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> That's what ultimately depresses me about AI. It's still just a parlor trick. We haven't actually taught computers to think, to reason, to be innovative. And

> That's what ultimately depresses me about AI. It's still just a parlor trick. We haven't actually taught computers to think, to reason, to be innovative. And what do you feel when we make these parlor tricks more capable than us at the majority of tasks? And what do you feel when we understand it well enough to realize we're the same type of parlor tricks? To me it seems like you're most interested in a magic 'aha' moment and will miss or not be prepared for how the road in front of us likely unfolds.

tsunamifury 3y ago
He will go on saying it’s a trick. It’s a form of denial I’m seeing everywhere now when faced with something so genuinely terrifying or identity challenging you can’t process it.
- emodendroket 3y ago
  Perhaps I can say you're motivated by an Oedipus complex and we can keep the chain going of ad hominem with a thin psychobabble veneer to make it appear serious.
  - boredninja 3y ago
    [dead]
emodendroket 3y ago
> And what do you feel when we make these parlor tricks more capable than us at the majority of tasks? This seems like the logical fallacy of "begging the question" since it is far from apparent to me that they are "more capable than us at the majority of tasks."
- adastra22 3y ago
  AI systems are vastly better than humans at a wide variety of tasks. Better at handwriting recognition, better at scheduling, better at playing games, better at speech recognition and transcription, etc.
  - cypress66 3y ago
    I am skeptical on many of those. Speech recognition is not even close to human level. Whisper, and whatever Google uses will make a lot of mistakes on audio files that are trivial to any native speaker.
    - adastra22 3y ago
      In actual tests it is beyond human level. Humans actually mishear about 1 in 20 words during transcription tests; whisper does better.
      - emodendroket 3y ago
        But we don’t solely rely on how well we hear since we have knowledge that allows us to correct for poor hearing based on what is being said rather than forging ahead with a nonsense transcription. Machine transcription is definitely faster and cheaper but the end product isn’t “better,” and anyone who has read it can attest to that.
        ben_w 3y ago
        > But we don’t solely rely on how well we hear since we have knowledge that allows us to correct for poor hearing based on what is being said rather than forging ahead with a nonsense transcription. Good voice transcription AI already do that too; that's why they work best if they know which language they're operating in, as that means they can use the language to create a model of the most likely words. I think the most recent WWDC from Apple even has a video about adding custom vocabulary for their speech engine to pick up on that covered some details in this exact topic, though I can't search right now.
        emodendroket 3y ago
        Undoubtedly so but I have yet to see one that doesn't make mistakes a human would be unlikely to. It is not an easy capability to reproduce and wouldn't have been my first choice if I wanted to talk about things it can do better than people.
- ben_w 3y ago
  It's certainly difficult to enumerate all the things we humans actually do. There's a lot of stuff we consider to be "common sense", sometimes those things are used to criticise AI and sometimes they're used to criticise other humans for not knowing them, but that is a category that we don't even think about until we notice the absence. For the things not considered common sense, like playing chess (beats all humans) or speaking/reading foreign languages (more than I can name to a higher standard than my second language), to creating art (even if it regularly makes the common sense mistake of getting the number of fingers and limbs wrong it's still better and not just faster than most humans), to arithmetic (a Raspberry Pi Zero can do it faster than all humans combined), to symbolic maths, to flying planes… A dev conference I was at recently had someone demonstrate how they hooked up their whatsapp voice calls to speech recognition, speech synthesis trained on their own voice, and an LLM, and the criticism of the people who got the AI replies was not "you're using an AI" (he had to actively demonstrate his use of AI to conversation partners who didn't believe him) but "you can't have listed to my message, you replied too quickly to have even played it all back."
