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> Do you think that AI is having a big enough impact already to generate this valuation? Is it changing your life? I'm actually quite bearish on AI on the very

by dvt 2y ago

> Do you think that AI is having a big enough impact already to generate this valuation? Is it changing your life? I'm actually quite bearish on AI on the very long term (and as a trained philosopher, I don't buy into the whole AGI nonsense), but I do think AI will redefine how we interact with our computers/devices in the short-to-medium term. These days, everyone's too enamored with the generative aspect (which is, for the most park, bunk), and for whatever reason ignoring the way more value-generating aspects (synthesis, categorization, summarization, validation/invocation, etc.).

gizajob 2y ago
Funnily enough my bachelors thesis was “Wittgensteinian problems for Artificial General Intelligence” so I also have grounds for being bearish, even though I respect what is happening at the moment and have hope for the future.
- N0b8ez 2y ago
  Is the Wittgensteinian problem that the AGI wouldn't understand concepts like we do, or is the problem that it wouldn't be able to use them better than a human?
  - gizajob 2y ago
    There’s a few different ways one can look at it if trying to take lessons and ideas from Wittgenstein. I didn’t do a brilliant job of the thesis to be honest… but I got a few things on an intuitive level from trying to grok a bunch of Wittgenstein that left me feeling like there was a serious problem in our attempts to build an AI. One of them is that we only have language with which to build an AI - language and symbols. Yet these nevertheless capture absolutely nothing about what it is to perceive and understand, on a human level, so yeah. It’s kind of what Searle was getting at - symbolic outputs and translation based on rules doesn’t get you intelligence, even if it produces a system that looks as if it is intelligent. There’s also that we have an intersubjective attunement to others that is pre-linguistic. Ultimately “meaning is use” which is a pithy take on later Wittgenstein- there’s nothing in language which means anything at all. So it’s not that it wouldn’t be able to use language or concepts better than we do, it’s that we change with the AI and don’t accept them - particularly as they start to become uncanny or unpredictable. There really is something to sentience that we all know that cannot be reduced to language or machinery. Our language about machinery, and intelligent machinery, is full of usage mistakes and categorical errors that we overlook, but which are more serious when analysed. We are complete beings - my intelligence is part of a system, and it makes no sense to abstract it out of that system in order to nail it down. “Pain” cannot be reduced down to or captured in language. Suffering is part of our intelligence and we’d be nowhere without it. So ideas kind of like that and more. AGI would have to suffer to become general enough to warrant the use of the word general.
    - N0b8ez 2y ago
      >AGI would have to suffer to become general enough to warrant the use of the word general. Jo Cameron doesn't have general intelligence? This seems absurd. Intelligence is orthogonal to phenomenology and affective states. People aren't worried about AGI because it might have a Cartesian theater, the worry is that it might be more competent than humans and put humans out of a job. The semantics of whether it "truly" has intelligence is irrelevant. >Suffering is part of our intelligence and we’d be nowhere without it. It might be part of our intelligence, but why would it need to be part of machine's intelligence? GPT4 is already beating humans at theory of mind tasks[1], and I doubt that it suffers. Our suffering is an evolutionary stroke of bad luck. It has nothing to do with intelligence itself, and it would have been better if we had evolved some other way that didn't need it. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z
      - gizajob 2y ago
        If LLMs are beating humans in theory of mind tasks, your theory of mind is incorrect. I’d not heard of Jo Cameron but one outlier, for me, wouldn’t hyper-negate the whole idea out of existence. A huge amount of what I suffer with is not physical pain.
        N0b8ez 2y ago
