5 ms·

100% this, I don't get how even on this website people are so clueless. Give them a semi human sounding puppet and they think skynet is coming tomorrow. If we

100% this, I don't get how even on this website people are so clueless. Give them a semi human sounding puppet and they think skynet is coming tomorrow. If we learned anything from the past few months is how gullible people are, wishful thinking is a hell of a drug

digbybk 4y ago
I’m open minded about this, I see people more knowledgeable than me on both sides of the argument. Can someone explain how Geoffrey Hinton can be considered to be clueless?
- RandomLensman 4y ago
  Not clueless. However, is he an expert in socio-political-economic issues arising from AI or in non-existent AGI? Technical insight into AI might not translate into either.
  - etiam 3y ago
    The expert you set as the bar is purely hypothetical. To the extent we can get anything like that at all presently, it's going to be people whose competences combine and generalize to cover a complex situation, partially without precedent. Personally I don't really see that we'll do much better in that regard than a highly intelligent and free-thinking biological psychologist with experience of successfully steering the international ML research community through creating the present technology, and with input from contacts at the forefront of the research field and information overview from Google. Not even Hinton knows for sure whats going to happen of course, but if you're suggesting his statements are to be discounted because he's not a member of some sort of credentialed trade that are the ones equipped to tell us the future on this matter, I'd sure like to who they supposedly are.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      Experts don't get to decide but society, I'd say; you need - dare I say it - political operators that understand rule making.
- srslack 4y ago
  Hinton, in his own words, asked PaLM to explain a dad joke he had supposedly come up with and was so convinced that his clever and advanced joke would take a lifetime of experience to understand, despite PaLM perfectly articulating why the joke was funny, he quit Google and is, conveniently, still going to continue working on AI, despite the "risks." Not exactly the best example.
  - digbybk 4y ago
    Hinton said that the ability to explain a joke was among the first things that made him reassess their capabilities. Not the only thing. You make it sound as though Hinton is obviously clueless yet there are few people with deeper knowledge and more experience working with neural networks. People told him he was crazy for thinking neural networks could do anything useful, now it seems people are calling his crazy for the reverse. I’m genuinely confused about this.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - srslack 4y ago
      I didn't say he was clueless, it's just not in good faith to suggest there's probable existential risk on a media tour where you're mined for quotes, and then continue to work on it.
    - revelio 4y ago
      Not clueless, but unfortunately engaging in motivated reasoning. Google spent years doing nothing much with its AI because its employees (like Hinton) got themselves locked in an elitist hard-left purity spiral in which they convinced each other that if plebby ordinary non-Googlers could use AI they would do terrible things, like draw pictures of non-diverse people. That's why they never launched Imagen and left the whole generative art space to OpenAI, Stability and Midjourney. Now the tech finally leaked out of their ivory tower and AI progress is no longer where he was at, but Hinton finds himself at retirement age and no longer feeling much like hard-core product development. What to do? Lucky lucky, he lives in a world where the legacy media laps up any academic with a doomsday story. So he quits and starts enjoying the life of a celebrity public intellectual, being praised as a man of superior foresight and care for the world to those awful hoi polloi shipping products and irresponsibly not voting for Biden (see the last sentence of his Wired interview). If nothing happens and the boy cried wolf then nobody will mind, it'll all be forgotten. If there's any way what happens can be twisted into interpreting reality as AI being bad though, he's suddenly the man of the hour with Presidents and Prime Ministers queuing up to ask him what to do. It's all really quite pathetic. Academic credentials are worth nothing with respect to such claims and Hinton hasn't yet managed to articulate how, exactly, AI doom is supposed to happen. But our society doesn't penalize wrongness when it comes from such types, not even a tiny bit, so it's a cost-free move for him.
- lm28469 4y ago
  He doesn't talk about skynet afaik > Some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “quite scary”, he told the BBC, warning they could become more intelligent than humans and could be exploited by “bad actors”. “It’s able to produce lots of text automatically so you can get lots of very effective spambots. It will allow authoritarian leaders to manipulate their electorates, things like that.” You can do bad things with it but people who believe we're on the brink of singularity, that we're all going to lose our jobs to chatgpt and that world destruction is coming are on hard drugs.
