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This is a really beautiful article, and while there are certainly fundamental differences between how a toddler thinks and learns, and how an LLM "thinks", I do
by Retr0id 3y ago
This is a really beautiful article, and while there are certainly fundamental differences between how a toddler thinks and learns, and how an LLM "thinks", I don't think we should get too comfortable with those differences.
Every time I say to myself "AI is no big deal because it can't do X", some time later someone comes along and makes an AI that does X.
- alexwebb2 3y agoThere's a well-documented concept called "God of the gaps" where any phenomenon humans don't understand at the time is attributed to a divine entity. Over time, as the gaps in human knowledge get filled, the god "shrinks" - it becomes less expansive, less powerful, less directly involved in human affairs. The definition changes. It's fascinating to watch the same thing happen with human exceptionalism – so many cries of "but AI can't do <thing that's rapidly approaching>". It's "human of the gaps", and those gaps are rapidly closing.
- allemagne 3y ago"God is dead" is beyond passé in the 2020s, but in the 19th century nobody really needed a "god of the gaps." If a Friedrich Nietzsche equivalent was active today, and let's just say was convinced that AGI was possible, I kind of wonder what generally accepted grand narrative he'd declare dead beyond just human exceptionalism. Philosophy itself?
- NoGravitas 3y agoPhilosophy is already a self-destroying enterprise (it lets you think out to the limits of thought). Eugene Thacker's "The Horror of Philosophy" series is probably the best thorough explanation of this.
- Barrin92 3y agoI honestly don't know where this is supposed to be happening. I have observed the opposite for decades. When Gary Kasparov was beaten by Stockfish, people proclaimed the end of chess and went on AI hyperboles. Same with Watson winning Jeopardy, Alexa, etc. Every time computers outperform humans in some domain this is conflated with deep general progress, panicked projections of replacement and job losses, the end times and so on. People are way faster to engage in reductionism of human capacity and Terminator-esque fantasies than the opposite. Despite the fact that it never happens. It's even reflected in our popular culture. I can barely recall a single work of science fiction in the last 30 years that would qualify as portraying human exceptionalism. AI doomerism, overestimation and fear of machines is the norm.
- alexwebb2 3y ago“but AI can’t create art” “but AI can’t write poetry” “but AI can’t do real work” Panic is probably not warranted. Too much incentive stacked against the truly apocalyptic scenarios. But yeah, a lot of jobs are probably going to shrink.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoThen never say to yourself "AI is no big deal because it can't do X". Say instead (for example) "It is important that I understand the differences between both the capabilities and internal mechanisms of AI and people, even if, over some period of time, the capabilities may appear to converge".
- Retr0id 3y agoI'm not terribly interested in truisms, I'm more interested in figuring out what AIs actually cannot fundamentally do, if anything (present or future).
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoWhat are the things that humans actually cannot fundamentally do, if anything?
- Retr0id 3y agoThat's a very large set of things. Calculating 1000000 digits of the decimal expansion of pi within an hour would be just one example.
- cozzyd 3y agoTo be super cheeky: wget https://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/tpi-0.9-linux.tar.gz tar xvf tpi-0.9-linux.tar.gz time ./tpi -T 8 -o pi.txt 1M real 0m0.176s user 0m0.500s sys 0m0.049s