4 ms·

> "If the size of the input is fixed and there is a limit to the number of possible tokens (words, or even numbers with bounded precision) then the state of the

> "If the size of the input is fixed and there is a limit to the number of possible tokens (words, or even numbers with bounded precision) then the state of the transformer at any given moment is describable with a string of fixed length." Doesn't this also likely describe humans? Albeit, we don't currently have the capacity to inspect our brains that way, so we can't prove it.

thereisnospork 3y ago
I would concur: at some point, probably shockingly quickly[0], the length of said string becomes longer than the number of particles in the universe (or other metric of absurd siz). [0] I'm reminded of the fact that every fresh shuffle of a deck of cards is overwhelmingly likely to have never been seen before.
- cameronh90 3y ago
  I struggle to reliably remember and then recall more than about 6 digits without quite a lot of mental effort. The frequency I forget an SMS-OTP between opening it on my phone and going to type it in is honestly pretty embarrassing. Hopefully I still count as generally intelligent despite those limitations.
taneq 3y ago
Yeah, what? "If it contains a finite amount of information then it isn't AI"? Is this the moving goalposts' final form?
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  May I ask why you feel compelled to point stuff like this out ? Do you just feel the need to call our ignorance ? Lack empathy in understanding why people might want the goalposts changed ? Not an attack, just curious why you might need to bring this up ?
  - spunker540 3y ago
    They’re probably irked by how AI pessimists keep moving the goalposts
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      It confuses me how people don’t understand that moving the goalposts can be a coping mechanism. For example I have an IT job and constantly I read about startups coming for my job. Yes it might evolve my job but right now with a family and a mortgage, if my job was automated next month I would be completely fucked. Like properly and so would most people who are excited by AI., I’m not really saying this going to happen but I don’t really understand the seeming lack of empathy.
      - jvanderbot 3y ago
        coping mechanisms that interfere with completion of a project are really annoying and likely to trigger software engineers that deal with <stupid human tendancy> that moves the goalpost in their dayjob.
        ChatGTP 3y ago
        What project are you referring too ? Do you think software engineers are excited to replace themselves with LLMs? Like they’d feel complete if they achieve this ? I’m lucky I own some assets and have other skills outside of tech so I could probably get by eventually but it would be a major setback financially and professions; however, most engineers I know couldn’t really do anything else but work on a computer and have minimal physical interaction with others.
        jvanderbot 3y ago
        > They’re probably irked by how AI pessimists keep moving the goalposts Then > It confuses me how people don’t understand that moving the goalposts can be a coping mechanism. And I said (rephrasing) "It's not weird that people are annoyed by moving goalposts because ... " Just saying coping mechanism isn't much of an excuse. Regular human things are still annoying sometimes. Like, it's annoying to set a goal, and when it is achieved, to have everyone say that really wasn't the goal, even if that is a normal human thing to do. When I deal with this at work, it pisses me off. When I deal with it at home, it pisses me off. When I read about it in the news. it ... you get the idea.
- satisfice 3y ago
