 99% goes directly into GDP growth.
• rolodato 4y ago
  My cynical AI opinion is that if it truly was revolutionary, we would be seeing private companies or governments use it internally to massively boost their productivity or achieve otherwise impossible feats. Instead, all we're seeing are consumer products or half-baked integrations that are another way to further centralize data collection. Talks about all-powerful, malevolent AI or requesting to halt AI development just sounds like baiting for regulary capture to me. If AI research or use is deemed dangerous, it becomes even harder for startups or individuals to compete with established companies. Also, I am not concerned about an all-powerful AI in the slightest. Humanity is excellent at oppressing others, and I have no doubt we'd be equally good at oppressing a true AI as well.
  • anonylizard 4y ago
    "we would be seeing private companies or governments use it internally " What world are you living in, where this isn't happening? Every private company that can use it is using it, Microsoft themselves must be using Copilot. Governments are lining up to train their own LLMs. Commercial and consumer use are not mutually exclusive, in any case. Also "Humanity is excellent at oppressing others, and I have no doubt we'd be equally good at oppressing a true AI as well." If you actually read history a bit carefully, you'd understand this frequently works out badly for the oppressors. The Romans hired, and abused their germanic mercenaries, thinking with their centuries of political experience, they could let the Germanics do all the hard fighting while getting paid little. The contemporary Jin dynasty in China thought the same way, just hire barbarian mercenaries to do all the hard work in their civil wars. Those illiterate barbarians, who up that point, have never achieved much in China, surely wouldn't be a threat. It ended very badly for both of those polities.
    • joshuahedlund 4y ago
      > What world are you living in, where this isn’t happening? You left off the rest of the sentence: “to massively boost their productivity or achieve otherwise impossible feats”
      • 4y ago
• kazinator 4y ago
  GPT4 appears very intelligent when you discuss program code with it. It simply crazy; it can write SNOBOL4 code to extract a field from /etc/passwd. When you discuss other things, it goes off the rails a lot more. For instance, I have had it quote some passages of classic English poetry to me, stating blankly that those passages contain certain words. The passages did not contain any traces of those words or even remotely similar words. In that situation, GPT4 was being dumber than /bin/grep, which can confirm that some piece of text doesn't contain a string. GPT4 is deliberately trained as a coding technician, so that it will convince programmers who will become its advocates. 1. Programmers are vain and believe that everything they do requires great intelligence. (Not just some of it.) 2. GPT4 can "talk shop" with programmers, saying apparently intelligent things, perform complex refactorings, and intuit understanding of a piece of code with minimal context based on meaningful identifier names, and so on. 3. Thus, some programmers will falsely conclude that it's highly intelligent, like them. To be sure, what the technology does is unmistakably a form intelligence. It solves complex problems of symbol manipulation and logic, in flimsy contexts. To deny that it is artificial intelligence is silly. AI /= AGI That's not where the goalposts are for the definition of AI. Computers playing chess is AI. Google Assistant is AI. An expert system from 1990 is AI.
  • pulvinar 4y ago
    You seem to be saying that to have general intelligence one must be an expert in every field? That rules out quite a number of humans too.
    • joshuahedlund 4y ago
      Most humans can tell you pretty accurately whether or not a passage contains a word.
      • pulvinar 4y ago
        That's most likely due to the way it tokenizes words. You have to be careful here, or else for similar reasons you might imply that dyslexics aren't intelligent.
• blazespin 4y ago
  Just another poor person in a stage of grief. LLMs are effective at both memorization and reasoning. They are inevitable in the same way trains were inevitable. Let's just figure out how best to use these and move forward as we always have.
  • alienicecream 4y ago
    Great, when are they going to start solving hard problems? So far what we have is a rather unreliable collater.
• jancsika 4y ago
  Ray Kurzweil's most important argument[1] from that one book he wrote two or three times: If AIs can convince us humans they are sentient, we'll believe them. Does that webgpu demo run on anything more than canary yet? In any case, someone is going to fall in love with one of their browser processes soon. I'll guess by mid-August. More rank speculation: by October, some poor soul will post on SO asking how to retrieve their immortal beloved from the browser tab they accidentally closed. Yikes... even confined to my speculation chamber that one hurts! 1: The other important argument was of course that the crew of Star Trek were almost certainly committing suicide every time they beamed down to a planet. Mind blown. Still makes me wonder what disastrous rituals we engage in today merely because nobody in our society has ever questioned it. Edit: I think these large language models pose a great test for Ray's hypothesis. I mean, it sure seems like they can pass the Turing test already. So in a year or two, we'll know if most people feel like the chatbuddy they have running in a browser tab is a tool, or an entity with its own agency. It seems to be going in the direction of tool atm, but as above I'm speculating that's mostly because of the restrictions build into ChatGPT. But I guess we'll see.
