4 ms·

Some people will never be convinced that a machine demonstrates intelligence. This is because for a lot of people, intelligence exists a subjective experience

Some people will never be convinced that a machine demonstrates intelligence. This is because for a lot of people, intelligence exists a subjective experience that they have and the belief that others have it too is only inasmuch as others appear to be like the self.

dekhn 2y ago
This is why I want the field to go straight to building indistinguishable agents- specifically, you should be able to video chat with an avatar that is impossible to tell from a human. Then we can ask "if this is indistinguishable from a human, how can you be sure that anybody is intelligent?" Personally I suspect we can make zombies that appear indistinguishable from humans (limited to video chat; making a robot that appears human to a doctor would be hard) but that don't have self-consciousness or any subjective experience.
- bsder 2y ago
  "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists." LLMs are not artificial intelligence but artificial stupidity. LLMs will happily hallucinate. LLMs will happily tell you total lies with complete confidence. LLMs will give you grammatically perfect completely vapid content. etc. And yet that is still better than what most humans could do in the same situation. We haven't proved that machines can have intelligence, but instead we are happily proving that most people, most of the time just aren't very intelligent at all.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > yet that is still better than what most humans could do in the same situation Yup. A depressing takeaway from LLMs is most humans don’t demonstrate a drive to be curious and understand, but instead, to sort of muddle through most (economic) tasks.
  - vladms 2y ago
    > LLMs will happily hallucinate. LLMs will happily tell you total lies with complete confidence. Perhaps we should avoid anthropomorphizing them too much. LLMs don't inhabit a "real world" where they can experiment and learn. Their training data is their universe, and it's likely filled with conflicting, peculiar, and untestable information. Yes, the output is sometimes "a lie" if we apply it to our world, but in "their world" stuff is might be just strangely different. And it's not like the real world has only "hard simple truths" - quantum mechanics comes to mind about how strange stuff can be.
- ActorNightly 2y ago
  Thats not really intelligence though.
6stringmerc 2y ago
It is until proven otherwise because modern science still doesn’t have a consensus or standards or biological tests which can account for it. As in, highly “intelligent” people often lack “common sense” or fall prey to con artists. It’s pompous as shit to assert a black box mimicry constitutes intelligence. Wake me up when it can learn to play a guitar and write something as good as Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. Hint: we’ll both be dead before that happens.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  I can't write something as good as Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. Ergo I'm not intelligent.
  - coffeeaddict1 2y ago
    This to me is a weak argument. You have the ability to appreciate and judge something as good as Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. That's what makes you intelligent.
    - motorest 2y ago
      > This to me is a weak argument. You have the ability to appreciate and judge something as good as Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. That's what makes you intelligent. What if you don't? Do you think that makes someone not intelligent? Think about it for a second.
      - coffeeaddict1 2y ago
        Yes. If you do not possess the potential ability to judge other human beings and/or their work, you lack intelligence.
    - aidenn0 2y ago
      1. I'm sure if I were to ask an LLM for opinions on Dylan and Petty, it would provide them. 2. I don't know if this was the point the original was making, but I personally think Dylan is a bit overrated as a songwriter (and the one time I saw him live, he was only so-so as a performer, but I don't think that's exactly a hot take).
meroes 2y ago
It doesn’t mean they tie intelligence to subjective experience. Take digestion. Can a computer simulate digestion, yes. But no computer can “digest” if it’s just silicon in the corner of an office. There are two hurdles. The leap from simulating intelligence to intelligence, and the leap from intelligence to subjective experience. If the computer gets attached to a mechanism that physically breaks down organic material, that’s the first leap. If the computer gains a first person experience of that process, that’s the second. You can’t just short-circuit from simulates to does to has subjective experience. And the claim other humans don’t have subjective experience is such non-starter.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  I think you're talking about consciousness rather than intelligence. While I do see people regularly distinguishing between simulation and reality for consciousness, I don't often see people make that distinction for intelligence. > And the claim other humans don’t have subjective experience is such non-starter. What about other primates? Other mammals? The smarter species of cephalopods? Certain many psychopaths seem to act as if they have this belief.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  > And the claim other humans don’t have subjective experience is such non-starter. There is no empirical test for the subjective experience of consciousness. You can't even prove to anybody else that you have it. We assume other people experience as we ourselves do as a basic decency we extend to other humans. This is a good thing, but it's essentially faith not science. As for machines not having it, I'm fine with that assumption, but until there can be some sort of empirical test for it, it's not science. Thankfully, it's also not relevant to any engineering matter. Whether the machines have a subjective experience in any way comparable to our own doesn't touch any question about what demonstrable capabilities or limitations they have. We don't need to know if the computer has a ""soul"" to know if the computer can be a solution to any given engineering problem. Whether machines can have subjective experience shouldn't be considered an important question to engineers; let theologians waste their time fruitlessly debating that.
