4 ms·

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.
            • ChatGTP 3y ago
              I find it frustrating people don’t understand that this project is an it different to launching an app on the App Store though? If you don’t kind of get that then maybe you have no business building powerful technology ? If you were working on the Manhattan project would you feel frustrated if people didn’t want you to succeed ?
              • jvanderbot 3y ago
                Yes I bet people would be frustrated if they were working on the Manhattan project and others were saying it's not worth building or were actively hindering it. I would. Why else would they work on it if they didn't feel like it was worthwhile? But that's not what we're talking about, we're talking about moving goalposts which are so commonly frustrating that they have their own term that is known in logic as, surprise, Moving Goalpost. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts
                • ChatGTP 3y ago
                  I bet a lot of people had reservations about working on and completing the Manhattan project because they felt like if they didn't do it, the Nazi's on Soviets would have, it's not really the same thing. I know what moving the goalposts is far out...anyway, where are the goalposts for intelligence defined, do you know where I can find them?
      • consilient 3y ago
        Of course it's a coping mechanism, but coping mechanisms that get in the way of protecting yourself are bad for you! Being completely fucked if your job gets automated away in a month doesn't have to mean being completely fucked if your job gets automated away in five years, but it's a whole lot more likely if you spend the first four of them being told you have nothing to worry about.
      • stevenhuang 3y ago
        Do you think science should appeal to empathy? Some of us are trying to arrive to a correct understanding of what likely is or isn't possible. How would being dishonest about the implications and sticking your head in the sand wrt a more refined understanding of NN capabilities possibly help you in the scenario you've outlined? I don't know about you but the idea of conjuring up a false edifice as means to cope with reality is kind of obscene. How about something pragmatic, like contemplating the soundness of universal basic income?
        • ChatGTP 3y ago
          I'm not talking about me personally, I'm just surprised other are surprised that people are trying to cope with the their livelihoods or worse may be completely obliterated. Maybe emotional intelligence isn't common within the ubergeek class?
          • stevenhuang 3y ago
            Yeah the person asking if this is the goal post's final form--that was a rhetorical question. Obviously they suspect why and they're expressing their incredulity at people still in the denial stage of grief. Being emotive to the extent you're cognitively impaired is not a favourable condition to be in.
            • ChatGTP 3y ago
              people still in the denial stage of grief. I think something has gone wrong with "technological progress" when we building technology which puts large amounts of people into "denial" and "grief". Personally, if people can't really understand that and then make statements like, "they need to remain logical" or whatever, then I guess you'll never get it.
        • ghostzilla 3y ago
          Apparently you deleted one of your previous comments on the topic, so I'll repost it here as it illustrates wonderfully how "pragmatic" your own thinking is, especially the part that matrix multiplication in a loop is "literally what your brain is doing": "Ah it's you again! It's quite funny seeing the dearth of knowledge you routinely insist on displaying whenever this topic comes up. Consider doing some reading on the information theoretic view of cognition and neurobiology. You'll find leading theories for how our brains work have many similarities to NNs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding Another thing, you don't seem to understand that all physical processes can be modeled completely through matmuls. You should also read up on the definition of intelligence because you seem confused on what it means. Pretty much every assertion you make here is wrong and you don't even know it. You assert "it's common sense" something that does matrix multiplication in a loop can't be intelligent, yet get this, it's literally what your brain is doing. Please have some epistemic humility and consider refraining from forming strong opinions on topics you don't have a clue on."
  • taneq 3y ago
    It just bugs me when people dismiss LLMs as "not intelligent" for some inane reason, when GPT4 can hold a better conversation on more topics than most people you'd meet on the street. No, it's not a fully fledged superhuman strong AGI, but it's SO much more capable than anything we had even a year ago. > Lack empathy in understanding why people might want the goalposts changed ? Based on your later comments, I'm reading this as: 1) People are afraid because of recent major advances in AI 2) In an attempt to manage their anxiety, they try to convince themselves that these advances aren't actually significant or effective by redefining their interpretation of 'AI', 'AGI', 'intelligence' etc. to be something that current techniques don't threaten to achieve 3) In order to reinforce this cognitive dissonance, they post dismissive or belittling comments declaring that it's not 'real AI' according to their redefined interpretation of the term 4) We should respond to these comments with compassion, understanding that they're a coping mechanism, rather than correcting them Is that right? If so that's a really interesting take.
• 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.