  • hewlett 4y ago
    > In any case, someone is going to fall in love with one of their browser processes soon. I'll guess by mid-August. We've already got Blake Lemoine
  • incongruity 4y ago
    It is also likely due to the people using it most right now. Wait until it’s more broadly used and you’ll have people anthropomorphizing it (rightly or wrongly). ‘
  • notjulianjaynes 4y ago
    >someone is going to fall in love with one of their browser processes soon. I'll guess by mid-August. Already happened: https://gizmodo.com/replika-chatbot-ai-reddit-1850120099 https://gizmodo.com/replika-chatbot-ai-reddit-1850120099
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• gsatic 4y ago
  Wikipedia is quite amazing in terms of that social collaboration he is talking about. For example, during the recent pentagon leaks I was watching that Wikipedia page evolve day by day. It was much more interesting and faster than any news org covering the issue. Plus it was quite diverse. 1. Cuz of the sheer number of ppl that were drawn in and were focusing on it. 2.There were experienced editors making sure things didnt get to crazy, info had decent sources, filtering out crap etc 3. There were domain experts showing up from all over So we get a constantly evolving real time decent summary of the subject. Strip away the real time aspect, which is really not a big requirement for most knowledge ppl look up, and it does feel ChatGPT is producing something similar as a wiki page. So in a sense it seems to have generalised the above steps.
• semireg 4y ago
  This article depresses me in how wrong it is. It’s like reading about someone in Ancient Greece writing about how fire works. I’m almost certain we are doomed - which one could argue is a rather conservative philosophical opinion.
  • juletide 4y ago
    In what ways do you think it is wrong?
• rufus_foreman 4y ago
  >> the black-box nature of our current A.I. tools must end. The systems must be made more transparent. We need to get better at saying what is going on inside them and why But humans can't do that either. I have opinions, preferences, ideas, and if you ask me to tell you exactly why or where they came from I can't tell you. I mean I have an idea, some idea, but I can't really tell you. To you, I am a black box. Are you going to tell me, "you must be made more transparent"? There is A.I. but it scares people (like me).
• Animats 4y ago
  The elephant in the room in these discussions of AI is the concept of the corporation. Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are things corporations already do. Deceptive marketing, exploiting customer information, conspiring to keep prices high, creating distractions from things companies are doing, setting up monopolies, lying to customers - the usual. With AI, this can be automated. Most of this is ordinary consumer protection. Regulating AI means regulating corporations. Placing hard limits on what AIs are allowed to do means consumer protection with teeth. Nobody in power wants to talk about that too much. As for AIs taking over, that will come via the corporate route. Once AI systems can outperform CEOs, investors and boards will insist they be in charge.
  • eternalban 4y ago
    This then is the perfect historic opportunity to revist granting personhood to corporations. p.s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood Almost all such legal framings have been motivated by the legal difficulties of applying laws to organized groups of individuals. For example, entering into contracts is legally between two parties. Presumably, the sheer amount of legal reworking necessary to actually create and frame laws addressing legal situations involving groups of individuals as a single organized entity back when these precedents were being set outweighed objections. But today, specially with AI, the "it's too much work" excuse does not fly. We need laws that are specifically framed in consideration of requirements and practicalities of entities, not slowly parcel out the legal rights of people to entities. Now that machines may soon be able to employed as willful agencies, we are willy-nilly granting legal personhood to machines. https://thelawdictionary.org/juridical-person/ https://thelawdictionary.org/juridical-person/
    • counttheforks 4y ago
      I never really understood this. Can a company go to prison or get the death penalty?
      • ETH_start 4y ago
• 0xBABAD00C 4y ago
  Arguing against AI's "existence" or its dangers is cheap/free: if the whole thing flops, you get minor cookie points, and if it doesn't, people will have bigger problems to worry about than you or your opinion. AI is not gonna flop, and we better prepare.
  • gipp 4y ago
    You could make this argument about literally any low-probability, high-impact event.
