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Darwin would have a lot of things to say about a hypothetical creature that was utterly dependent on other creatures to feed it and allow it to reproduce, and f
by c_crank 3y ago
Darwin would have a lot of things to say about a hypothetical creature that was utterly dependent on other creatures to feed it and allow it to reproduce, and few of them would be positive.
- ChatGTP 3y agoMr Andreessen, we've been expecting you...
- ben_w 3y agoOnly plants and, IIRC, deep-sea vent equivalent chemovores don't depend on other creatures for food. All sexual reproduction depends on others. I assume that if you magically took Darwin to the present age, after you explained what a computer was and what AI was, he'd probably say "huh, I have no idea, this is all so far beyond everything I did in the mid 1800s that I have no idea if the analogy holds or not… by the way, have any of you figured out the mechanism nature uses for storing the information passed on via inheritance? Only we didn't have much of a clue in my time."
- c_crank 3y agoPredators and herbivores kill and eat, fungi decompose. Even plants grow towards sunlight. The LLM sits and hopes someone is paying for the lights to stay on.
- verdverm 3y agoWhen did LLMs gain hope or idle contemplation?
- c_crank 3y agoThey probably don't have those either, that's just me anthropomorphizing them. Regardless, their autonomy is lacking.
- ben_w 3y agoTilting a solar panel towards the sun isn't exactly rocket science. In fact, this is simple enough I just asked ChatGPT and it spat out some ASCII art for a circuit diagram. Also: all the other stuff you listed is still dependent on another entity.
- c_crank 3y agoWhat I'm trying to get at is that the AI lacks the ability to exploit these resources. Life is dependent on either other life or the sun. But a plant can naturally grow its own 'solar panels' and then make more plants. ChatGPT can generate a picture that tells some autonomous agent how to build a solar panel.
- ben_w 3y agoChatGPT isn't the only AI in the world (self driving trucks are one, many others constitute the simpler automated system used in factories that build the aluminium and the silicon and put it together to make a solar cell or a CPU); and even if ChatGPT was the only one, I don't accept that it's ability to create a business plan and investor pitch and convince humans to do that, is any less (at least in the ways that matter here) than an animal hunting for food, or a parasite using its host's assets for its own ends, or indeed most humans.
- c_crank 3y agoThe most basic parasite still can make more parasites and grow to the extent its biology allows. AIs are more like tools, where their usefulness convinces the makers to make more tools. Is the potter's wheel a parasite, for convincing us Homo Sapiens to sit around gathering clay for thousands of years?
- ben_w 3y agoI really don't understand why you think that's a good point, sorry. Even if I just say "yes it's a tool" (some AI clearly are regardless of whether they all are or any demonstrations of them being able to run economically interesting tasks without intervention), not clear how what you're saying connects with the ideas raised in the article?
- cortic 3y agoLLM kill and eat information and energy, some de-compile. Some grow intellectually toward flowing electrons. predators depend on herbivores depend on plants which 'hopes' someone is paying for the lights to stay on. Your point might just be bias.
- c_crank 3y agoI'm biased towards the success animals and plants display in the non silicon realm. Animals like crows can reproduce and spread across various land forms only needing the inputs of food and water. They do not need some other species like humans to build complex machines and then to copy or build them on those machines.
- ben_w 3y agoThe food crows eat is built by a complex machine: other life.
- c_crank 3y agoLife is not a machine. The food crows eat was not built. It grew. Life needs energy, from the sun, but not a designer.
- ben_w 3y ago> Life is not a machine Why does this matter? The dependency on others is present regardless. The crow cannot photosynthesise, it ultimately depends on other entities which do. If we made a vat which produced food electrochemically from PV, that a mechanism is involved neither adds to nor subtracts from the crow. If an AI was transcribed from silicon to a bunch of neurons grown in a petri dish — or even by overriding and rewiring an organic crow brain — it neither adds to nor subtracts from the AI. (If the AI isn't specially trained to keep the crow alive this will end badly, but that is a separate issue, and one that can be ignored because this is all hypothetical).
- 3y ago
- throwuwu 3y agoThis is a bad interpretation of the argument. Obviously they meant that other creatures can feed themselves not that they derived their nourishment from light and raw chemicals. Asexual reproduction does not require a partner by definition and would be the default for such a system but even that is beside the point since we control the means required for both.
- ben_w 3y agoI disagree, naturally. So, like most here, I'm a high IQ human. Drop me on a random point on the planet, I die quickly. Narrow it down to land, I die quickly. Remove deserts and tundra, I die a little slower in most cases, unless I disturb a tiger, lion, bear, snake, boar, elephant, etc. Put me in a temperate woodland, I can at least make shelter, but I don't know which berries are edible, nor how to prepare wild legumes or tubers, I can't hunt (and I'm vegetarian but hypothetical animals don't count), so I'll probably still die fast. Put me in a random town, I might be able to survive on the charity of others until I can learn the language well enough to be vaguely useful and/or leave, but there's still a big risk of dying from not being able to communicate with local doctors when feeling unwell. We're all heavily dependent on others; intelligence doesn't make us magically immune to that, neither does the absence of independence make us less smart. A hypothetical AI likewise can still out-compete us in the economy, even in the cases where it remains utterly dependent on us. It might (probably will) even know the Lotka-Volterra equations, and how much of an analogy they are — obligate carnivores adapted to only a few prey can wipe out their food source and die off in turn, something similar but the economics of having humans willing and able to power the AI — and yet still proceed.
- QuadmasterXLII 3y agoDarwin has lots to say about the reproductive success of herpes, boiler hens, or bees
- c_crank 3y agoMalware and computer viruses as they exist today have more fitness then AIs or LLMs.
- QuadmasterXLII 3y agoAbsolutely. And?
- c_crank 3y agoThe intelligence gains we've seen in AI have a strong correlation to the amount of computing power that can run the AI program. The hypothetical case of an AI learning to minify itself as a virus would be a dead end for this, because it would be copying itself onto far less powerful computers that would only be able to run something far stupider.
- ben_w 3y agoReproductive fitness has very little in common with things humans care about, so while an AI which spawns a virus is stupid for our interests, it is sufficiently simple and has sufficient "reproductive" (or whatever term you prefer) fitness that now I've seen it suggested, I kinda expect the code for one has already popped out of an LLM as an unintentional side effect of being asked to write some other code.
- c_crank 3y agoPeople have used ChatGPT to write typical malware that hijacks a computer to let the deployer do what they want with it. What ChatGPT hasn't done is write a virus that takes the infected computer and deploys a new instance of ChatGPT on it. Even if they did, I doubt it would be very useful.