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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

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!
fasterik 3y ago
I would say "moving the goalposts" is an understatement. Requiring that a system's state must not be describable with a string of fixed length is an absurd definition of intelligence. By that definition, anything composed of a finite number of atoms can never be intelligent. I think the idea that we have to give a precise definition of general intelligence is mistaken. We start from the premise that humans are generally intelligent, and then we build systems that are able to compete with humans across multiple domains. LLMs outperform humans on many language-based tasks, so I would say they are already generally intelligent. Of course, they do poorly on a lot of tasks as well, so there is a lot of room for improvement.

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!

fasterik 3y ago

I would say "moving the goalposts" is an understatement. Requiring that a system's state must not be describable with a string of fixed length is an absurd definition of intelligence. By that definition, anything composed of a finite number of atoms can never be intelligent. I think the idea that we have to give a precise definition of general intelligence is mistaken. We start from the premise that humans are generally intelligent, and then we build systems that are able to compete with humans across multiple domains. LLMs outperform humans on many language-based tasks, so I would say they are already generally intelligent. Of course, they do poorly on a lot of tasks as well, so there is a lot of room for improvement.