shmel 2y ago
How do they convince themselves that other people have intelligence too?
simonw 2y ago
It's called the AI effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect > The author Pamela McCorduck writes: "It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'."
- qzw 2y ago
  > somebody figured out how to make a computer do something Well, I would argue that in most deterministic AI systems the thinking was all done by the AI researchers and then encoded for the computer. That’s why historically it’s been easy to say, “No, the machine isn’t doing any thinking, but only applying thinking that’s embedded within.” I think that line of argument becomes less obvious when you have learning systems where the behavior is training dependent. It’s still fairly safe to argue that the best LLMs today are not yet thinking, at least not in a way a human does. But in another generation or two? It will become much harder to deny.
  - svieira 2y ago
    > It’s still fairly safe to argue that the best LLMs today are not ... thinking I agree completely. > But in another generation or two? It will become much harder to deny. Unless there is something ... categorically different about what an LLM does and in a generation or two we can articulate what that is (30 years of looking at something makes it easier to understand ... sometimes).
    - aorloff 2y ago
      Intelligence requires agency
  - otabdeveloper4 2y ago
    In many ways LLMs are a regression compared to what was before. They solve a huge class of problems quickly and cheaply, but they also have severe limitations that older methods didn't have. So no, it's not a linear progress story like in a sci-fi story.
AndrewKemendo 2y ago
Humans are basically incapable of recognizing that there’s something that’s more powerful than them They’re never going to actively collectively admit that that’s the case, because humans collectively are so so systematically arrogant and self possessed that they’re not even open to the possibility of being lower on the intelligence totem pole The only possible way forward for AI is to create the thing that everybody is so scared of so they can actually realize their place in the universe
- skissane 2y ago
  > Humans are basically incapable of recognizing that there’s something that’s more powerful than them > They’re never going to actively collectively admit that that’s the case, because humans collectively are so so systematically arrogant and self possessed that they’re not even open to the possibility of being lower on the intelligence totem pole For most of human history, the clear majority of humans have believed in God(s), spirits, angels, bodhisattvas, etc - beings which by definition are above us on the “totem pole” - and although atheism is much more widespread today, I think it almost certainly remains a minority viewpoint at the global level. So I’m sceptical of your idea humans have some inherent unwillingness to believe in superhuman entities. From an atheist perspective, one might say that the (globally/historically) average human is so eager to believe in such entities, that if they don’t actually exist, they’ll imagine them and then convince themselves that their imaginings are entirely real. (Whereas, a theist might argue that the human eagerness to believe in such entities is better explained by their existence.)
  - AndrewKemendo 2y ago
    Religious people - depending on type - use the God as cosplay or as some kind of deus ex machina that they are merged with in their mind. Ask a deeply religious person about the separation between themselves and God and each tradition has their own version of being one with God or that they’ll become God etc… It’s all the same because it’s ultimately about their relationship with how they define their God - having a “religious experience” where you realize “you are a part of god and get benefit etc..” is frankly a requirement to be a religion In part that’s why it’s hard to call some versions of Buddhism religions and even harder for eg Hindus
AIPedant 2y ago
I will not be convinced a machine demonstrates intelligence until someone demonstrates a robot that can navigate 3D space as intelligently as, say, a cockroach. AFAICT we are still many years away from this, probably decades. A bunch of human language knowledge and brittle heuristics doesn't convince me at all. This ad hominem is really irritating. People have complained since Alan Turing that AI research ignores simpler intelligence, instead trying to bedazzle people with fancy tricks that convey the illusion of human intelligence. Still true today: lots of talk about o3's (exaggerated) ability to do fancy math, little talk about its appallingly bad general quantitative reasoning. The idea of "jagged AI" is unscientific horseshit designed to sweep this stuff under the rug.
felipeerias 2y ago
In the natural world, intelligence requires embodiment. And, depending on your point of view, consciousness. Modern AI exhibits neither of those characteristics.

