4 ms·

this is not evidence in favor of your position. We could use this to argue in favor of anything such as “humans will eventually develop time travel” or “we will

this is not evidence in favor of your position. We could use this to argue in favor of anything such as “humans will eventually develop time travel” or “we will have cost effective fusion power”. The fact is many things we’ve tried to develop for decades still don’t exist. Nothing is guaranteed

mitthrowaway2 2y ago
I'd put decent odds on a $1B research project developing time travel if time travel were an ability that every human child was innately born with. It's never easy to recreate what biology has done, but nature providing an "existence proof" goes a long way towards removing doubt about it being fundamentally possible.
- zombiwoof 2y ago
  Nature didn’t build intelligence with non biological activity. And we won’t either
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    There's a big difference between "this project is like time travel or cold fusion; it's doubtful whether the laws of physics even permit it" and "this project is like heavier-than-air flight; we know birds do it somehow, but there's no way our crude metal machines will ever match them". I'm confident which of those problems will get solved given, say, a hundred years or so, once people roll up their sleeves and get working on it.
  - vasco 2y ago
    "Biological activity" is just computation with different energy requirements. If science rules the universe we're complex automata, and biologic machines or non-biological machines are just different combinations of atoms that are computing around.
  - vidarh 2y ago
    Unless you have any evidence suggesting that one or more of the variations of the Church-Turing thesis is false, this is closer to a statement of faith than science. Basically, unless you can show humans calculating a non-Turing computable function, the notion that intelligence requires a biological system is an absolutely extraordinary claim. If you were to argue about conscience or subjective experience or something equally woolly, you might have a stronger point, and this does not at all suggest that current-architecture LLMs will necessarily achieve it.
fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
Humans are an existing proof of human level intelligence. There are only two fundamental possibilities why this could not be replicated in silicon: 1. There is a chemical-level nature to intelligence which prevents other elements like silicon from being used as a substrate for intelligence 2. There is a non material aspect to intelligence that cannot be replicated except by humans To my knowledge, there is no scientific evidence that either are true and there is already a large body of evidence that implies that intelligence happens at a higher level of abstraction than the individual chemical reactions of synapses, ie. the neural network, which does not rely on the existence of any specific chemicals in the system except in as much as they perform certain functions that seemingly could be performed by other materials. If anything, this is more like speculating that there is a way to create energy from sunlight using plants as an existence proof of the possibility of doing so. More specifically, this is a bet that an existing physical phenomenon can be replicated using a different substrate.

mitthrowaway2 2y ago

I'd put decent odds on a $1B research project developing time travel if time travel were an ability that every human child was innately born with. It's never easy to recreate what biology has done, but nature providing an "existence proof" goes a long way towards removing doubt about it being fundamentally possible.

zombiwoof 2y ago
Nature didn’t build intelligence with non biological activity. And we won’t either
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  There's a big difference between "this project is like time travel or cold fusion; it's doubtful whether the laws of physics even permit it" and "this project is like heavier-than-air flight; we know birds do it somehow, but there's no way our crude metal machines will ever match them". I'm confident which of those problems will get solved given, say, a hundred years or so, once people roll up their sleeves and get working on it.
- vasco 2y ago
  "Biological activity" is just computation with different energy requirements. If science rules the universe we're complex automata, and biologic machines or non-biological machines are just different combinations of atoms that are computing around.
- vidarh 2y ago
  Unless you have any evidence suggesting that one or more of the variations of the Church-Turing thesis is false, this is closer to a statement of faith than science. Basically, unless you can show humans calculating a non-Turing computable function, the notion that intelligence requires a biological system is an absolutely extraordinary claim. If you were to argue about conscience or subjective experience or something equally woolly, you might have a stronger point, and this does not at all suggest that current-architecture LLMs will necessarily achieve it.

fngjdflmdflg 2y ago

Humans are an existing proof of human level intelligence. There are only two fundamental possibilities why this could not be replicated in silicon: 1. There is a chemical-level nature to intelligence which prevents other elements like silicon from being used as a substrate for intelligence 2. There is a non material aspect to intelligence that cannot be replicated except by humans To my knowledge, there is no scientific evidence that either are true and there is already a large body of evidence that implies that intelligence happens at a higher level of abstraction than the individual chemical reactions of synapses, ie. the neural network, which does not rely on the existence of any specific chemicals in the system except in as much as they perform certain functions that seemingly could be performed by other materials. If anything, this is more like speculating that there is a way to create energy from sunlight using plants as an existence proof of the possibility of doing so. More specifically, this is a bet that an existing physical phenomenon can be replicated using a different substrate.