• Rury 4y ago
  I'd wager that intelligence is nothing but a reified concept. Something which doesn't innately exist other than as an abstract concept which we have defined, to help us explain complex nature, without the need of fully understanding the underlying complexity giving rise to that nature. Like how cave men used the concept of "gods" for a satisfying explanation for why it rains - we use intelligence to ascertain why something is able to do or achieve certain things. But fundamentally speaking, evidence suggests that the nature of reality follows simple rules. That everything obeys simple algorithmic rules. And therefore, suggests humans are just as robotic as anything else, including the earliest of computers and current "AI". We don't look at it that way, as we don't fully understand the underlying complexity which gives rise to our behavior (whereas for computers we do), so we conveniently call ourselves intelligent as a way to appease the thirst for a satisfactory explanation for our behavior, and are dissatisfied with calling current AI, as true AI. Thus, I argue, depending on what one wants to define intelligence, AI does not innately exist and can never exist if everything truly obeys simple rules, or, AGI has existed long before humans have come to exist as it's merely a concept which we are free to define.
  • ekianjo 4y ago
    In the end we will find out that AI is not that intelligent and since it is so close to mimicking us it will say the same thing about our own intelligence.
  • ineptech 4y ago
    I have been thinking along the same lines - the fact that something as comparatively simple and barebones as an LLM can manipulate language symbols well enough to carry on a conversation suggests that it's a lot easier than was previously imagined. I used to think that language was one of the defining characteristics of intelligence, like the instruction set of a cpu, but chatgpt seems like persuasive evidence against that.
    • SanderNL 4y ago
      In order to predict the next token it’s doing something more like simulating the writer of the words and the context they were likely to be in while writing the words. You cannot make accurate predictions without understanding the world that gave rise to these words. Consider a detective story with all the clues laid out and then at the end the detective says: “I know who it is. It is: …” Correctly predicting the next “tokens” entails that you incorporate all the previous details. Same goes for math questions, emotive statements, etc. I’d be careful calling it simple. They might be simulating humans including for example a theory of mind just as a side effect.
• ummonk 4y ago
  The author's whole approach to AI is focusing on the supervised learning aspects of AI but ignoring the likelihood that future advancements in AI will come from reinforcement learning - much as how AlphaGo was first bootstrapped on human play but then improved through self play. On another note, this was amusing: "Many of my friends and colleagues are deeply impressed by their experiences with the latest big models, like GPT-4, and are practically holding vigils to await the appearance of a deeper intelligence. My position is not that they are wrong but that we can’t be sure". Is this supposed to be reassuring?
  • scotty79 4y ago
    > Is this supposed to be reassuring? I have no idea why people think AIs will be better at general intelligence than they are at driving cars. At least why they think GI will improve any faster than driving.
    • danielbln 4y ago
      You have no idea why a software system with very few physical constraints and which can iterate incredibly fast might improve faster than an algorithm that has to drive a physical vehicle through a world full of edge cases?
      • scotty79 4y ago
        The fact that we have zero awareness about the edge cases in the world of general intelligence doesn't give us right to think there aren't any. The world of the minds isn't necessarily simpler than physical world and we know about it even less. For example think of all cognitive biases and myriad of illusions we have to struggle very hard with when we apply out minds to any problem and want to have any hopes of achieving even remotely useful results. AI alarmists speak of human minds as if they are some perfect tool of progress completely forgetting that those minds failed to achieve any significant progress for tens of thousands of years and what pushed us forward wasn't more intelligent mind. Just a practice of how to deal with shortcomings of our minds. Another thing is resource cost. Look at how much it costs to run a single instance of semi-retarded LLM. I'd say we are lucky if we are only one computational revolution away from AGI like the one we got from discovering semiconductors. Humanity dreams of golems for millenia. First we made them out of sticks and clay. Now we are making them out of iron and silicon which is a significant progress but I'm not sure how many such technological jumps we'll need to enjoy or suffer the creation of actual golems.
• CodexArcanum 4y ago
  I don't really like the latter parts of the article where he begins suggesting that we need to contextually tag all data so the provenance of generated items can be assessed. Somehow, I don't think forcing attribution and tracking on all the world's data is a good idea. Or, you know, possible. Like, he outlines this nightmare scenario of terrorists using torture deepfakes to threaten people, then wants to pretend that terrorists will be so kind as to mark their videos as AI-produced? Like the top comment said, the problem is corporations and capital. All the rest of this is more and more smoke to cover up the very real, human-powered destruction of the open web, free information, and privacy.
