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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

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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - srslack 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.

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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  [deleted]
- srslack 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.