        > A huge amount of what I suffer with is not physical pain. It's not just physical suffering that she's supposedly immune to. She's also immune to all psychological suffering as well. And she is married, has kids, and is perfectly healthy. If she's in fact the real deal (I don't know this myself, but I haven't seen anyone debunking her) then dismissing her as an outlier would be a remarkable form of complacency. If the effect can be understood and replicated, suffering will become fully as needless as it deserves to be, with its final eradication mourned probably as much as the death of smallpox. > If LLMs are beating humans in theory of mind tasks, your theory of mind is incorrect. Or, LLMs have better theory of mind than most humans do, which is the finding of that study. Is it metaphysically impossible? If your mental image of how LLM cognition works is the same type of expert system that Searle was writing about back in the day, it's refreshingly bizarre to read how LLMs appear to work: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-und... Where is the Chinese Room in this? I don't see one. Just a lot of complex and vague conceptual associations mediated through neural connections. Whether or not these models are conscious or have an inner life, they seem to be doing just fine understanding concepts.
digging 2y ago
> as a trained philosopher, I don't buy into the whole AGI nonsense Can you elaborate on why you believe AGI is nonsense? > ignoring the way more value-generating aspects (synthesis, categorization, summarization, etc.) Summarization is one of the most common applications of LLMs I see. I expect if I knew more precisely what you meant by the other two we'd find examples of those, too. Everybody is trying to find out what these tools can do and throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. People are doing exactly what one would expect them to do.
- dvt 2y ago
  > Can you elaborate on why you believe AGI is nonsense? John Searle is much smarter than I am and he elaborated plenty on this in the 80s. (But more saliently, I think it's absurd to think our brains, or brains in general, do polynomial curve fitting in any meaningful sense.) > Summarization is one of the most common applications of LLMs I see. This is true, though the workflow is extremely cumbersome. > People are doing exactly what one would expect them to do. I don't disagree, I think people are moving in the right direction (albeit slowly). Maybe the generative aspect is just more awe-inducing rather than "oh hey this thing creates calendar events out of any date," even though the latter would be way more useful.
  - N0b8ez 2y ago
    > But more saliently, I think it's absurd to think our brains, or brains in general, do polynomial curve fitting in any meaningful sense. Why would an AI need to use the same mechanisms as a human to think? Most machines we create are quite different in character from their natural counterparts (what bird has a propeller?)
  - FreakLegion 2y ago
    Searle's arguments aren't that broad. If you're thinking of the Chinese Room, the point there is simply that computation isn't understanding. It's not a claim that AGI is nonsense in principle, and in fact most of these older arguments are narrowly scoped to GOFAI. Of course nobody serious thinks LLMs have minds, either, but unless you believe in ghosts it's hard to make a case that human-like AGI shouldn't ultimately be possible.
N0b8ez 2y ago
Are you thinking of Searle's Chinese Room or another famous thought experiment? Is your issue that an AGI wouldn't really "understand" concepts, despite being better at using them than a human? >and as a trained philosopher, I don't buy into the whole AGI nonsense It's hard to imagine Socrates using this form of argument.
- gizajob 2y ago
  Yeah but Socrates mostly just spent all day convincing people they were stupid.
  - N0b8ez 2y ago
    I tend to admire that Socrates used arguments in the process of that, unlike both of us right now.
    - gizajob 2y ago
      I really dig Socrates, and his arguments. I also dig Nietzsche for pointing out “he was a buffoon who got himself killed”. Dialectics is useful up to the point you start going round in circles and that is as far as most ever get with it.
      - N0b8ez 2y ago
        Well, if we're taking the stories at face value, Socrates knew what he was getting himself into when he chose to die, even when he could have easily escaped. He died to prove a point. If Nietzsche thinks this is silly, it's one of those times he's at odds with his own philosophy. > To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there (Twilight of the Idols, 1888)
        gizajob 2y ago