  - oldandtired 3y ago
    It is impossible to enumerate all the things that we humans do. However, we can enumerate all the things that we create can do. Every system we create has its limitation due to the limitations that we create in them. All systems we create cannot exceed those limitations. We make machines that are stronger, faster, and can have much finer motor control than we have as individual abilities. No machine we have created has the dexterity that we have. Every computational system can be analysed in fine detail to determine the limits that we have built into them. It may take an enormous amount of time and effort to do so, but we can do it. No computational system that we have built is able to exceed the limited programming we place in it. There is an enormous amount of hype that goes on about the current generation (and future generations) of these systems, but all of them are in the abilities that we have programmed into them. They are in all essentials completely stupid (in the worst possible way - non-sentient, non-intelligent). Every logic error that we have made in building these systems is hidden in that code. One day, those errors will come back and bite us, but there is nothing intelligent or sentient in these systems. It is our errors, for which we are responsible, that will cause those problems. We can use them as adjuncts to our sentience and intelligence - but all they are are tools, never anything more. However, if we cede control to these systems, we are ceding control to something that is no better than fire (a good servant - a horrendous master). After forty years, I have seen far too often, hype by humans convince other humans to cede control to the systems that humans have made and the result has been various levels of chaos. If anything, what we need to be careful of is how humans use these systems against other humans. This is the perennial problem that we face as we build new technology.
keiferski 3y ago
And what do you feel when we understand it well enough to realize we’re the same type of parlor tricks? That’s called positivism and it has a lot of philosophical issues. I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that sensory appearance is equivalent to reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism
- __loam 3y ago
  That statement also has no basis in neuroscience.
  - boredninja 3y ago
    [dead]
- bondarchuk 3y ago
  Sensory appearance not being equivalent to reality does not have any relevance to the question of AI and humans ultimately being the same kind of information-processing system. Just handwaving "that's X philosophical position and it has problems" does not strike me as a good argument either unless you manage to explain how these problems pertain to the question at hand.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Unless AI becomes indistinguishable from human beings on a cellular level, yes, it’s entirely relevant and is the single most relevant thing. A lot of people seem to think that if an AI can simulate the appearance of a human being, that makes them equivalent to one. It might introduce some problems WRT to determining if an entity is human or not, but this doesn’t somehow prove they humans are just a “parlor trick.” This is a positivistic argument and as I pointed out, positivism has a lot of issues. The best counter argument IMO being that it’s needlessly reductive. This is all covered pretty clearly in the link.
    - bondarchuk 3y ago
jmopp 3y ago
Computers are already better than humans at a wide variety of tasks. Text generation just happens to now be one of those tasks. But if you look at the prompt -> output -> prompt feedback loop, it's clear that the human submitting the prompts is still doing all the thinking. We're not yet at the point where the AI can prompt itself and improve its output in a logical manner.
- tessellated 3y ago
  You really should take a look at Code Interpretor: https://www.latent.space/p/code-interpreter#details https://www.latent.space/p/code-interpreter#details
- ben_w 3y ago
  > We're not yet at the point where the AI can prompt itself and improve its output in a logical manner. Self-play is widely used to train game AI, and is the "A" in "GAN"; is there any point doing it on an LLM? Especially on the ones being sold as services where people get upset if they change over time?