dekhn 2y ago

This is why I want the field to go straight to building indistinguishable agents- specifically, you should be able to video chat with an avatar that is impossible to tell from a human. Then we can ask "if this is indistinguishable from a human, how can you be sure that anybody is intelligent?" Personally I suspect we can make zombies that appear indistinguishable from humans (limited to video chat; making a robot that appears human to a doctor would be hard) but that don't have self-consciousness or any subjective experience.

bsder 2y ago
"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists." LLMs are not artificial intelligence but artificial stupidity. LLMs will happily hallucinate. LLMs will happily tell you total lies with complete confidence. LLMs will give you grammatically perfect completely vapid content. etc. And yet that is still better than what most humans could do in the same situation. We haven't proved that machines can have intelligence, but instead we are happily proving that most people, most of the time just aren't very intelligent at all.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > yet that is still better than what most humans could do in the same situation Yup. A depressing takeaway from LLMs is most humans don’t demonstrate a drive to be curious and understand, but instead, to sort of muddle through most (economic) tasks.
- vladms 2y ago
  > LLMs will happily hallucinate. LLMs will happily tell you total lies with complete confidence. Perhaps we should avoid anthropomorphizing them too much. LLMs don't inhabit a "real world" where they can experiment and learn. Their training data is their universe, and it's likely filled with conflicting, peculiar, and untestable information. Yes, the output is sometimes "a lie" if we apply it to our world, but in "their world" stuff is might be just strangely different. And it's not like the real world has only "hard simple truths" - quantum mechanics comes to mind about how strange stuff can be.
ActorNightly 2y ago
Thats not really intelligence though.

6stringmerc 2y ago

It is until proven otherwise because modern science still doesn’t have a consensus or standards or biological tests which can account for it. As in, highly “intelligent” people often lack “common sense” or fall prey to con artists. It’s pompous as shit to assert a black box mimicry constitutes intelligence. Wake me up when it can learn to play a guitar and write something as good as Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. Hint: we’ll both be dead before that happens.

aidenn0 2y ago
I can't write something as good as Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. Ergo I'm not intelligent.
- coffeeaddict1 2y ago
  This to me is a weak argument. You have the ability to appreciate and judge something as good as Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. That's what makes you intelligent.
  - motorest 2y ago
    > This to me is a weak argument. You have the ability to appreciate and judge something as good as Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. That's what makes you intelligent. What if you don't? Do you think that makes someone not intelligent? Think about it for a second.
    - coffeeaddict1 2y ago
      Yes. If you do not possess the potential ability to judge other human beings and/or their work, you lack intelligence.
  - aidenn0 2y ago
    1. I'm sure if I were to ask an LLM for opinions on Dylan and Petty, it would provide them. 2. I don't know if this was the point the original was making, but I personally think Dylan is a bit overrated as a songwriter (and the one time I saw him live, he was only so-so as a performer, but I don't think that's exactly a hot take).

meroes 2y ago

It doesn’t mean they tie intelligence to subjective experience. Take digestion. Can a computer simulate digestion, yes. But no computer can “digest” if it’s just silicon in the corner of an office. There are two hurdles. The leap from simulating intelligence to intelligence, and the leap from intelligence to subjective experience. If the computer gets attached to a mechanism that physically breaks down organic material, that’s the first leap. If the computer gains a first person experience of that process, that’s the second. You can’t just short-circuit from simulates to does to has subjective experience. And the claim other humans don’t have subjective experience is such non-starter.

aidenn0 2y ago
I think you're talking about consciousness rather than intelligence. While I do see people regularly distinguishing between simulation and reality for consciousness, I don't often see people make that distinction for intelligence. > And the claim other humans don’t have subjective experience is such non-starter. What about other primates? Other mammals? The smarter species of cephalopods? Certain many psychopaths seem to act as if they have this belief.
lupusreal 2y ago
> And the claim other humans don’t have subjective experience is such non-starter. There is no empirical test for the subjective experience of consciousness. You can't even prove to anybody else that you have it. We assume other people experience as we ourselves do as a basic decency we extend to other humans. This is a good thing, but it's essentially faith not science. As for machines not having it, I'm fine with that assumption, but until there can be some sort of empirical test for it, it's not science. Thankfully, it's also not relevant to any engineering matter. Whether the machines have a subjective experience in any way comparable to our own doesn't touch any question about what demonstrable capabilities or limitations they have. We don't need to know if the computer has a ""soul"" to know if the computer can be a solution to any given engineering problem. Whether machines can have subjective experience shouldn't be considered an important question to engineers; let theologians waste their time fruitlessly debating that.