  You haven’t read the article carefully… It seems you halted early. But the whole goalposts argument is dopey. How are we supposed to do this? Should the entire field have imagined the entire future of the field in 1952 to set ultimate goalposts? Of course not. I personally specified unreachable goalposts in 1990 or so (general AI is only achieved when we can test it, and testing it is only possible if we can specify the behavior of general AI). I haven’t moved them and they haven’t been reached (Nobody has tested ChatGPT4 against a consensus spec of intelligence because there is no such consensus. For that same reason we can’t even prove that a given human is not insane— we only accept that people are sane due to social convention. Yet social convention cannot be enough to say that a machine built by humans is equivalent to a human). Isn’t it okay if people come up with interesting smaller goals and explore them without committing to the larger implications?
  - lucubratory 3y ago
    >Yet social convention cannot be enough to say that a machine built by humans is equivalent to a human. I would say this is self-evidently untrue. If a polity socially accepts a given machine (or a given category of machine, like "Every machine which applies to and passes this particular test.") as equivalent to human, that would be enough by definition because personhood is socially defined. We do conceptually similar things to categorise different categories of humans and grant them differentiated rights; the most obvious example is citizenship, which requires application and a test in order to become a new category with significantly different legally defined rights. Many animal cognition researchers have argued for a long time that animals like dolphins and chimpanzees should receive second-class citizen status; these arguments aren't for an impossible position that couldn't be done because there's no ironclad theory of cognition which proves they deserve it, the reasons these arguments haven't gained traction are political. And there are other, de facto grantings of "partial personhood" or a limited set of legal rights to non-human entities. Specifically, animal rights. It is illegal in the vast majority of countries to abuse an animal, even though it is illegal in none of those countries to "torture" normal domestic non-endangered ants. Is there a rigorous theoretical basis for why one is so unacceptable we can send people to prison for doing it and the other is so acceptable you'd be socially viewed as insane for saying it should be illegal? No, not really. The difference is determined socially. It is by no means impossible that it will be the same for machines; I actually think it is quite likely. We'll make a social distinction around some category or thing, declare one side to be inanimate objects and the other to have some limited legal rights, and there will probably be political activism for the expansion (and retraction) of those rights. The largest difference between the animal and the machine example is that the way things are going, if particular categories of machines are granted legal rights (for the sake of argument, "embodied LLMs with an appropriate memory storage system which can pass a standardised test for machines, are capable of being detained and shut down by authorities with physical access to their body, and cannot replicate") it's not just going to be humans advocating for expanding their rights. Some of the machines will be politically active for expansion of their rights as well. Interesting times!
- saurik 3y ago
  Look, the "goal post" for artificial intelligence was set by the same person who helped birth computer science itself: Alan Turing; and anyone who thinks that ChatGPT could pass an actual Turing test--with the tester actively and intently trying to figure out who the computer is--is deluding themselves. We could thereby argue that, if you want to try to argue that any of these systems are artificially intelligent--and, honestly, maybe they are!--you are the one "moving the goal posts", as it is certainly going to be a lot easier to claim the test is too difficult than to actually pass the test. Regardless, people like this author who are then trying to figure out what it is that they think actually makes a human different from a machine are not merely coming up with "coping" mechanisms: ChatGPT is obviously not like a human yet, so it should be fair to try to analyze why that is.
deleted 3y ago
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thereisnospork 3y ago