  - digbybk 4y ago
    I’ll have to dig it up but the last interview I saw with him, he was focused more on existential risk from the potential for super intelligence, not just misuse.
    - tomrod 3y ago
      The NYT piece implied that, but no, his concern was less existential singularity and more on immoral use.
      - cma 3y ago
        Did you read the Wired interview? > “I listened to him thinking he was going to be crazy. I don't think he's crazy at all,” Hinton says. “But, okay, it’s not helpful to talk about bombing data centers.” https://www.wired.com/story/geoffrey-hinton-ai-chatgpt-dangers/ https://www.wired.com/story/geoffrey-hinton-ai-chatgpt-dange... So, he doesn't think the most extreme guy is crazy whatsoever, just misguided in his proposed solutions. But Eliezer has for instance has said something pretty close to AI might escape by entering in the quantum Konami code which the simulators of our universe put in as a joke and we should entertain nuclear war before letting them get that chance.
        tomrod 3y ago
        Then we created God(s) and rightfully should worship it to appease its unknowable and ineffable nature. Or recognize that existing AI might be great at generating human cognitive artifacts but doesn't yet hit that logical thought.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  Given the skill AI has with programming showing up about 10 years sooner than anyone expected, I have seen a lot of cope in tech circles. No one yet knows how this is going to go, coping might turn into "See! I knew all along!" if progress fizzles out. But right now the threat is very real and we're seeing the full spectrum of "humans under threat" behavior. Very similar to the early pandemic when you could find smart people with any take you wanted.
dmreedy 4y ago
I don't think anyone reasonable believes LLMs are right now skynet, nor that they will be tomorrow. What I feel has changed, and what drives a lot of the fear and anxiety you see, is a sudden perception of possibility, of accessibility. A lot of us (read: people) are implicit dualists, even if we say otherwise. It seems to be a sticky bias in the human mind (see: the vanishing problem of AI). Indeed, you can see a whole lot of dualism in this thread! And even if you don't believe that LLMs themselves are "intelligent" (by whatever metric you define that to be...), you can still experience an exposing and unseating of some of the foundations of that dualism. LLMs may not be a destination, but their unprecedented capabilities open up the potential for a road to something much more humanlike in ways that perhaps did not feel possible before, or at least not possible any time soon. They are powerful enough to change the priors of one's internal understanding of what can be done and how quickly. Which is an uncomfortable process for those of us experiencing it.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  > A lot of us (read: people) are implicit dualists, even if we say otherwise. Absolutely spot on. I am not a dualist at all and I've been surprised to see how many people with deep-seated dualist intuition this has revealed, even if they publicly claim not to. I view it as embarrassing? It's like believing in fairies or something.
NegativeK 3y ago
[flagged]
varelse 3y ago
[dead]
nologic01 3y ago
People are bored and tired sitting endlessly in front of a screen. Reality implodes (incipient environmental disasters, ongoing wars reawakening geopolitical tectonic plates, internal political strife between polarized fractions, whiplashing financial systems, etc.) What to do? Why, obviously lets talk about the risks of AGI. I mean LLM's are an impressive piece of work but the global reaction is basically more a reflection of an unmoored system that floats above and below reality but somehow can't re-establish contact.
bart_spoon 3y ago
It doesn't have to be Skynet. If anything, that scenario seems to a strawman exclusively thrown out by the crowd insisting AI presents no danger to society. I work in ML, and I am not in any way concerned about end-of-world malicious AI dropping bombs on us all or harvesting our life-force. But I do worry about AI giving us the tools to tear ourselves to pieces. Probably one of the single biggest net-negative societal/technological advancements in recent decades has been social media. Whatever good it has enabled, I think its destructive effects on society are undeniable and outstrip the benefits by a comfortable margin. Social media itself is inert and harmless, but the way humans interact with it is not. I don't think that trying to regulate every detail of every industry is stifling and counter-productive. But the current scenario is closer to the opposite end of the spectrum, with our society acting as a greedy algorithm in pursuit of short-term profits. I'm perfectly in favor of taking a measure-twice-cut-once approach to something that has as much potential for overhauling society as we know it as AI does. And I absolutely do not trust the free market to be capable of moderating itself in regards to these risks.

digbybk 4y ago

I’m open minded about this, I see people more knowledgeable than me on both sides of the argument. Can someone explain how Geoffrey Hinton can be considered to be clueless?