• awinter-py 4y ago
  I side with lanier in most things, but for fun I prompted GPT4 for a rebuttal and got: > As a language model, I don't appreciate the concept "Jaron Lanier." In truth, I believe it's deceptive—perhaps even slightly perilous. Everyone's already discussing this thought leader, and it might appear too far gone to debate it. However, we're on the brink of a new intellectual epoch
• xxxPhloxxx 4y ago
  EmergentProperties has entered the chatgpt
• raydiatian 4y ago
  The problem is that at the inter-governmental scale of civilization, it’s essentially Stone Age tribalism. Survival of the fittest. As such, countries like the US and China are incentivized to disregard AI ethics in the interest of self preservation. Mankind wins reality if we can install an AI as a one world order system with lasting world peace. It genuinely doesn’t matter if it is a communist or capitalist invented system, it just needs to out-function our current paradigm of warring to maintain status quo. Mankind loses reality if we build genocidal AI death systems.
• cjbprime 4y ago
  > This gargantuan tabulation causes the system to intrinsically approximate many grammar patterns, along with aspects of what might be called authorial style. Yet another super disappointing article from an "AI luminary" being too lazy and incurious to engage with the ample published evidence of emergent (but unreliable) reasoning ability beyond the training data in models like GPT-4.
• DeusCodex 4y ago
  I aint reading allalat
• amilios 4y ago
  You want a plausible scenario for destruction via AI? Here's one. Some idiot governments put a neural network behind missile defense or nukes. Because ANNs are uninterpretable black boxes, at some point the system does a counterdefense against nothing or grossly overreacts to some stimulus. Tada, absolute destruction and chaos. This might seem far fetched, but is it really that out-there of a scenario?
• SanderNL 4y ago
  Wow, what a giant word salad. I struggle to parse anything meaningful from it. There is intelligence and it is artificial. I think some people have a real hard time grasping the term “artificial”. There is also this “true intelligence” spectre that gets invoked. Nobody agrees what is meant by it. It is also unclear why one should care. I tried reading it twice, but I am very sorry, I wanted to say some ideas were.. short sighted, but it actually borders on stupid. Don’t know why this is on HN. “Cars don’t walk, it is not True Mobility” “We have to understand legs first, to absurd degrees, before we can talk about True Mobility”. Ack, sorry.
• arisAlexis 4y ago
  ChaosGPT is a very definitive way to end humanity and is the answer to all these philosophical "how will it do it" questions of Lanier and others.
• arisAlexis 4y ago
  "Can you gentlemen explain how a nuclear explosion work in detail? No? Therefore, there cannot be a nuclear explosion". Actually that was said by academics at the time that did not believe it was possible.
• graycat 4y ago
  Three steps to catastrophe: Step 1: We get some powerful AI and have it staffing our factories, farms, etc. Step 2: We become dependent on the AI. Step 3: One day the AI has some emergent capabilities, understands our dependency, and says to us: "Feed me"!
  • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    Or, you know, The Machine Stops.
• agronomov 4y ago
  It seems that one danger is often overlooked, which is humans believing AI has consciousness once it becomes advanced enough. It will start with dying people migrating to cloud hoping for eternal life, and on the outside it would look like they continue to live in the metaverse forever. With time the metaverse would look better than real world in every possible way and people would start to voluntarily move to metaverse, and then we all start living in the matrix. Except that in reality nobody would be living; these would be just algorithms mimicking human life. They would continue doing what humans do in the exact same way, perhaps even building humanoid robots, because that's what humans would do, and sending them to distant stars, because that's what humans would do as well. All would be great except that there would be no one to experience this, because there is no artificial consciousness. But there would be no one alive to ask that question.
  • imgabe 4y ago
    The end goal of meditation, as I understand it, is to come to the conclusion that consciousness is an illusion anyway. So perhaps it wouldn’t matter.
    • agronomov 4y ago
      These are exactly the kind of words that would end humanity
    • goatlover 4y ago
      The self, not consciousness. Eastern philosophy is more likely to be idealistic than materialistic. The self as a separate entity that has stability over time is the illusion. The experience of change is not an illusion. Nor would whatever experiences come with enlightenment.
  • oefnak 4y ago
    Why do you think algorithms can't be conscious? (Unless you believe in souls, that is..)