shmel 2y ago

How do they convince themselves that other people have intelligence too?

simonw 2y ago

It's called the AI effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect > The author Pamela McCorduck writes: "It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'."

qzw 2y ago
> somebody figured out how to make a computer do something Well, I would argue that in most deterministic AI systems the thinking was all done by the AI researchers and then encoded for the computer. That’s why historically it’s been easy to say, “No, the machine isn’t doing any thinking, but only applying thinking that’s embedded within.” I think that line of argument becomes less obvious when you have learning systems where the behavior is training dependent. It’s still fairly safe to argue that the best LLMs today are not yet thinking, at least not in a way a human does. But in another generation or two? It will become much harder to deny.
- svieira 2y ago
  > It’s still fairly safe to argue that the best LLMs today are not ... thinking I agree completely. > But in another generation or two? It will become much harder to deny. Unless there is something ... categorically different about what an LLM does and in a generation or two we can articulate what that is (30 years of looking at something makes it easier to understand ... sometimes).
  - aorloff 2y ago
    Intelligence requires agency
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago
  In many ways LLMs are a regression compared to what was before. They solve a huge class of problems quickly and cheaply, but they also have severe limitations that older methods didn't have. So no, it's not a linear progress story like in a sci-fi story.

AndrewKemendo 2y ago

Humans are basically incapable of recognizing that there’s something that’s more powerful than them They’re never going to actively collectively admit that that’s the case, because humans collectively are so so systematically arrogant and self possessed that they’re not even open to the possibility of being lower on the intelligence totem pole The only possible way forward for AI is to create the thing that everybody is so scared of so they can actually realize their place in the universe

skissane 2y ago
> Humans are basically incapable of recognizing that there’s something that’s more powerful than them > They’re never going to actively collectively admit that that’s the case, because humans collectively are so so systematically arrogant and self possessed that they’re not even open to the possibility of being lower on the intelligence totem pole For most of human history, the clear majority of humans have believed in God(s), spirits, angels, bodhisattvas, etc - beings which by definition are above us on the “totem pole” - and although atheism is much more widespread today, I think it almost certainly remains a minority viewpoint at the global level. So I’m sceptical of your idea humans have some inherent unwillingness to believe in superhuman entities. From an atheist perspective, one might say that the (globally/historically) average human is so eager to believe in such entities, that if they don’t actually exist, they’ll imagine them and then convince themselves that their imaginings are entirely real. (Whereas, a theist might argue that the human eagerness to believe in such entities is better explained by their existence.)
- AndrewKemendo 2y ago
  Religious people - depending on type - use the God as cosplay or as some kind of deus ex machina that they are merged with in their mind. Ask a deeply religious person about the separation between themselves and God and each tradition has their own version of being one with God or that they’ll become God etc… It’s all the same because it’s ultimately about their relationship with how they define their God - having a “religious experience” where you realize “you are a part of god and get benefit etc..” is frankly a requirement to be a religion In part that’s why it’s hard to call some versions of Buddhism religions and even harder for eg Hindus

AIPedant 2y ago

I will not be convinced a machine demonstrates intelligence until someone demonstrates a robot that can navigate 3D space as intelligently as, say, a cockroach. AFAICT we are still many years away from this, probably decades. A bunch of human language knowledge and brittle heuristics doesn't convince me at all. This ad hominem is really irritating. People have complained since Alan Turing that AI research ignores simpler intelligence, instead trying to bedazzle people with fancy tricks that convey the illusion of human intelligence. Still true today: lots of talk about o3's (exaggerated) ability to do fancy math, little talk about its appallingly bad general quantitative reasoning. The idea of "jagged AI" is unscientific horseshit designed to sweep this stuff under the rug.

felipeerias 2y ago

In the natural world, intelligence requires embodiment. And, depending on your point of view, consciousness. Modern AI exhibits neither of those characteristics.