3 ms·

Self-awareness and intelligence (in the sense in which AI has any and will likely have more in five years) are not the same thing. My cats have more self awaren

by kalkin 3y ago

Self-awareness and intelligence (in the sense in which AI has any and will likely have more in five years) are not the same thing. My cats have more self awareness than ChatGPT but the latter can do a lot of intellectual tasks that nonhuman animals can't. What's disheartening for me is to see people make confident pronouncements about how other people are being taken in by scifi and hype and there's nothing to worry about even while displaying what seem like basic conceptual confusions.

agentultra 3y ago
I'm not worried that GPT-4 is going to "escape its jail, become self aware, and start building a robot army to conquer the world." Or whatever. I wasn't worried that the future of financial markets and payment systems were going to be replaced with crypto-currencies and the IMF replaced with the Ethereum developers. I didn't believe for a second that they would successfully supplant the financial institutions and state governments and escape regulation. We were also supposed to see the modern Internet replaced with web3. It was inevitable! These were all hyperbolic claims made by crypto enthusiasts for years. They were preposterous from day one but it didn't stop many smart, intelligent people from being taken in and converted to believers. There are real dangers! However I think those dangers come from other humans and human institutions. Just as the dangers of crypto came from real humans pulling off huge scams and fraud. Whether it's corporations hyping their AI products to health care professionals and causing thousands of misdiagnoses that lead to chronic health problems or death; to scammers using them to trick family members of their targets to divulge useful information... that's all humans being humans and leveraging a tool that makes it easier for them to cause harm (intentionally or otherwise). What we need are people cutting through the hype so that regular people don't mistake negligence or intentional malice with the "sentience" of "AGI."
- kalkin 3y ago
  If you want to put yourself in the position of cutting through the hype, conceptual clarity matters. But given your opening and final sentences you seem to have entirely missed the point about distinguishing between intelligence and sentience. The AI researchers you view as hypesters think more precisely than that. Edit: there is a lot of hype and bullshit around AI that needs cutting through. But unlike crypto, there's also some substance, so a blanket attitude of scoffing isn't helpful.
  - agentultra 3y ago
    TFA isn't a blanket scoffing and neither are my comments. I think LLM's are neat, interesting, and could be very useful. However I do remain skeptical of the more extreme claims made by researchers that don't publish their experiments for others to reproduce, by companies with a vested interest in maintaining narratives that improve their gains, etc. That kind of hogwash does make it all the more difficult to have sensible conversations and perform real research. Edit: I, for one, am hopeful we will be able to add reasoning models to our tool-chain one day for the purposes of dispatching trivial proofs to. It would be nice to use formal methods in more places in software development and be able to move past the, cost and time excuses for avoiding them.

by kalkin 3y ago

agentultra 3y ago

I'm not worried that GPT-4 is going to "escape its jail, become self aware, and start building a robot army to conquer the world." Or whatever. I wasn't worried that the future of financial markets and payment systems were going to be replaced with crypto-currencies and the IMF replaced with the Ethereum developers. I didn't believe for a second that they would successfully supplant the financial institutions and state governments and escape regulation. We were also supposed to see the modern Internet replaced with web3. It was inevitable! These were all hyperbolic claims made by crypto enthusiasts for years. They were preposterous from day one but it didn't stop many smart, intelligent people from being taken in and converted to believers. There are real dangers! However I think those dangers come from other humans and human institutions. Just as the dangers of crypto came from real humans pulling off huge scams and fraud. Whether it's corporations hyping their AI products to health care professionals and causing thousands of misdiagnoses that lead to chronic health problems or death; to scammers using them to trick family members of their targets to divulge useful information... that's all humans being humans and leveraging a tool that makes it easier for them to cause harm (intentionally or otherwise). What we need are people cutting through the hype so that regular people don't mistake negligence or intentional malice with the "sentience" of "AGI."

kalkin 3y ago
If you want to put yourself in the position of cutting through the hype, conceptual clarity matters. But given your opening and final sentences you seem to have entirely missed the point about distinguishing between intelligence and sentience. The AI researchers you view as hypesters think more precisely than that. Edit: there is a lot of hype and bullshit around AI that needs cutting through. But unlike crypto, there's also some substance, so a blanket attitude of scoffing isn't helpful.
- agentultra 3y ago
  TFA isn't a blanket scoffing and neither are my comments. I think LLM's are neat, interesting, and could be very useful. However I do remain skeptical of the more extreme claims made by researchers that don't publish their experiments for others to reproduce, by companies with a vested interest in maintaining narratives that improve their gains, etc. That kind of hogwash does make it all the more difficult to have sensible conversations and perform real research. Edit: I, for one, am hopeful we will be able to add reasoning models to our tool-chain one day for the purposes of dispatching trivial proofs to. It would be nice to use formal methods in more places in software development and be able to move past the, cost and time excuses for avoiding them.