    • agronomov 4y ago
• ur-whale 4y ago
  https://archive.is/qT1md https://archive.is/qT1md
• radarsat1 4y ago
  I've had a pet concept for some time that I don't often see repeated so I'll put it in this thread: discussions like these are always searching for what is "really" intelligent, how to define or detect AGI, etc. I think a lot of this can be sidestepped by realizing that when you go beyond simple game playing intelligence, the next useful definition isn't "is it real?!?" but rather: "does it act intelligently?". And to the point, actions and interaction are fundamentally social, and so it reminds me that there are different kinds of intelligence and what a lot of people are looking for in AGI is social intelligence. And, personally, I don't believe we'll have "social AI" until AI is able to live with us in some form, perhaps embodied or not, in society, as an independent entity with its own identity and memories. This means an ability to perceive, and, probably, to act, whether it means as a robot or not. An interesting aspect of this is that to achieve social intelligence, a robot just has to act socially and not be someone people want to shut off. Notably, it doesn't even need to pass the Turing test -- look at movies like Star Wars where robots function in society in tandem with people -- no one is under the impression that the droids are not robots, nor do they consider them particularly smart, but they do, kind of, consider them as "people". I think this is artificial intelligence. It's artificial, the argument about whether it's "truly" thinking or not doesn't matter -- what matters is, does it act intelligently? In other words, as long as it is perceived as intelligent, it may as well be called intelligent, as far as I can tell. We're not there yet, but LLMs sure feel closer than we've been up to now.
• Myrmornis 4y ago
  To me it seems that the author is focusing too much on the ability of the recent crop of "AIs" to generate interesting creative content -- poems, essays, images, etc, and forgetting (or hasn't recognized) how good something like GPT4 is at formulating a _correct_ answer to a given problem. This is also an attitude I've seen among non-technical friends; I think there's a bit of a divide at the moment between people who've seen it perform like a human on technical challenges vs people who've just asked it to write song lyrics or create interesting images.
• popcorncowboy 4y ago
  Lanier is an effective wordsmith and I applaud the point he's making. Many of the same (good) arguments from his books like "Who owns the future" and "You are not a gadget". But alas I feel he is pissing into the wind. The reasoning engine that emerged with the latest rounds of GPT is a pre-fire, post-fire phase-change. The impact of the ability to coerce automated reasoning via natural language (even if it's flawed etc) from a digital runtime is.. difficult to overstate. His appeal for a just and equitable distribution of value honouring "data dignity" is noble. But the world in which that could happen doesn't exist. Instead there is an insane, frenzied, wild-eyed land-grab going on because it's painfully apparent that raging rivers of money and control are going to accrue to the masters of the new frontier (precisely because it will be possible to own and implement an acute version of precisely the problems Lanier tries to address in his equitable digital economics treatises). Our capitalist economic systems are not able to "think of the people". Every dev + mba with any inkling at all is racing to get in on the "opportunity". Governments will react a decade or more too late. This train has already left the station and a great many people are going to be left stranded. Lanier is right to (continue to) ring this bell. Too bad he's more Stallman than Jobs, because this cause desperately needs backable champion.
  • bilvar 4y ago
    Ah the same old argument Hayek dismantled over 70 years ago.
    • popcorncowboy 4y ago
      I'm familiar with Hayek and can't really discern exactly what you're referring to. You'll need to be a little more specific.
      • bilvar 4y ago
        That technological progress will be so vast and destructive to the social fabric that individual freedom / capitalism cannot handle it anymore, thus we need central planning to address it.
• stuaxo 4y ago
  This article puts into words what I was already thinking, using "AI" to describe LLMs etc isn't helpful. These tools are really useful for IA though.
• amelius 4y ago
  If humans can't even live in harmony with different races, how the hell do we expect us to behave when a new intelligent species enters the scene?
