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> On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to
by nkrisc 2y ago
> On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
- kachapopopow 2y agoAn Artificial Intelligence on that level would be able to easily figure out what you actually want. We should maybe go one step further and get rid of the inputs? They just add all of that complexity when they're not even needed.
- nkrisc 2y agoRight? The AI can just predict what we'll want and then create it for us.
- Filligree 2y agoWell, 'create it' at least. Leaving the humans in place would just mess things up.
- didgetmaster 2y agoIsn't that the whole premise behind 'The Matrix'? An imaginary world created as a simulation by machines.
- Mbwagava 2y agoYea but the world they created wasn't one anyone wanted or asked for any more than our own reality caters to us; it is intended to portray life as it was in the nineties. To accept this as ideal is to accept that we currently live in an ideal world, which is extremely difficult to accept.
- chronid 2y agoIn one of the movies it's actually explained the machines originally created an utopia for humanity, but it was bad for "engagement" and "retention" and they had to pivot on the nineties simulator - which was better accepted.
- Mbwagava 2y agoOk, sure. In neither case was such a world a product of imagination.
- ehnto 2y agoAnd if it wasn't what you wanted, well maybe you are wrong. An AI that intelligent is always right after all. Seriously though, at some point AI does actually need an input from the user, if we are imagining ourselves still as the users. If instead we just let AI synthesise everything, including our demands and desires, then why bother being involved at all. Take the humans out of the loop. Their experience of the outputs of the AI is actually a huge bottleneck, if we skip showing the humans we can exist so much faster.
- namaria 2y agoY'all starting to sound awfully like religious types. Is that satire?
- andrei_says_ 2y agoOr figured out that “perception is reality” and make the necessary adjustments to what we think we want.
- Mbwagava 2y agoAt some point we just need to acknowledge that such speculation is like asking for a magic genie in a bottle rather than discussing literal technology.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago"Magic genie in a bottle" is a very good way of framing what an AGI would (will) be if implemented, complete with all the obvious failure modes that end disastrously for the heroes in magic genie stories.
- namaria 2y agoThat's basically the whole premise of Bostrom's "Superintelligence"
- andrei_says_ 2y agoAlso consider that you won’t know if the answer relates to what you want or not because you have no reference helping distinguish between reality and hallucination. And have been conditioned to accept LLM responses as reality.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoMr. Babbage apparently wasn't familiar with the idea of error correction. I suppose it's only fair; most of the relevant theory was derived in the 20th century, AFAIR.
- kibwen 2y agoNo, error correction in general is a different concept than GIGO. Error correction requires someone, at some point, to have entered the correct figures. GIGO tells you that it doesn't matter if your logical process is infallible, your conclusions will still be incorrect if your observations are wrong.
- Mbwagava 2y agoI suppose spell checking is a sort of literal error correction. Of course this does require a correct list of words and misspellings to not be on that list.
- pixl97 2y agoHonestly I see this not about error but instead divining with perfect accuracy what you want. And when you say it that way it starts sounding like a predicting the future machine.
- Mbwagava 2y agoWell yea as soon as someone starts acting like humans communicate well, let alone the mind-reading behavior you're describing, I'm completely lost.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoGIGO is an overused idea that's mostly meaningless in the real world. The only way for the statement to be true in general sense, is if your input is uniformly random. Anything else carries some information. In practice, for Babbage's quip to hold, the interlocutor doesn't need to merely supply any wrong figures, they need to supply ones specifically engineered to be uncorrelated with the right figures. Again, in general sense. Software engineers are too used to computers being fragile wrt. inputs. Miss a semicolon, program won't compile (or worse, if it's JavaScript). But this level of strictness wrt. inputs is a choice in program design. Error correction was just one example anyway. Programmers may be afraid of garbage in their code, but for everyone else, a lot of software is meant to sift through garbage, identifying and amplifying desired signals in noisy inputs. In other words, they're producing right figures in the output out of wrong ones in the input.
- immibis 2y agoThey were simply asking if Babbage had prepared the machine to always give the answers to the questions Babbage knew he was going to enter - i.e. whether he was a fraud. Enter 2+2. Receive 4. That's the right answer. If you enter 1+1, will you still receive 4? It's easy to make a machine that always says 4.