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Ever thought about ... let's say you were God. You wanted to design intelligence, to control insects, animal bodies and eventually humans. What would it need to
by candiodari 3y ago
Ever thought about ... let's say you were God. You wanted to design intelligence, to control insects, animal bodies and eventually humans. What would it need to do?
Well, you'll quickly find that bodies require constant control to survive. Whilst an animal's body can survive for months with an animal's mind operating at 1% capacity, if the output of the mind truly stops, the body dies. The heart, respiration, the circulatory system (deciding where the blood goes), ... all need to be controlled with some amount of intelligence for them to function at all. Even just to remain alive, they need intelligence. They don't work on reflexes alone.
For mammals, total loss of control leads to fatal injury ... in seconds. Without control, the heart will either stop or (wrong order of muscle firing) be totally ineffective at building pressure in the circulatory system. This will kill oxygen transfer through the blood-brain barrier as soon as the pressure drop reaches the brain, which will be much less than a second, this leads to further loss of control in 2-3 seconds. Irreperable damage sets in before 20 seconds pass, death (permanent and total loss of control) occurs in humans after about 1 minute 30 seconds. The plus side of this seems to be that, when that control is there, mammal bodies are far more efficient than a "passive" robot can be (any robot you can turn off -safely- at any time is a "passive" robot, the big counterexample is a flying drone, which will incur damage and may injure others if turned off or it loses control)
So "predict the next token" is really THE most important function of the brain. Second, it is incredibly important to KEEP predicting the next token, to keep going, and keep going, and keep going, no matter how stupid the output, because literally any output will give a result superior to no output at all. No matter the damage, no matter how terribly wrong things are going, it must keep going further.
- omikun 3y agoI like where you're going with this! I think a stronger argument is that animals can survive so well by ONLY predicting just a few seconds in to the future for the most part. If you own a cat you'll realize most of them don't have a good understand of physical properties like levers or strings or one thing can knock into another. Of course you'll find on SM cats opening doors with uncanny ability. But I can see from my own cat who can open doors, that he has an incredibly rudimentary understanding of levers. He only knows the lever must be moved but not which direction or how. He can only mash at it with his body until it eventually opens. He doesn't understand why a child proof lock stops him from opening the door so he'll try over and over again. With other cats as well, they only form vague associations over either many repetitions or from an emotional experience. But they don't reason the way we can learn from one experience.
- exe34 3y agoIt seems to me you're conflating two different things - control systems and intelligence. We already have pretty good engineering tools for control systems and better ones are discovered now and again. LLMs aren't meant to control individual servos, although it appears that transformers can do that too. The human brain doesn't use the same architecture for controlling the heart as it does for processing vision, for example.
- candiodari 3y agoEveryone's always comparing LLM and trasnformers to the human mind. Hence this is a valid comparison, as the human mind definitely is a control system. And it has the active robot limitation.
- exe34 3y agoEveryone's always compared the human mind to the most advanced technology we have. First it was pumps, then transistors, then computers, and now the highest abstraction so far, the transformer. They may or may not be sufficient to replicate the human mind, but they just haven't failed to scale up and show new abilities yet.