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In almost any HN thread that touches on the subject someone manages to express this sort of view. E.g. from the most recent thread I read: https://news.ycombin
by nullc 2y ago
In almost any HN thread that touches on the subject someone manages to express this sort of view. E.g. from the most recent thread I read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40686920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40686920 (apologies for singling out the post, it was impossible to give an example without doing singling out something-- I hope you'll read it in the sense it was intended: an example of a common pattern).
It's even more common in other venues.
That said, from what I've seen the posted article is often used to justify hysteria about AI. For some people the thing protecting them from a meltdown is just a view that superhuman machine intelligence isn't possible, and once that is broken they become vulnerable to cult indoctrination or just general dysfunction.
One needs to maintain perspective, and sometimes an inaccurate view of impossibility is helping a person make better decisions on the whole than they would without it.
- MostlyStable 2y agoI also frequently see the slightly weaker form of argument hypothesizing "diminishing returns" of intelligence or some other claim that humans are close the practical upper limit of intelligence.
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoWhich is pretty stupid, because what human intelligence wouldn't be greatly enhanced by cybernetic math coprocessors and perfect wide memory recall, and a greatly increased lifespan so there wasn't so much collective work done constantly (re)training new generations and passing forward knowledge in 18-30 year education programs, which are constrained by communication mechanisms with bandwidth possibly in the thousand bytes per second rate? The sad fact is that the only real fiction in Isaac Asimov's robots is the ability to impose the laws of robotics.
- card_zero 2y agoBut we have math processors, I own several, they're just not implanted in my head, so what? Why would sticking them in there make me "super-intelligent"? If my calculator has a better interface so I can use it faster, is that also making me more intelligent? These things are tools, the hype about super-intelligence is just about a person with very effective tools. Oh noes!
- Hugsun 2y agoHaving good tools is definitely a force multiplier, but as you say, we already have those. We are however limited in how fast we can interface with these tools. There is a lot of potential improvement from just knowing the answer to a mathematical/logical expression, just by thinking about it. Saving you the context and mode switch. The real power comes from being able to simulate and model complex phenomena using wetware integrated tools. A big component of intelligence is the ability to create accurate mental models, and probe them. If you integrate an accurate physics simulator, a 3D modeler, a ray tracer, etc. You have greatly improved their internal modeling abilities and they can (theoretically) dedicate more neurons to higher abstractions that rely on these well grounded systems. It is also not clear that human level intelligence is any real limit. We could just as well make a super-intelligent AI without tool use. The current hype around tool use is just to make current LLMs a bit better.
- Animats 2y agoYes, that argument keeps coming around. It's become less convincing over time. LLMs are a new kind of intelligence. They sound like humans when trained on text written by humans. That reflects the training set, not the algorithm. We have a hard time getting an intuitive sense of what shape this kind of intelligence has. It's also changing very rapidly. ChatGPT was launched less than two years ago. > For some people the thing protecting them from a meltdown is just a view that superhuman machine intelligence isn't possible, and once that is broken they become vulnerable to cult indoctrination or just general dysfunction. AI would be a bigger political issue if more people understood what's happening. We have no idea how to organize a society where AIs do most of the middle class work. AI is going to break the "College = Success" paradigm more than it's broken already. That doesn't even require superhuman intelligence. Just mid-level human intelligence. The current frontier is getting machine intelligence to consistently avoid random stupidity. Hallucinations, totally wrong answers, that sort of thing. "Common sense" AI is still weak. If that can be fixed, the level at which LLMs currently operate will be superhuman.
- bee_rider 2y agoYeah, AI that was as intelligent as a normal person, or even a fairly dumb one, but which never dies and has unlimited ability to focus on a single problem would probably cause some social hiccups as well.