tsunamifury 3y ago

He will go on saying it’s a trick. It’s a form of denial I’m seeing everywhere now when faced with something so genuinely terrifying or identity challenging you can’t process it.

emodendroket 3y ago
Perhaps I can say you're motivated by an Oedipus complex and we can keep the chain going of ad hominem with a thin psychobabble veneer to make it appear serious.
- boredninja 3y ago
  [dead]

emodendroket 3y ago

> And what do you feel when we make these parlor tricks more capable than us at the majority of tasks? This seems like the logical fallacy of "begging the question" since it is far from apparent to me that they are "more capable than us at the majority of tasks."

adastra22 3y ago
AI systems are vastly better than humans at a wide variety of tasks. Better at handwriting recognition, better at scheduling, better at playing games, better at speech recognition and transcription, etc.
- cypress66 3y ago
  I am skeptical on many of those. Speech recognition is not even close to human level. Whisper, and whatever Google uses will make a lot of mistakes on audio files that are trivial to any native speaker.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    In actual tests it is beyond human level. Humans actually mishear about 1 in 20 words during transcription tests; whisper does better.
    - emodendroket 3y ago
      But we don’t solely rely on how well we hear since we have knowledge that allows us to correct for poor hearing based on what is being said rather than forging ahead with a nonsense transcription. Machine transcription is definitely faster and cheaper but the end product isn’t “better,” and anyone who has read it can attest to that.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        > But we don’t solely rely on how well we hear since we have knowledge that allows us to correct for poor hearing based on what is being said rather than forging ahead with a nonsense transcription. Good voice transcription AI already do that too; that's why they work best if they know which language they're operating in, as that means they can use the language to create a model of the most likely words. I think the most recent WWDC from Apple even has a video about adding custom vocabulary for their speech engine to pick up on that covered some details in this exact topic, though I can't search right now.
        emodendroket 3y ago
        Undoubtedly so but I have yet to see one that doesn't make mistakes a human would be unlikely to. It is not an easy capability to reproduce and wouldn't have been my first choice if I wanted to talk about things it can do better than people.
ben_w 3y ago
It's certainly difficult to enumerate all the things we humans actually do. There's a lot of stuff we consider to be "common sense", sometimes those things are used to criticise AI and sometimes they're used to criticise other humans for not knowing them, but that is a category that we don't even think about until we notice the absence. For the things not considered common sense, like playing chess (beats all humans) or speaking/reading foreign languages (more than I can name to a higher standard than my second language), to creating art (even if it regularly makes the common sense mistake of getting the number of fingers and limbs wrong it's still better and not just faster than most humans), to arithmetic (a Raspberry Pi Zero can do it faster than all humans combined), to symbolic maths, to flying planes… A dev conference I was at recently had someone demonstrate how they hooked up their whatsapp voice calls to speech recognition, speech synthesis trained on their own voice, and an LLM, and the criticism of the people who got the AI replies was not "you're using an AI" (he had to actively demonstrate his use of AI to conversation partners who didn't believe him) but "you can't have listed to my message, you replied too quickly to have even played it all back."
- oldandtired 3y ago
  It is impossible to enumerate all the things that we humans do. However, we can enumerate all the things that we create can do. Every system we create has its limitation due to the limitations that we create in them. All systems we create cannot exceed those limitations. We make machines that are stronger, faster, and can have much finer motor control than we have as individual abilities. No machine we have created has the dexterity that we have. Every computational system can be analysed in fine detail to determine the limits that we have built into them. It may take an enormous amount of time and effort to do so, but we can do it. No computational system that we have built is able to exceed the limited programming we place in it. There is an enormous amount of hype that goes on about the current generation (and future generations) of these systems, but all of them are in the abilities that we have programmed into them. They are in all essentials completely stupid (in the worst possible way - non-sentient, non-intelligent). Every logic error that we have made in building these systems is hidden in that code. One day, those errors will come back and bite us, but there is nothing intelligent or sentient in these systems. It is our errors, for which we are responsible, that will cause those problems. We can use them as adjuncts to our sentience and intelligence - but all they are are tools, never anything more. However, if we cede control to these systems, we are ceding control to something that is no better than fire (a good servant - a horrendous master). After forty years, I have seen far too often, hype by humans convince other humans to cede control to the systems that humans have made and the result has been various levels of chaos. If anything, what we need to be careful of is how humans use these systems against other humans. This is the perennial problem that we face as we build new technology.

keiferski 3y ago

And what do you feel when we understand it well enough to realize we’re the same type of parlor tricks? That’s called positivism and it has a lot of philosophical issues. I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that sensory appearance is equivalent to reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism

__loam 3y ago
That statement also has no basis in neuroscience.
- boredninja 3y ago
  [dead]
bondarchuk 3y ago
Sensory appearance not being equivalent to reality does not have any relevance to the question of AI and humans ultimately being the same kind of information-processing system. Just handwaving "that's X philosophical position and it has problems" does not strike me as a good argument either unless you manage to explain how these problems pertain to the question at hand.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Unless AI becomes indistinguishable from human beings on a cellular level, yes, it’s entirely relevant and is the single most relevant thing. A lot of people seem to think that if an AI can simulate the appearance of a human being, that makes them equivalent to one. It might introduce some problems WRT to determining if an entity is human or not, but this doesn’t somehow prove they humans are just a “parlor trick.” This is a positivistic argument and as I pointed out, positivism has a lot of issues. The best counter argument IMO being that it’s needlessly reductive. This is all covered pretty clearly in the link.
  - bondarchuk 3y ago

jmopp 3y ago

Computers are already better than humans at a wide variety of tasks. Text generation just happens to now be one of those tasks. But if you look at the prompt -> output -> prompt feedback loop, it's clear that the human submitting the prompts is still doing all the thinking. We're not yet at the point where the AI can prompt itself and improve its output in a logical manner.

tessellated 3y ago
You really should take a look at Code Interpretor: https://www.latent.space/p/code-interpreter#details https://www.latent.space/p/code-interpreter#details
ben_w 3y ago
> We're not yet at the point where the AI can prompt itself and improve its output in a logical manner. Self-play is widely used to train game AI, and is the "A" in "GAN"; is there any point doing it on an LLM? Especially on the ones being sold as services where people get upset if they change over time?