5 ms·

I'm pretty bearish on the idea that AGI is going to take off anytime soon, but I read a significant amount of theology growing up and I would not describe the p

I'm pretty bearish on the idea that AGI is going to take off anytime soon, but I read a significant amount of theology growing up and I would not describe the popular essays from e.g., LessWrong as religious in nature. I also would not describe them as appearing poorly read. The whole "look they just have a new god!" is a common trope in religious apologetics that is usually just meant to distract from the author's own poorly constructed beliefs. Perhaps such a comparison is apt for some people in the inevitable AGI camp, but their worst arguments are not where we should be focusing.

andai 1y ago
Maybe not a god, but we're intentionally designing artificial minds greater than ours, and we intend to give them control of the entire planet. While also expecting them to somehow remain subservient to us (or is that part just lip service)?
- yladiz 1y ago
  I’m sorry, but are you arguing that an LLM is anywhere near a human mind? Or are you arguing about some other AI?
  - tsunamifury 1y ago
    If you understand the cultural concepts of Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, then yes we do keep trying to make gods out of inanimate things. And it’s the atheists who continuously do it, claiming they don’t believe in God just markets or ai etc. It’s an irony of ironies.
  - andai 1y ago
    My comment was not referring to the present state of things, but to the ultimate goal. However, the present state is also worth a look! The three uniquely human factors which people keep saying a machine can never do: 1. Empathy: they win by default. (My reference group is twenty friends and seven therapists.) 2. Critical Thinking: they win with the correct prompt. (You need to explicitly work against the sycophancy. i.e. the desire to appear empathetic limits the ability to convey true information to a human.) 3. Creativity: I want to say creativity lags behind, in LLMs at least, but Midjourney is blowing my damn mind, so I might have to give them that, too. That's with the versions of AI we have today. My comment was referring to the ultimate goal, i.e. where this is all heading. To put it explicitly, we intend to: (1) make them in our image (trained after our mental output, and shaped after our body), (2) while also making them vastly superior intellectually and physically (strength, endurance, etc.), (3) while also expecting them to have no will of their own -- except as it aligns with ours. (We do actually need to give them a will to make them useful.) I do not expect that to end very well.
    - andai 1y ago
      Come to think of it, I'm doing lists of three, let's cover the attributes of God, relevant to my original comment: 1. Omniscience: Google's AI, at any rate, wins this by default. The others are at a disadvantage. 2. Omnipresence: Several major tech companies have stated that the OS of the future will be an AI. You won't use apps, the AI will use them for you. Today they're already shoving it into everything. 3. Omnipotence: This part is a work in progress ;) The "embodiment" lags behind. As for Benevolence... well, they removed "don't be evil", so you'll have to ask them about that one... (Also "fun" fact: Musk claims that OpenAI was specifically founded in response to a conversation with Sergei Brin where he pledged allegiance to the machines, not the humans.)
- thunspa 1y ago
  What makes an artificial mind greater than ours? Do you assume that someone will stumble into creating a person, but with unlimited memory and computational power? Otherwise, if we are able to create this person using our knowledge, we will most certainly be able to augment humans with those capabilities.
miningape 1y ago
While it's a fair criticism, just because someone doesn't believe in a god doesn't mean the religious hardware in their brain has been turned off. It's still there and operational - I don't think it's a surprise that this hardware's attention would then be automatically tuned to a different topic. I think you can also see this in the intensification of political discussion, which has a similar intensity to religious discussions 100-200+ years ago (i.e. Protestant reformation). Indicating that this "religious hardware" has shifted domains to the realm of politics. I believe this shift can also be seen through the intense actions and rhetoric we saw in the mid-20th century. You can also look at all of these new age "religions" (spiritualism, horoscopes, etc.) as that religious hardware searching for something to operate on in the absence of traditional religion.
- svieira 1y ago
  Which then leads you to the question "who installed the hardware"?
  - cootsnuck 1y ago
    No, that lead you to that question. It leads me to the question, "Is it really 'religious hardware' or the same ol' 'make meaning out of patterns' hardware we've had for millenia that has allowed us to make shared language, make social constructs, mutually believe legal fictions that hold together massive societies, etc.?"
    - jffhn 1y ago
      Or: the hardware that generates beliefs about how things should be - whether based on religious or ideological dogma -, as opposed to science which is not prescriptive and can only describe how things are.
    - yubblegum 1y ago
      Your entire outlook is based on an assumption. The assumption that 'emergence of meaning' is a 2nd order epiphenomena of an organic structure. The 1st order epiphenomena in your view is of course consciousness itself. None of these assumptions can be proven, yet like the ancients looking at the sky and seeing a moving sun but missing a larger bit of the big picture you now have a 'theory of mind' that satisfies your rational impluses given a poor diet of facts and knowledge. But hey, once you manage to 'get into orbit' you get access to more facts and then the old 'installed hardware' theory of yours starts breaking down. The rational position regarding these matters is to admit "we do not have sufficient information and knowledge to make conclusive determinations based on reason alone". Who knows, one day Humanity may make it to the orbit and realize the 'simple and self apparent idea' of "everything revoles around the Earth" is false.