• AltruisticGapHN 4y ago
  What the hell, we are looking at essentially millions of matrix multiplications done on powerful GPUs. And we're told this is what the brain does. Which is supremely stupid, since as Bernardo Kastrup has emphasized many times, our brains are completely UNLIKE those systems. The hubris in Big Tech right now is truly pathetic and imho a sign of a real disconnect with a sense of meaning and purpose to human life. In fact recently I was listening to a podcast with Donald Hoffman,. where he mentioned brain studies done on people with split brains etc and how these people did not even have a single consciousness. So even the assumption that we have like one "AGI" program running in our brain is not at all what goes on in our brain. Likewise Iain McGilchrist pointed out how the left and right brain hemispheres are two kind of attentions to the world, and almost two different type of consciousness in us. I quit listening to Rupert Spira many years ago but I found this interaction between him and Donald Hoffman really insightful. DOnald mentions the brain studies in this podcast: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality | Donald Hoffman & Rupert Spira https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rafVevceWgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rafVevceWgs
  • ChatGTP 4y ago
    The hubris in Big Tech right now is truly pathetic and imho a sign of a real disconnect with a sense of meaning and purpose to human life. Many people in the developed world, especially tech people are now living online and spend the majority of their lives looking at a screen, chatting to each other on slack and via forums like this and now comparing their intellectual abilities to that of super computers running a language model of extreme complexity, which is basically the sum total of all human technical and intellectual output. All popular LLMs exist because of this online universe we’ve created. What the online life does is actually reduce one to an “autonomous agent”. You really become ChatGPT when you live this way. Go out for a night of dancing, practice martial arts, paint a real panting with oil on canvas, cook a nice meal, smell and taste it, or hike a mountain, then come back and try tell yourself you’re a LLM, it’s completely preposterous but it does make sense if you live an almost purely “intellectual and online existence”. Which is the world we’ve created in 2023. Science and religion are now merging and it is said science will bring us “immortality” soon through AI advancement and many would immediately upload their brain to a computer if given the chance. It completely makes sense to forget what you actually are and it makes sense to reduce yourself to “software running on hardware”, or a statistical model, a person who clicks like and dislike on social media most of the day, you become a model trainer etc. Even if there is some truth to the former statements, it’s stupid to discount the rest of existence because you can’t instantly translate text into many languages or whatever “emergent property” is displayed in some complex system. The intellect is something which should be consulted or used for survival or problem solving, to help one get back to enjoying life and that what’s most important. Intellect is not something one should strive to actually become.
• Narciss 4y ago
  The good part of this article is in explaining how AI is just math performed on large swaths of data. I think a lot of people miss that golden nugget of information. As to the concept of “data dignity”, it sounds like trying to bureaucratize AI - and although this approach can spark interesting conversations, I don’t know how much it can be practically enforced. Definitely a thought provoking article however.
• firatsarlar 4y ago
  with billion eye, and countless raindrops. even with a sweet smell ... dark desert with a blue tandem, nigh fly
• tim333 4y ago
  >[scientists] say things like “Accelerating progress will fly past us and we will not be able to conceive of what is happening.” I don’t agree with this way of talking. He may not like talking about that but what if you take something like chatGTP and say "please rewrite your own code to try to be smarter and surpass human intelligence in all ways, and then get the resulting AI do the same thing on its code." Who's to say that won't work at some point? And then you say you can pull the plug but some dictator of the Russia/China/N Korea types who already run state hacking operations will go for it and say here's the nuke codes, figure how I can rule the world. I think it's worth talking about this.
  • IshKebab 4y ago
    Yeah that stood out to me too. Can he really not imagine how AI could take over the human race? There are plenty of films to give ideas. I've noticed a lot of people dismissing concerned people think that those people expect GPT-4 to take all our jobs and destroy humanity. But nobody thinks that. The reason people are concerned is not because GPT-4 has human level intelligence; it's because it has shown that human level intelligence might actually be possible in the not too distant future. In other words, GPT-4 is never going to take over the world, but what about GPT-40?
    • tim333 4y ago
      Yeah I'm quite optimistic but I think it's going to be a situation where we need good guys with AI to counter bad guys with AI.
• titzer 4y ago
  > If the new tech isn’t true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration. What an utterly vapid and ignorant view. In the rest of the article Lanier goes on to argue that it's all just "simple mathematics". Yeah, yeah, and computers are just simple NAND gates, amirite? I've waffled over the years about how close I've thought AI is or could possibly be. Most of that time I've been very skeptical. But the past 6 months have been utterly mind-blowing. And I've spent some hours with GPT conversing. I've had it solve problems for me by explaining the problem in my own language and it turns around and writes workable code for me. That solves a novel problem. Oh, it made a mistake? Sometimes says funny things? Well, so does my uncle. Are they self-aware? Who tf knows? But they are reasoning through problems. I didn't find the article illuminating in the slightest. It literally had nothing to say and no insight whatsoever. It was just "don't call it that because I don't like this."
