4 ms·

Philosophy of mind. It is impossible to create an artificial version of something that we cannot yet define. People need to dial back the hype and take some mor

by korse 3y ago

Philosophy of mind. It is impossible to create an artificial version of something that we cannot yet define. People need to dial back the hype and take some more time to consider why we think and what constitutes a 'sense of self'. Spending some more time figuring out how biological brains 'store data' wouldn't hurt either, but impressive MRI party tricks (with monetization paths) seem to win the day every time. Side note is that language models are extremely inefficient for the benefit they provide. Most humans don't need to ingest terabytes of domain specific data in order to engage in basic reading comprehension and reasoning. I'd argue they excel at things like designing molecules, where we don't have the mental capacity or speed to ingest as much information as we would need to reason quickly, but the amount of information and processing necessary to replace a secretary is laughable.

robotresearcher 3y ago
> Most humans don't need to ingest terabytes of domain specific data in order to engage in basic reading comprehension and reasoning. How much data do you think a 6 year old has processed by the time they read a book? Eyes and ears are pretty high bitrate input devices.
- russdill 3y ago
  Not only that, the built-in connection network that developed over hundreds of millions of years from untold trillions of organisms.
- bluetomcat 3y ago
  A child doesn’t process “data” in the form of a sequence of tokens. A child associates visual objects with similar traits to pronounced words, heard from their parents. It also acquires a basic feeling of temporal sequentiality and physical causality by throwing toys, for example. It learns the rules of the language grammar by subconsciously noticing the basic structure of sentences with objects, verbs and qualities.
  - xboxnolifes 3y ago
    > A child doesn’t process “data” in the form of a sequence of tokens. A child associates visual objects with similar traits to pronounced words, heard from their parents. Objects and words are tokens. At least, objects and words are not fundamental types of things. Before they are tokens, they exist only through light and sound waves that we perceive (and other sensations such as touch, smell). Our eyes and ears need to process this information before it becomes objects and words.
- korse 3y ago
  No contest about the 'bitrate' for eyes and ears, but we don't have to feed kids the entire library of congress in order for them to reason about text. This is what gives me cold feet about the current wave of LLMs. Where is this going? We'll have something that people will dub 'AGI'. It will seem intelligent and may or may not be catastrophic, but whether or not it actually has a sense of self will be an open question, second only to the fact that it requires the power output of Argentina to survive? Seems like a dumb hack, not an advancement indicative of a thorough understanding of the problem. If and when, then maybe we can use it to bio-engineer our way to a better future?
  - lostmsu 3y ago
    I think you are plainly wrong here. Imagine a thought experiment where you'd plug newborn's ears and cover eyes until they are 6yo and see how much data you'd have to feed to them before they can reason about text from this point. I imagine it will be in hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes. The idea that children learn from little is naive.
    - korse 3y ago
      I did not state that children learn from little. I did state that they are able to achieve impressive outcomes quickly with very small amounts of domain specific knowledge (movement not included). Our best language models at this point appear to be narrow and deep where the child model is wide and shallow. For example, how many pictures of apples do I need in order to train a robot to recognize apples? How many apples (or representations thereof) does a child need to see to identify an apple? I won't argue about image density, but human eyes aren't that high resolution and people don't seem to have excellent high resolution multi-frame memory. This just makes we wonder if we should be spending more time working on how we utilize our wide but shallow data corpus rather than playing I can't believe it's not statistics with hugely inefficient and focused data sets.