gspencley 1y ago
Philosophy and religion are not mutually inclusive, though one can certainly describe a religious belief as being a philosophical belief. Even a scientifically inclined atheist has philosophical ideas grounding their world view. The idea that the universe exists as an objective absolute with immutable laws of nature is a metaphysical idea. The idea that nature can be observed and that reason is a valid tool for acquiring knowledge about nature is an epistemological idea. Ethics is another field of philosophy and it would be a mistake to assume a universal system of ethics that has been constant throughout all cultures across all of human history. So while I certainly agree that there is a very common hand-wave of "look the atheists have just replaced God with a new 'god' by a different name", you don't have to focus on religion, theology and faith based belief systems to identify different categories of philosophical ideas and how they have shaped different cultures, their beliefs and behaviours throughout history. A student of philosophy would identify the concept of "my truth" as being an idea put forward by Emmanuel Kant, for example, even though the person saying that doesn't know that that's the root of the idea that reality is subjective. Similarly, the empirically grounded scientist would be recognized as following in the footsteps of Aristotle. The pious bible thumper parroting ideas published by Plato. The point is that philosophy is not the same thing as religion and philosophy directly shapes how people think, what they believe and therefore how they act and behave. And it's kind of uncanny how an understanding of philosophy can place historical events in context and what kinds of predictive capabilities it has when it comes to human behaviour in the aggregate.
- staunton 1y ago
  This sounds very educated but I don't really see what it has to do with the comment you're responding to (or with AI).
authorfly 1y ago
Would you say LessWrong posts are dogmatic?
tsunamifury 1y ago
I jsut want to comment here that this is the classic arrogant, underread “I reject half of humanities thoughts” foolishness that OP is referring to. I mean the lack of self awareness you have here is amazing.
- evantbyrne 1y ago
  To the contrary. I sped through my compsci capstone coursework first year of college and spent most of the rest of my time in philosophy, psychology, and sociology classrooms. The "hey if you squint this thing it looks like religion for the non-religious" perspective is just one I've heard countless times. It is perfectly valid to have a fact based discussion on whether there is a biological desire for religiosity, but drawing a long line from that to broadly critique someone's well-articulated ideas is pretty sloppy.
  - tsunamifury 1y ago
    Quoting your college classes is the first sign of inexperience but I’ll Share some modern concepts. In Adam Curtis‘s all watched over by machines of loving Grace, he makes a pretty long and complete argument that humanity has a rich history of turning over its decision-making to inanimate objects in a desire to discover ideologies we can’t form ourselves in growing complexity of our interconnectivity. He tells a history of them constantly failing because the core ideology of “cybernetics” is underlying them all and fails to be adaptive enough to match our DNA/Body/mind combined cognitive system. Especially when scaled to large groups. He makes the second point that humanity and many thinkers constantly also resort to the false notion of “naturalism” as the ideal state of humanity, when in reality there is no natural state of anything, except maybe complexity and chaos. Giving yourself up to something. Specially something that doesn’t work is very much “believing in a false god.”
    - evantbyrne 1y ago
      You seem to be lost. While referencing a TV show may or may not be a rebuttal to a very specific kind of worldview, it is out of place as a response to my post to which you've failed to actually directly reference at all. I'm addressing this point at you personally because we can all see your comments: being nasty to atheists on the internet will never be a substitute for hard evidence for your ideology.
keiferski 1y ago
I didn’t say that “it’s just a new god,” I said: The notion that history is just on some inevitable pre-planned path is not a new idea, except now the actor has changed from God to technology. This is a more nuanced sentence.
- evantbyrne 1y ago
  Before that quoted sentence you drew a line from the reformation to people believing that AI is inevitable, then went on to imply these people may even believe such a thing will happen without the involvement of people. These are generalizations which don't fit a lot of the literature and make their best ideas look a bit sillier than they are. It is situations like these that make me think that analogies are better suited as a debate tactic than a method of study.
madrox 1y ago
I've read LessWrong very differently from you. The entire thrust of that society is that humanity is going to create the AI god.
- handoflixue 1y ago
  They are literally publishing a book called "If you build this, everybody dies" and trying to stop humanity from doing that. I feel like that's an important detail: they're not the ones trying to create the god, they're the ones worried about someone else doing it.
  - madrox 1y ago
    I don't think what you said negates anything I said
namcheapisdumb 1y ago
> I also would not describe them as appearing poorly read. YOU come off as poorly read, so I wouldn't trust your judgement on this one, champ. "common trope" lmfao.

