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They don't have 'artificial intelligence' capabilities (and never will). But it is an interesting technology.
by oska 3y ago
They don't have 'artificial intelligence' capabilities (and never will).
But it is an interesting technology.
- concordDance 3y agoThey can be the core part of a system that can do a junior dev's job. Are you defining "artificial intelligence" is some unusual way?
- oska 3y agoI'm defining intelligence in the usual way and intelligence requires understanding which is not possible without consciousness I follow Roger Penrose's thinking here. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aiGybCeqgI&t=721s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aiGybCeqgI&t=721s
- concordDance 3y ago> intelligence requires understanding which is not possible without consciousness How are you defining "consciousness" and "understanding" here? Because a feedback loop into an LLM would meet the most common definition of consciousness (possessing a phonetic loop). And having an accurate internal predictive model of a system is the normal definition of understanding and a good LLM has that too.
- FeepingCreature 3y agoNo, you're not supposed to actually have an empirical model of consciousness. "Consciousness" is just "that thing that computers don't have".
- wildermuthn 3y agoIt’s cool to see people recognizing this basic fact — consciousness is a prerequisite for intelligence. GPT is a philosophical zombie.
- bagofsand 3y agoProblem is, we have no agreed-upon operational definition of consciousness. Arguably, it's the secular equivalent of the soul. Something everything believes they have, but which is not testable, locatable or definable. But yet (just like with the soul) we're sure we have it, and it's impossible for anything else to have it. Perhaps consciousness is simply a hallucination that makes us feel special about ourselves.
- howrar 3y agoYou can't even know that other people have it. We just assume they do because they look and behave like us, and we know that we have it ourselves.
- wildermuthn 3y agoI disagree. There is a simple test for consciousness: empathy. Empathy is the ability to emulate the contents of another consciousness. While an agent could mimic empathetic behaviors (and words), given enough interrogation and testing you would encounter an out-of-training case that it would fail.
- concordDance 3y agoUh... so is it autistic people or non-autistic people who lack consciousness? (Generally autistic people emulate other autistic people better and non-autists emulate non-autists better) > given enough interrogation and testing you would encounter an out-of-training case that it would fail. This is also the case with regular humans.
- int_19h 3y agoFor one thing, this would imply that clinical psychopaths aren't conscious, which would be a very weird takeaway. But also, how do you know that LMs aren't empathic? By your own admission they do "mimic empathetic behaviors", but you reject this as the real thing because you claim that with enough testing you would encounter a failure. This raises all kinds of "no true Scotsman" flags, not to mention that empathy failure is not exactly uncommon among humans. So how exactly do you actually test your hypothesis?
- Zambyte 3y agoI think answering this may illuminate the division in schools of thought: do you believe life was created by a higher power?
- oska 3y agoMy beliefs aren't really important here but I don't believe in 'creation' (i.e. no life -> life); I believe that life has always existed
- concordDance 3y agoNow that is so rare I've never even heard of someone expressing that view before... Materialists normally believe in a big bang (which has no life) and religious people normally think a higher being created the first life. This is pretty fascinating, to you have a link explaining the religion/ideology/worldview you have?
- nprateem 3y agoBuddhism
- Zambyte 3y agoDo you believe: 1) Earth has an infinite past that has always included life 2) The Earth as a planet has a finite past, but it (along with what made up the Earth) is in some sense alive, and life as we know it emerged from that life 3) The Earth has a finite past, and life has transferred to Earth from somewhere else in space 4) We are the Universe, and the Universe is alive Or something else? I will try to tie it back to computers after this short intermission :)
- hedora 3y agoIf by “junior dev”, you mean “a dev at a level so low they will be let go if not promoted”, then I agree. I’ve watched my coworkers try to make use of LLMs at work, and it has convinced me the LLM’s contributions are well below the bar where their output is a net benefit to the team.
- raccoonDivider 3y agoIt works pretty well in my C++ code. Context: modern C++ with few footguns, inside functions with pretty-self-explanatory names. I don't really get the "low bar for contributions" argument because GH Copilot's contributions are too small-sized for there to even be any bar. It writes the obvious and tedious loops and other boilerplate so I can focus on what the code should actually do.
- int_19h 3y agoConversely, I was very skeptical of its ability to help coding something non-trivial. Then I found out that the more readable your code is - in a very human way, like descriptive identifiers, comments etc - the better this "smart autocomplete" is. It's certainly good enough to save me a lot of typing, so it is a net benefit.