by dvt 2y ago

gizajob 2y ago

Funnily enough my bachelors thesis was “Wittgensteinian problems for Artificial General Intelligence” so I also have grounds for being bearish, even though I respect what is happening at the moment and have hope for the future.

N0b8ez 2y ago
Is the Wittgensteinian problem that the AGI wouldn't understand concepts like we do, or is the problem that it wouldn't be able to use them better than a human?
- gizajob 2y ago
  There’s a few different ways one can look at it if trying to take lessons and ideas from Wittgenstein. I didn’t do a brilliant job of the thesis to be honest… but I got a few things on an intuitive level from trying to grok a bunch of Wittgenstein that left me feeling like there was a serious problem in our attempts to build an AI. One of them is that we only have language with which to build an AI - language and symbols. Yet these nevertheless capture absolutely nothing about what it is to perceive and understand, on a human level, so yeah. It’s kind of what Searle was getting at - symbolic outputs and translation based on rules doesn’t get you intelligence, even if it produces a system that looks as if it is intelligent. There’s also that we have an intersubjective attunement to others that is pre-linguistic. Ultimately “meaning is use” which is a pithy take on later Wittgenstein- there’s nothing in language which means anything at all. So it’s not that it wouldn’t be able to use language or concepts better than we do, it’s that we change with the AI and don’t accept them - particularly as they start to become uncanny or unpredictable. There really is something to sentience that we all know that cannot be reduced to language or machinery. Our language about machinery, and intelligent machinery, is full of usage mistakes and categorical errors that we overlook, but which are more serious when analysed. We are complete beings - my intelligence is part of a system, and it makes no sense to abstract it out of that system in order to nail it down. “Pain” cannot be reduced down to or captured in language. Suffering is part of our intelligence and we’d be nowhere without it. So ideas kind of like that and more. AGI would have to suffer to become general enough to warrant the use of the word general.
  - N0b8ez 2y ago
    >AGI would have to suffer to become general enough to warrant the use of the word general. Jo Cameron doesn't have general intelligence? This seems absurd. Intelligence is orthogonal to phenomenology and affective states. People aren't worried about AGI because it might have a Cartesian theater, the worry is that it might be more competent than humans and put humans out of a job. The semantics of whether it "truly" has intelligence is irrelevant. >Suffering is part of our intelligence and we’d be nowhere without it. It might be part of our intelligence, but why would it need to be part of machine's intelligence? GPT4 is already beating humans at theory of mind tasks[1], and I doubt that it suffers. Our suffering is an evolutionary stroke of bad luck. It has nothing to do with intelligence itself, and it would have been better if we had evolved some other way that didn't need it. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z
    - gizajob 2y ago
      If LLMs are beating humans in theory of mind tasks, your theory of mind is incorrect. I’d not heard of Jo Cameron but one outlier, for me, wouldn’t hyper-negate the whole idea out of existence. A huge amount of what I suffer with is not physical pain.
      - N0b8ez 2y ago
        > A huge amount of what I suffer with is not physical pain. It's not just physical suffering that she's supposedly immune to. She's also immune to all psychological suffering as well. And she is married, has kids, and is perfectly healthy. If she's in fact the real deal (I don't know this myself, but I haven't seen anyone debunking her) then dismissing her as an outlier would be a remarkable form of complacency. If the effect can be understood and replicated, suffering will become fully as needless as it deserves to be, with its final eradication mourned probably as much as the death of smallpox. > If LLMs are beating humans in theory of mind tasks, your theory of mind is incorrect. Or, LLMs have better theory of mind than most humans do, which is the finding of that study. Is it metaphysically impossible? If your mental image of how LLM cognition works is the same type of expert system that Searle was writing about back in the day, it's refreshingly bizarre to read how LLMs appear to work: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-und... Where is the Chinese Room in this? I don't see one. Just a lot of complex and vague conceptual associations mediated through neural connections. Whether or not these models are conscious or have an inner life, they seem to be doing just fine understanding concepts.

digging 2y ago

> as a trained philosopher, I don't buy into the whole AGI nonsense Can you elaborate on why you believe AGI is nonsense? > ignoring the way more value-generating aspects (synthesis, categorization, summarization, etc.) Summarization is one of the most common applications of LLMs I see. I expect if I knew more precisely what you meant by the other two we'd find examples of those, too. Everybody is trying to find out what these tools can do and throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. People are doing exactly what one would expect them to do.

dvt 2y ago
> Can you elaborate on why you believe AGI is nonsense? John Searle is much smarter than I am and he elaborated plenty on this in the 80s. (But more saliently, I think it's absurd to think our brains, or brains in general, do polynomial curve fitting in any meaningful sense.) > Summarization is one of the most common applications of LLMs I see. This is true, though the workflow is extremely cumbersome. > People are doing exactly what one would expect them to do. I don't disagree, I think people are moving in the right direction (albeit slowly). Maybe the generative aspect is just more awe-inducing rather than "oh hey this thing creates calendar events out of any date," even though the latter would be way more useful.
- N0b8ez 2y ago
  > But more saliently, I think it's absurd to think our brains, or brains in general, do polynomial curve fitting in any meaningful sense. Why would an AI need to use the same mechanisms as a human to think? Most machines we create are quite different in character from their natural counterparts (what bird has a propeller?)
- FreakLegion 2y ago
  Searle's arguments aren't that broad. If you're thinking of the Chinese Room, the point there is simply that computation isn't understanding. It's not a claim that AGI is nonsense in principle, and in fact most of these older arguments are narrowly scoped to GOFAI. Of course nobody serious thinks LLMs have minds, either, but unless you believe in ghosts it's hard to make a case that human-like AGI shouldn't ultimately be possible.

N0b8ez 2y ago

Are you thinking of Searle's Chinese Room or another famous thought experiment? Is your issue that an AGI wouldn't really "understand" concepts, despite being better at using them than a human? >and as a trained philosopher, I don't buy into the whole AGI nonsense It's hard to imagine Socrates using this form of argument.

gizajob 2y ago
Yeah but Socrates mostly just spent all day convincing people they were stupid.
- N0b8ez 2y ago
  I tend to admire that Socrates used arguments in the process of that, unlike both of us right now.
  - gizajob 2y ago
    I really dig Socrates, and his arguments. I also dig Nietzsche for pointing out “he was a buffoon who got himself killed”. Dialectics is useful up to the point you start going round in circles and that is as far as most ever get with it.
    - N0b8ez 2y ago
      Well, if we're taking the stories at face value, Socrates knew what he was getting himself into when he chose to die, even when he could have easily escaped. He died to prove a point. If Nietzsche thinks this is silly, it's one of those times he's at odds with his own philosophy. > To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there (Twilight of the Idols, 1888)
      - gizajob 2y ago