8 ms·

As a counterpoint, I feel like the belief that we can't get to AGI comes off as religion. It presupposes an ineffable quality that we posses that machines can

• mjburgess 3y ago
  Does gold have an 'ineffable' quality that hydrogen does not? Do cells, after 1bn years of evolution have a quality that gold does not? Does reality work one way, and not another? Are not all things unequal? A "machine" is what, exactly? Do we take it to be an abstraction? Or is it an electrical field oscillating over silicon? Either way, you're in trouble. Abstractions have no physical properties, and electrified sand seems hardly to possess any interesting properties. The ability for animals to adapt to their environments, by growing into them, by establishing plastic causal connections in their very bodies, grown by their environemtns... able to almost instantly move from protein expression in 1trn 1-bn-yr cellular supercomputers in each of our bodies to macro sensory-motor representation --- and back again Is this ineffable? Or is this extremely effable. Is rather, not the superstitious view that "everything is anything" ? All extant, knowing, studied intelligent systems have organic properties; and radically so. Insofar as this is "ineffable" you should take that up with the animal kingdom. I find the contrary supersitious, magical, religious, ineffable... that mere abstract patterns in arbiatrily chosen aspects of our bodies are necessary and sufficient conditions for anything at all. This would be the only case in all science. The only physical property instantiated by mere arrangement at any level. Upload our consciousness? Make it out of wood why not! Nonesense. When I am hungry, I dream of food, when I dream of food I plan to get some, and I am angry without it. This will not be made out of sand.
  • jacquesm 3y ago
    Given that you need some pretty complex elements to be able to make life in the first place (not to mention complex molecules made out of those elements) I'd say yes, there is definitely an 'ineffable' quality that life has that Hydrogen does not (to short circuit your chain of reasoning), but intelligence isn't necessarily made of a particular kind of matter and that's where the analogy breaks down.
    • mjburgess 3y ago
      The soul, likewise, is immaterial. Who now trades in superstition? Everything is corporeal.
      • mjburgess 3y ago
        Downvoted for saying reality has physical properties? Where else but hackernews? Sorry to disappoint, but all the algorithms of CS, which do anything at all, have devices in them. ie., their critical steps are impure, and cannot be specified mathematically. There is nothing abstract in the world, everything is concrete. Discrete mathematics is not some divine realm which is where the Mind really occurs, and the Soul is really kept. No graph traversal algorithm cares, nor will ever. Science is the study of reality, not computer "science". There are no computational "properties". All interesting properties are of objects extended in space, and in time. The world is physical, as described by physics; not abstract, as describe by mathematics. And so, not computable.
        • lanstin 3y ago
          My mind has abstractions in it. Are you saying that mental formations are not real, not in the universe?
        • InSteady 3y ago
          >Where else but hackernews? I have seen this sentiment on every single platform I have participated in. Where else? Everywhere that humans go. Find a more appropriate (or at least original) lamentation.
• dullcrisp 3y ago
  You don’t have to believe AGI is impossible to believe we have no route to get there. The burden of proof on “we have a way to do this” falls heavily on the person proposing it. And being able to do something that wasn’t expected doesn’t imply the ability to do a specific other thing. It’s that belief that’s I’d say is perhaps more cultish than religious.
  • iknowstuff 3y ago
    Who’s saying we definitely have a way to do this? Very few. Nobody’s trying to prove that we definitely do right now. But the “presumption” that we can’t is silly given our advancements
    • dullcrisp 3y ago
      This logic doesn’t work with anything else. If I say we’re going to fly to Jupiter you’re going to ask me for specifics not just presume that I know what I’m talking about. Or any of the other infinite things I can claim to be able to do. Why is this one different?
      • eklavya 3y ago
        In that scenario, you are the one claiming we will "never" fly to jupiter.