RandomLensman 4y ago
Not clueless. However, is he an expert in socio-political-economic issues arising from AI or in non-existent AGI? Technical insight into AI might not translate into either.
- etiam 3y ago
  The expert you set as the bar is purely hypothetical. To the extent we can get anything like that at all presently, it's going to be people whose competences combine and generalize to cover a complex situation, partially without precedent. Personally I don't really see that we'll do much better in that regard than a highly intelligent and free-thinking biological psychologist with experience of successfully steering the international ML research community through creating the present technology, and with input from contacts at the forefront of the research field and information overview from Google. Not even Hinton knows for sure whats going to happen of course, but if you're suggesting his statements are to be discounted because he's not a member of some sort of credentialed trade that are the ones equipped to tell us the future on this matter, I'd sure like to who they supposedly are.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    Experts don't get to decide but society, I'd say; you need - dare I say it - political operators that understand rule making.
srslack 4y ago
Hinton, in his own words, asked PaLM to explain a dad joke he had supposedly come up with and was so convinced that his clever and advanced joke would take a lifetime of experience to understand, despite PaLM perfectly articulating why the joke was funny, he quit Google and is, conveniently, still going to continue working on AI, despite the "risks." Not exactly the best example.
- digbybk 4y ago
  Hinton said that the ability to explain a joke was among the first things that made him reassess their capabilities. Not the only thing. You make it sound as though Hinton is obviously clueless yet there are few people with deeper knowledge and more experience working with neural networks. People told him he was crazy for thinking neural networks could do anything useful, now it seems people are calling his crazy for the reverse. I’m genuinely confused about this.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - srslack 4y ago
    I didn't say he was clueless, it's just not in good faith to suggest there's probable existential risk on a media tour where you're mined for quotes, and then continue to work on it.
  - revelio 4y ago
    Not clueless, but unfortunately engaging in motivated reasoning. Google spent years doing nothing much with its AI because its employees (like Hinton) got themselves locked in an elitist hard-left purity spiral in which they convinced each other that if plebby ordinary non-Googlers could use AI they would do terrible things, like draw pictures of non-diverse people. That's why they never launched Imagen and left the whole generative art space to OpenAI, Stability and Midjourney. Now the tech finally leaked out of their ivory tower and AI progress is no longer where he was at, but Hinton finds himself at retirement age and no longer feeling much like hard-core product development. What to do? Lucky lucky, he lives in a world where the legacy media laps up any academic with a doomsday story. So he quits and starts enjoying the life of a celebrity public intellectual, being praised as a man of superior foresight and care for the world to those awful hoi polloi shipping products and irresponsibly not voting for Biden (see the last sentence of his Wired interview). If nothing happens and the boy cried wolf then nobody will mind, it'll all be forgotten. If there's any way what happens can be twisted into interpreting reality as AI being bad though, he's suddenly the man of the hour with Presidents and Prime Ministers queuing up to ask him what to do. It's all really quite pathetic. Academic credentials are worth nothing with respect to such claims and Hinton hasn't yet managed to articulate how, exactly, AI doom is supposed to happen. But our society doesn't penalize wrongness when it comes from such types, not even a tiny bit, so it's a cost-free move for him.
lm28469 4y ago
He doesn't talk about skynet afaik > Some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “quite scary”, he told the BBC, warning they could become more intelligent than humans and could be exploited by “bad actors”. “It’s able to produce lots of text automatically so you can get lots of very effective spambots. It will allow authoritarian leaders to manipulate their electorates, things like that.” You can do bad things with it but people who believe we're on the brink of singularity, that we're all going to lose our jobs to chatgpt and that world destruction is coming are on hard drugs.
- digbybk 4y ago
  I’ll have to dig it up but the last interview I saw with him, he was focused more on existential risk from the potential for super intelligence, not just misuse.
  - tomrod 3y ago
    The NYT piece implied that, but no, his concern was less existential singularity and more on immoral use.
    - cma 3y ago
      Did you read the Wired interview? > “I listened to him thinking he was going to be crazy. I don't think he's crazy at all,” Hinton says. “But, okay, it’s not helpful to talk about bombing data centers.” https://www.wired.com/story/geoffrey-hinton-ai-chatgpt-dangers/ https://www.wired.com/story/geoffrey-hinton-ai-chatgpt-dange... So, he doesn't think the most extreme guy is crazy whatsoever, just misguided in his proposed solutions. But Eliezer has for instance has said something pretty close to AI might escape by entering in the quantum Konami code which the simulators of our universe put in as a joke and we should entertain nuclear war before letting them get that chance.
      - tomrod 3y ago
        Then we created God(s) and rightfully should worship it to appease its unknowable and ineffable nature. Or recognize that existing AI might be great at generating human cognitive artifacts but doesn't yet hit that logical thought.
Workaccount2 4y ago
Given the skill AI has with programming showing up about 10 years sooner than anyone expected, I have seen a lot of cope in tech circles. No one yet knows how this is going to go, coping might turn into "See! I knew all along!" if progress fizzles out. But right now the threat is very real and we're seeing the full spectrum of "humans under threat" behavior. Very similar to the early pandemic when you could find smart people with any take you wanted.