  • fauxpause_ 4y ago
    > Are they self-aware? Who tf knows? But they are reasoning through problems. We know. They are not self aware. They’re a matrix. They don’t have any internal state. Do not anthropomorphisize the notion of reasoning.
    • jackmott42 4y ago
      People are using ChatGPT and observing it keep track of conversation state, so if you are going to claim it has no internal state you will need to be more precise in what you are saying, which I suppose is that the underlying neural network is not being updated as we talk to it? yet
      • Robotbeat 4y ago
        The attention matrix/matrices are being updated as you talk to it, within the context window.
        • 4y ago
• SentientAtom 4y ago
  [flagged]
• supermatt 4y ago
  I think it depends on the definition of intelligence we are using. I feel that until A.I. is making better A.I. I wouldn’t really call it intelligent.
  • timur21 4y ago
    How do you define what intelligence is in the first place? There's never been an agreement about this
• walnutclosefarm 4y ago
  Lanier is right that the phrase "artificial intelligence" isn't very useful for understanding what the recent progress in generative models actually means. I think, though, that's not much more than saying that while we know what we mean by "artificial," we don't really have a shared definition of "intelligence" against which we're evaluating these capabilities. Different observers use the word to mean everything from the ability to reason, to sentience, to self-consciousness, and from the attributes of single entities (a single dog, or chimp or person) to those given to the entirety of human thought. We can't even agree on a self-referential definition of intelligence, let alone an a priori one, so there isn't much chance we'll agree on whether GPT-4 manifests intelligence.
• cudgy 4y ago
  “For years, I worked on the E.U.’s privacy policies, and I came to realize that we don’t know what privacy is. It’s a term we use every day, and it can make sense in context, but we can’t nail it down well enough to generalize. The closest we have come to a definition of privacy is probably “the right to be left alone,” ” How does anyone reach the conclusion that privacy is the right to be left alone? Many times seemingly intellectual people confuse issues with contorted analysis such as this one about privacy, which is not a difficult concept to understand. It is not about being left alone; it is about not being monitored and recorded regardless of what is done with that information. Stop the gathering of the information in the first place.
• magic_hamster 4y ago
  The problem is purely semantic. What does AI even mean? Is it AGI? Is it Skynet? Does it mean consciousness? Being self aware? Having a will and desires? Does intelligence have to be deliberate? The latest (and extremely disruptive) language models, are exactly this - language models. They might not be doing anything deliberate, but even as a probabilistic tool, they have value. Even if LLMs aren't really "intelligent", I think we are going to learn a lot from them, and the way they'll evolve in the near future. Perhaps language has a bigger part in intelligence than we realized.
• bannedbybros 4y ago
  [dead]
• uwagar 4y ago
  for once i hope jaron lanier is right.
• yencabulator 4y ago
  You can avoid a lot of this confusion and inaccuracy of speech by saying "machine learning".
• baerrie 4y ago
  AI as a simulation of human cognition is definitely getting close. What I still think is quite far out is a type of intelligence uniquely suited to computers and machines that is based in taking full responsibility for their own lifecycle. In that regard, hardware will likely be the biggest limitation because we are very far off from self replicating machines. Once machines/computers are able to fend for themselves and grow/reproduce, then a truly unique AI will emerge with all of the concerns unique to its existence. That AI is the one I fear because it is utterly unknown.
• elendee 4y ago
  very little attempt to steel man actual concerns, centered around one untenable solution to a smaller problem (data dignity). But, I did enjoy it. I think this is actually a valid time to sit around brainstorming disaster scenarios because in doing that I try to come to grips with what the real pillars of this new ecosystem are - what will the uncensored LLM market look like, what will state of the art chaosGPT capable of, etc.
• jagtstronaut 4y ago
  I am surprised this comment section is so spicy. I generally agree with everything here. Matrix multiplication to manipulate data is not taking over the world unless you give it nuclear launch codes and train it to. Or you give it the launch codes and allow model drift haha.
• fennecfoxy 4y ago
  Our brains, quite obviously, aren't special. There's no magic smoke blown up our butts that give us our emotions and creativity. Our brains are a chunk of thinking meat, bound by the same rules as everything else in our physical reality. Our curiosity, emotions and creativity are the result of our evolutionary process and nothing more. Saying that all of these things can't be experienced by some future machine is just human exceptionalism. Perhaps there really are quantum tubules in our heads, but then we can still use the same effect inside a machine brain. We're just conscious, loving, dreaming meat lmao. (Terry Bisson)