        • timr 3y ago
          Just to close the metaphorical loop here, the current AI debate is something like: "There's a danger we'll be able to fly to Jupiter and bring home a Jupiterian life-form that will destroy humanity. Therefore we should stop all space exploration." The doomers take the equation with some wildly improbable step that we can't currently explain or justify, multiply the outcome of that step by "infinitely bad", and conclude that the whole thing must be dangerous. But to amp up the rhetoric, they always skip over the "wildly improbable" part.
          • 3y ago
• idontpost 3y ago
  [dead]
• dotnet00 3y ago
  When people say we can't get to AGI, they're typically either in the camp that there's something intrinsically special about us that is incapable of being replicated, or various versions of the belief that it's too complex to be achieved within a timespan in which they would still recognize humanity. The former can be seen as a religious belief, but the latter is simply saying that we do not understand anywhere near enough about intelligence to develop AGI. You point to the unexpected leap in capability we've had recently, but fundamentally it isn't that different from what we have had for decades. The same fundamental unsolved limitations exist, such as of being unable to learn the way we do (eg if a child is writing a specific letter wrong, we correct that specific mistake, but that doesn't overwrite the knowledge of how to write the other letters). As a lecture I watched a while ago had put it, we've gotten pretty good at making the icing of the AGI cake recently, but we still have no idea what the cake is supposed to even look/taste like, so we barely know what ingredients we might need to make it let alone the actual steps involved.
  • logicchains 3y ago
    >not understand anywhere near enough about intelligence to develop AGI. LLM training is essentially training them to predict what happens next. When we combine this with multi-modal training (video/audio), they're being trained to predict what happens next in the world. As we feed them more and more data and make them bigger and bigger, they'll get better and better at this task. Given that predicting what happens next requires predicting what humans do, because humans are part of the world, if they keep getting better and better then they'll be able to predict what humans would do well enough that they're capable of thinking any thoughts humans could think, because that's a requirement for predicting human behaviour. So just by training them on this one label, predict what happens next, we'd expect them to eventually develop human-level intelligence if the loss keeps decreasing.
    • dotnet00 3y ago
      That doesn't really follow at all. It may result in something that is even better at faking the appearance of intelligence, but LLMs and similar stuff fundamentally lacks various features that make them not capable of becoming human level intelligences.
• tivert 3y ago
  >> The belief that we can get to AGI comes off as religion to me. It is a substitute for something we can’t really understand, and it will continue to shift the more we learn, yet always remain out of reach. There will be some true believers, and some people simply gunning for power. > As a counterpoint, I feel like the belief that we can't get to AGI comes off as religion. It presupposes an ineffable quality that we posses that machines cannot. That's missing the point: the argument isn't that it's theoretically impossible to build an AGI, just that humans are incapable of it. Here's another point for the belief in AGI being a religion: it's basically a sect of the larger religion of technological progress, which (likely falsely) assumes that technology will continue to "advance" at approximately current rates until we live in a world out of a sci-fi paperback. A lot of people believe that, but frequently resort to a motte-and-bailey fallacy when challenged. > It's always hard to predict the rate of progress, Most of the current optimism comes from how radically wrong predictions were for the capabilities of AI today. 10 years ago a lot of people would have put current AI capability as arriving well after 2050. The jump in progress may not be sustained, but it definitely places doubt on people confidently predicting slow progress. It's worth noting that "the current optimism" is not without precedent. IIRC, there was a big boom in AI in the 70s/80s. SHRDLU was pretty impressive. But then then the promising ideas were found to be dead ends and there was a long winter.
  • inhumantsar 3y ago
    in many ways, we already live in a world out of a sci-fi paperback. I find it hard to fault people for thinking that we'll continue to progress at a fast pace, or at least thinking that we're a long way from a major plateau.
  • kaba0 3y ago
    I think that intelligence has a “bootstrap” level - that human achieved - after which it can practically do most stuff, the bottleneck won’t be intelligence itself. E.g. our mathematics itself has fundamental limitations on what it can prove - I don’t think some machine/different intelligent entity could get further away. At most they are getting their faster.
• mensetmanusman 3y ago
  We can not create the laws of physics, and we are fine with that aspect of immaterial reality.