dmreedy 4y ago

I don't think anyone reasonable believes LLMs are right now skynet, nor that they will be tomorrow. What I feel has changed, and what drives a lot of the fear and anxiety you see, is a sudden perception of possibility, of accessibility. A lot of us (read: people) are implicit dualists, even if we say otherwise. It seems to be a sticky bias in the human mind (see: the vanishing problem of AI). Indeed, you can see a whole lot of dualism in this thread! And even if you don't believe that LLMs themselves are "intelligent" (by whatever metric you define that to be...), you can still experience an exposing and unseating of some of the foundations of that dualism. LLMs may not be a destination, but their unprecedented capabilities open up the potential for a road to something much more humanlike in ways that perhaps did not feel possible before, or at least not possible any time soon. They are powerful enough to change the priors of one's internal understanding of what can be done and how quickly. Which is an uncomfortable process for those of us experiencing it.

whimsicalism 3y ago
> A lot of us (read: people) are implicit dualists, even if we say otherwise. Absolutely spot on. I am not a dualist at all and I've been surprised to see how many people with deep-seated dualist intuition this has revealed, even if they publicly claim not to. I view it as embarrassing? It's like believing in fairies or something.

NegativeK 3y ago

[flagged]

varelse 3y ago

[dead]

nologic01 3y ago

People are bored and tired sitting endlessly in front of a screen. Reality implodes (incipient environmental disasters, ongoing wars reawakening geopolitical tectonic plates, internal political strife between polarized fractions, whiplashing financial systems, etc.) What to do? Why, obviously lets talk about the risks of AGI. I mean LLM's are an impressive piece of work but the global reaction is basically more a reflection of an unmoored system that floats above and below reality but somehow can't re-establish contact.

bart_spoon 3y ago

It doesn't have to be Skynet. If anything, that scenario seems to a strawman exclusively thrown out by the crowd insisting AI presents no danger to society. I work in ML, and I am not in any way concerned about end-of-world malicious AI dropping bombs on us all or harvesting our life-force. But I do worry about AI giving us the tools to tear ourselves to pieces. Probably one of the single biggest net-negative societal/technological advancements in recent decades has been social media. Whatever good it has enabled, I think its destructive effects on society are undeniable and outstrip the benefits by a comfortable margin. Social media itself is inert and harmless, but the way humans interact with it is not. I don't think that trying to regulate every detail of every industry is stifling and counter-productive. But the current scenario is closer to the opposite end of the spectrum, with our society acting as a greedy algorithm in pursuit of short-term profits. I'm perfectly in favor of taking a measure-twice-cut-once approach to something that has as much potential for overhauling society as we know it as AI does. And I absolutely do not trust the free market to be capable of moderating itself in regards to these risks.