      - lostmsu 3y ago
        You are wrong again. There's no difference between ChatGPT and a child in that regard. That's like half of the point of GPT's zero shot performance on the tasks that involve made up language that you describe directly in the query. You are doubly wrong because somehow for a robot you are counting pictures of apples, and for a child you are counting distinct apples. The answer to "how many pictures of apples does child need to see" is somewhere in thousands. Remember, brain does an equivalent of 24 fps, so a child holding an apple for 5 seconds gets an equivalent of over 100 pictures.
lsmeducation 3y ago
[flagged]
BobbyJo 3y ago
> Philosophy of mind. It is impossible to create an artificial version of something that we cannot yet define Not true. It's a genuine fear of mine that we will create artificial consciousness without knowing we've done so, and doom countless minds to endless suffering before we realize the err. I think, with regard to AGI, like a lot of A.I. research, implementation will come before explanation.
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  This is all very superstitious. Much of what's said about AI in tech circles has a superstitious, irrational character. There's a very obvious absence of any real philosophical analysis or depth of understanding of the subject matter, only a crude, superficially materialistic, hand-wavy sort of assumption that any of this makes sense. The idea that computers and intelligence have anything to do with one another, in the manner they are often assumed in the context of AI to have anything to do with one another, is profoundly flawed from the start. A formal system by definition lacks features that are characteristic of intelligence (semantics and the ability to abstract from particulars), and physical computers, strictly speaking, aren't a natural kind nor do they, again strictly speaking, even embody or deal with formal systems per se anyway. Computation is a mathematical construct that is simulated with physical machines, and this model is completely agnostic about the physical means by which it is simulated. You could use wooden gears if you want. The assignment between physical state transformation and a computation is entirely conventional and in the eye of the beholder. Now, if you want to define "artificial intelligence" as the simulation of intelligence, then I could concede a loose version of this claim, but it would be closer to a marketing claim than a scientific or philosophical one. Practically speaking, such "AI" could still have major consequences as a sophisticated means of automation, but theoretically, there's no intelligence involved except on the part of the artificer. If you are prepared to worry about your computer becoming conscious, then you should equally be worried about your cup of coffee become conscious as you drink it and subject the contents to the torments of your digestive system. There's no reason to fetishize those artifacts we call computers.
  - BobbyJo 3y ago
    > There's a very obvious absence of any real philosophical analysis or depth of understanding of the subject matter Integrated Information Theory seems like a lot of thought has gone into it, and it would ascribe a good deal of consciousness to some of these systems. > A formal system by definition lacks features that are characteristic of intelligence (semantics and the ability to abstract from particulars) And quantum mechanics would have you believe Newtonian mechanics is nonsense, but there are such things as emergent properties, and rules changes as scales allow more complex compositions of simple rules. > If you are prepared to worry about your computer becoming conscious. That feels a bit disingenuous. You're dressing down some of the worlds largest supercomputers as "my computer". I'm not worried about my M1 Mac suffering. I'm worried about an emergent mind composed of thousands and thousands of computers working together to simulate intelligence suffering.
nathias 3y ago
Technological progress does not proceed from definitions, new concepts can unlock new domains of thought that can in turn yield knowledge and technology.