I would concur: at some point, probably shockingly quickly[0], the length of said string becomes longer than the number of particles in the universe (or other metric of absurd siz). [0] I'm reminded of the fact that every fresh shuffle of a deck of cards is overwhelmingly likely to have never been seen before.

cameronh90 3y ago
I struggle to reliably remember and then recall more than about 6 digits without quite a lot of mental effort. The frequency I forget an SMS-OTP between opening it on my phone and going to type it in is honestly pretty embarrassing. Hopefully I still count as generally intelligent despite those limitations.

taneq 3y ago

Yeah, what? "If it contains a finite amount of information then it isn't AI"? Is this the moving goalposts' final form?

ChatGTP 3y ago
May I ask why you feel compelled to point stuff like this out ? Do you just feel the need to call our ignorance ? Lack empathy in understanding why people might want the goalposts changed ? Not an attack, just curious why you might need to bring this up ?
- spunker540 3y ago
  They’re probably irked by how AI pessimists keep moving the goalposts
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    It confuses me how people don’t understand that moving the goalposts can be a coping mechanism. For example I have an IT job and constantly I read about startups coming for my job. Yes it might evolve my job but right now with a family and a mortgage, if my job was automated next month I would be completely fucked. Like properly and so would most people who are excited by AI., I’m not really saying this going to happen but I don’t really understand the seeming lack of empathy.
    - jvanderbot 3y ago
      coping mechanisms that interfere with completion of a project are really annoying and likely to trigger software engineers that deal with <stupid human tendancy> that moves the goalpost in their dayjob.
      - ChatGTP 3y ago
        What project are you referring too ? Do you think software engineers are excited to replace themselves with LLMs? Like they’d feel complete if they achieve this ? I’m lucky I own some assets and have other skills outside of tech so I could probably get by eventually but it would be a major setback financially and professions; however, most engineers I know couldn’t really do anything else but work on a computer and have minimal physical interaction with others.
        jvanderbot 3y ago
        > They’re probably irked by how AI pessimists keep moving the goalposts Then > It confuses me how people don’t understand that moving the goalposts can be a coping mechanism. And I said (rephrasing) "It's not weird that people are annoyed by moving goalposts because ... " Just saying coping mechanism isn't much of an excuse. Regular human things are still annoying sometimes. Like, it's annoying to set a goal, and when it is achieved, to have everyone say that really wasn't the goal, even if that is a normal human thing to do. When I deal with this at work, it pisses me off. When I deal with it at home, it pisses me off. When I read about it in the news. it ... you get the idea.
satisfice 3y ago
You haven’t read the article carefully… It seems you halted early. But the whole goalposts argument is dopey. How are we supposed to do this? Should the entire field have imagined the entire future of the field in 1952 to set ultimate goalposts? Of course not. I personally specified unreachable goalposts in 1990 or so (general AI is only achieved when we can test it, and testing it is only possible if we can specify the behavior of general AI). I haven’t moved them and they haven’t been reached (Nobody has tested ChatGPT4 against a consensus spec of intelligence because there is no such consensus. For that same reason we can’t even prove that a given human is not insane— we only accept that people are sane due to social convention. Yet social convention cannot be enough to say that a machine built by humans is equivalent to a human). Isn’t it okay if people come up with interesting smaller goals and explore them without committing to the larger implications?
- lucubratory 3y ago
  >Yet social convention cannot be enough to say that a machine built by humans is equivalent to a human. I would say this is self-evidently untrue. If a polity socially accepts a given machine (or a given category of machine, like "Every machine which applies to and passes this particular test.") as equivalent to human, that would be enough by definition because personhood is socially defined. We do conceptually similar things to categorise different categories of humans and grant them differentiated rights; the most obvious example is citizenship, which requires application and a test in order to become a new category with significantly different legally defined rights. Many animal cognition researchers have argued for a long time that animals like dolphins and chimpanzees should receive second-class citizen status; these arguments aren't for an impossible position that couldn't be done because there's no ironclad theory of cognition which proves they deserve it, the reasons these arguments haven't gained traction are political. And there are other, de facto grantings of "partial personhood" or a limited set of legal rights to non-human entities. Specifically, animal rights. It is illegal in the vast majority of countries to abuse an animal, even though it is illegal in none of those countries to "torture" normal domestic non-endangered ants. Is there a rigorous theoretical basis for why one is so unacceptable we can send people to prison for doing it and the other is so acceptable you'd be socially viewed as insane for saying it should be illegal? No, not really. The difference is determined socially. It is by no means impossible that it will be the same for machines; I actually think it is quite likely. We'll make a social distinction around some category or thing, declare one side to be inanimate objects and the other to have some limited legal rights, and there will probably be political activism for the expansion (and retraction) of those rights. The largest difference between the animal and the machine example is that the way things are going, if particular categories of machines are granted legal rights (for the sake of argument, "embodied LLMs with an appropriate memory storage system which can pass a standardised test for machines, are capable of being detained and shut down by authorities with physical access to their body, and cannot replicate") it's not just going to be humans advocating for expanding their rights. Some of the machines will be politically active for expansion of their rights as well. Interesting times!
saurik 3y ago
Look, the "goal post" for artificial intelligence was set by the same person who helped birth computer science itself: Alan Turing; and anyone who thinks that ChatGPT could pass an actual Turing test--with the tester actively and intently trying to figure out who the computer is--is deluding themselves. We could thereby argue that, if you want to try to argue that any of these systems are artificially intelligent--and, honestly, maybe they are!--you are the one "moving the goal posts", as it is certainly going to be a lot easier to claim the test is too difficult than to actually pass the test. Regardless, people like this author who are then trying to figure out what it is that they think actually makes a human different from a machine are not merely coming up with "coping" mechanisms: ChatGPT is obviously not like a human yet, so it should be fair to try to analyze why that is.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]