• olalonde 3y ago
  > I have made plenty of things where understanding the depths of what I had made took far more time and effort than building the thing in the first place. An example of this is electricity. The battery (1800), electric motor (1821) and telegraph (1832) were all invented before the discovery of the electron (1897).
• tomrod 3y ago
  Some folks I suppose take a religious fervor, but for my I look at how a child learns -- through the observation of cause and effect -- and know the current architectures don't support how we have husbanded animals and reared children for eons. The inherent capacity for true self-directed learning may well be there, but it isn't hit yet in what we see. GPTs are still neat.
  • tayo42 3y ago
    I'm not sure that's true. There is reinforcement learning and its branches. I think that's part of how they do ai for chess, go, star craft etc...
  • seanhunter 3y ago
    Why do you think computers would most efficiently learn the way we do? They don’t do anything else (eg arithmetic as an obvious example) anything like humans normally do.
    • tomrod 3y ago
      A deterministic algorithm that adjusts floating point errors for varying chipsets is more complex, agreed. So current implementations are not terribly simple for arithmetic. That highlights my point, I believe, that the only examples of actual learning, where one can make true inferences about the world without the need to collect the entirety of the internet to build transformers, we have to date are wetware, not software.
• mekoka 3y ago
  When someone says that skepticism in human-level AGI probably lies in religious beliefs, it tells me that the person likely believes that they have an idea what science and philosophy are saying on the matter. But I strongly suspect that they never actually looked. Among the small but growing number of modern idealists (the philosophy that consciousness precedes matter), a great deal are actually computer scientists who originally set out to work on AGI from a materialistic frame of reference, but bumped into the conscious machine problem. Once they more closely explored what the cognitive fields working to find answers to this problem are saying, they realized that most scientists approaching consciousness as an emergent property of matter will probably never get anywhere with this. Why is "the hard problem of consciousness" inextricable from human-level AGI? Because intelligence is only one component of our mentation. There is a back and forth between processing and experience that make up the whole thing. A machine can have or even exceed human processing power, but it will not experience the simplest of colors. Its approach to "creating" can be random hit-or-misses, or formulaically from existing input. But without subjective experience it cannot be as intently creative as an artist trying to come up with a new genre, or as funny as a comedian that relies on the shared subtleties of feelings and emotions (conscious experience) to make original work that other humans can resonate with. It cannot have the intuition of a gifted chef who suspects that two seldom combined spices might be an unexpected but resounding success in her new dessert.
  • gfodor 3y ago
    These are just opinions, there is no reason to imagine the phenomenology of qualia is so tightly coupled with creative work and/or making good conjectures. There is a lot of smoke…
  • HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
    What is 'subjective experience' in your view? Multi-modal models are clearly the future, if we provide models with a robot body - sensors, motors, the ability for locomotion - would that be subjective experience?
• inference-lord 3y ago
  We don't have any proof to suggest that "intelligence" grants a fundamental understanding of everything though. It can help us understand "things", do neat stuff, and build models to explain the working and structure of phenomena; However would having an IQ of 5000 mean you are now "God" or gain and understanding of everything including the mystery of existence itself? At some point, it seems important to stop trying to understand the world through ideas and concepts and just experience it. I really think there are more religious like beliefs on the pro AGI camp than the other way around, think about what AI promises to deliver by "visionaries" like Hinton and Kurzweil: * Immortality. * Resurrections. * Nirvana / Heaven / Utopia. For all we know, we create an AGI who becomes amused with fucking itself, or develops new games it finds interesting and spends all eternity playing them. Humans have a belief that we're going to create "god" as we think of "him". All seeing, all knowing, all powerful. It does get a bit ridiculous at times. I sympathize a lot wit the parents view personally.
  • kaba0 3y ago
    Good point, especially that intelligence doesn’t quite scale. Many (most?) of our problems are hard to solve due to lack of data/experimentation over lack of intelligence. And more intelligence won’t help with the infinite scalability of complexity.