by korse 3y ago

robotresearcher 3y ago

> Most humans don't need to ingest terabytes of domain specific data in order to engage in basic reading comprehension and reasoning. How much data do you think a 6 year old has processed by the time they read a book? Eyes and ears are pretty high bitrate input devices.

russdill 3y ago
Not only that, the built-in connection network that developed over hundreds of millions of years from untold trillions of organisms.
bluetomcat 3y ago
A child doesn’t process “data” in the form of a sequence of tokens. A child associates visual objects with similar traits to pronounced words, heard from their parents. It also acquires a basic feeling of temporal sequentiality and physical causality by throwing toys, for example. It learns the rules of the language grammar by subconsciously noticing the basic structure of sentences with objects, verbs and qualities.
- xboxnolifes 3y ago
  > A child doesn’t process “data” in the form of a sequence of tokens. A child associates visual objects with similar traits to pronounced words, heard from their parents. Objects and words are tokens. At least, objects and words are not fundamental types of things. Before they are tokens, they exist only through light and sound waves that we perceive (and other sensations such as touch, smell). Our eyes and ears need to process this information before it becomes objects and words.
korse 3y ago
No contest about the 'bitrate' for eyes and ears, but we don't have to feed kids the entire library of congress in order for them to reason about text. This is what gives me cold feet about the current wave of LLMs. Where is this going? We'll have something that people will dub 'AGI'. It will seem intelligent and may or may not be catastrophic, but whether or not it actually has a sense of self will be an open question, second only to the fact that it requires the power output of Argentina to survive? Seems like a dumb hack, not an advancement indicative of a thorough understanding of the problem. If and when, then maybe we can use it to bio-engineer our way to a better future?
- lostmsu 3y ago
  I think you are plainly wrong here. Imagine a thought experiment where you'd plug newborn's ears and cover eyes until they are 6yo and see how much data you'd have to feed to them before they can reason about text from this point. I imagine it will be in hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes. The idea that children learn from little is naive.
  - korse 3y ago
    I did not state that children learn from little. I did state that they are able to achieve impressive outcomes quickly with very small amounts of domain specific knowledge (movement not included). Our best language models at this point appear to be narrow and deep where the child model is wide and shallow. For example, how many pictures of apples do I need in order to train a robot to recognize apples? How many apples (or representations thereof) does a child need to see to identify an apple? I won't argue about image density, but human eyes aren't that high resolution and people don't seem to have excellent high resolution multi-frame memory. This just makes we wonder if we should be spending more time working on how we utilize our wide but shallow data corpus rather than playing I can't believe it's not statistics with hugely inefficient and focused data sets.
    - lostmsu 3y ago
      You are wrong again. There's no difference between ChatGPT and a child in that regard. That's like half of the point of GPT's zero shot performance on the tasks that involve made up language that you describe directly in the query. You are doubly wrong because somehow for a robot you are counting pictures of apples, and for a child you are counting distinct apples. The answer to "how many pictures of apples does child need to see" is somewhere in thousands. Remember, brain does an equivalent of 24 fps, so a child holding an apple for 5 seconds gets an equivalent of over 100 pictures.

lsmeducation 3y ago

[flagged]

BobbyJo 3y ago

> Philosophy of mind. It is impossible to create an artificial version of something that we cannot yet define Not true. It's a genuine fear of mine that we will create artificial consciousness without knowing we've done so, and doom countless minds to endless suffering before we realize the err. I think, with regard to AGI, like a lot of A.I. research, implementation will come before explanation.

lo_zamoyski 3y ago
This is all very superstitious. Much of what's said about AI in tech circles has a superstitious, irrational character. There's a very obvious absence of any real philosophical analysis or depth of understanding of the subject matter, only a crude, superficially materialistic, hand-wavy sort of assumption that any of this makes sense. The idea that computers and intelligence have anything to do with one another, in the manner they are often assumed in the context of AI to have anything to do with one another, is profoundly flawed from the start. A formal system by definition lacks features that are characteristic of intelligence (semantics and the ability to abstract from particulars), and physical computers, strictly speaking, aren't a natural kind nor do they, again strictly speaking, even embody or deal with formal systems per se anyway. Computation is a mathematical construct that is simulated with physical machines, and this model is completely agnostic about the physical means by which it is simulated. You could use wooden gears if you want. The assignment between physical state transformation and a computation is entirely conventional and in the eye of the beholder. Now, if you want to define "artificial intelligence" as the simulation of intelligence, then I could concede a loose version of this claim, but it would be closer to a marketing claim than a scientific or philosophical one. Practically speaking, such "AI" could still have major consequences as a sophisticated means of automation, but theoretically, there's no intelligence involved except on the part of the artificer. If you are prepared to worry about your computer becoming conscious, then you should equally be worried about your cup of coffee become conscious as you drink it and subject the contents to the torments of your digestive system. There's no reason to fetishize those artifacts we call computers.
- BobbyJo 3y ago
  > There's a very obvious absence of any real philosophical analysis or depth of understanding of the subject matter Integrated Information Theory seems like a lot of thought has gone into it, and it would ascribe a good deal of consciousness to some of these systems. > A formal system by definition lacks features that are characteristic of intelligence (semantics and the ability to abstract from particulars) And quantum mechanics would have you believe Newtonian mechanics is nonsense, but there are such things as emergent properties, and rules changes as scales allow more complex compositions of simple rules. > If you are prepared to worry about your computer becoming conscious. That feels a bit disingenuous. You're dressing down some of the worlds largest supercomputers as "my computer". I'm not worried about my M1 Mac suffering. I'm worried about an emergent mind composed of thousands and thousands of computers working together to simulate intelligence suffering.

nathias 3y ago

Technological progress does not proceed from definitions, new concepts can unlock new domains of thought that can in turn yield knowledge and technology.