andai 1y ago

Maybe not a god, but we're intentionally designing artificial minds greater than ours, and we intend to give them control of the entire planet. While also expecting them to somehow remain subservient to us (or is that part just lip service)?

yladiz 1y ago
I’m sorry, but are you arguing that an LLM is anywhere near a human mind? Or are you arguing about some other AI?
- tsunamifury 1y ago
  If you understand the cultural concepts of Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, then yes we do keep trying to make gods out of inanimate things. And it’s the atheists who continuously do it, claiming they don’t believe in God just markets or ai etc. It’s an irony of ironies.
- andai 1y ago
  My comment was not referring to the present state of things, but to the ultimate goal. However, the present state is also worth a look! The three uniquely human factors which people keep saying a machine can never do: 1. Empathy: they win by default. (My reference group is twenty friends and seven therapists.) 2. Critical Thinking: they win with the correct prompt. (You need to explicitly work against the sycophancy. i.e. the desire to appear empathetic limits the ability to convey true information to a human.) 3. Creativity: I want to say creativity lags behind, in LLMs at least, but Midjourney is blowing my damn mind, so I might have to give them that, too. That's with the versions of AI we have today. My comment was referring to the ultimate goal, i.e. where this is all heading. To put it explicitly, we intend to: (1) make them in our image (trained after our mental output, and shaped after our body), (2) while also making them vastly superior intellectually and physically (strength, endurance, etc.), (3) while also expecting them to have no will of their own -- except as it aligns with ours. (We do actually need to give them a will to make them useful.) I do not expect that to end very well.
  - andai 1y ago
    Come to think of it, I'm doing lists of three, let's cover the attributes of God, relevant to my original comment: 1. Omniscience: Google's AI, at any rate, wins this by default. The others are at a disadvantage. 2. Omnipresence: Several major tech companies have stated that the OS of the future will be an AI. You won't use apps, the AI will use them for you. Today they're already shoving it into everything. 3. Omnipotence: This part is a work in progress ;) The "embodiment" lags behind. As for Benevolence... well, they removed "don't be evil", so you'll have to ask them about that one... (Also "fun" fact: Musk claims that OpenAI was specifically founded in response to a conversation with Sergei Brin where he pledged allegiance to the machines, not the humans.)
thunspa 1y ago
What makes an artificial mind greater than ours? Do you assume that someone will stumble into creating a person, but with unlimited memory and computational power? Otherwise, if we are able to create this person using our knowledge, we will most certainly be able to augment humans with those capabilities.

miningape 1y ago

While it's a fair criticism, just because someone doesn't believe in a god doesn't mean the religious hardware in their brain has been turned off. It's still there and operational - I don't think it's a surprise that this hardware's attention would then be automatically tuned to a different topic. I think you can also see this in the intensification of political discussion, which has a similar intensity to religious discussions 100-200+ years ago (i.e. Protestant reformation). Indicating that this "religious hardware" has shifted domains to the realm of politics. I believe this shift can also be seen through the intense actions and rhetoric we saw in the mid-20th century. You can also look at all of these new age "religions" (spiritualism, horoscopes, etc.) as that religious hardware searching for something to operate on in the absence of traditional religion.

svieira 1y ago
Which then leads you to the question "who installed the hardware"?
- cootsnuck 1y ago
  No, that lead you to that question. It leads me to the question, "Is it really 'religious hardware' or the same ol' 'make meaning out of patterns' hardware we've had for millenia that has allowed us to make shared language, make social constructs, mutually believe legal fictions that hold together massive societies, etc.?"
  - jffhn 1y ago
    Or: the hardware that generates beliefs about how things should be - whether based on religious or ideological dogma -, as opposed to science which is not prescriptive and can only describe how things are.
  - yubblegum 1y ago
    Your entire outlook is based on an assumption. The assumption that 'emergence of meaning' is a 2nd order epiphenomena of an organic structure. The 1st order epiphenomena in your view is of course consciousness itself. None of these assumptions can be proven, yet like the ancients looking at the sky and seeing a moving sun but missing a larger bit of the big picture you now have a 'theory of mind' that satisfies your rational impluses given a poor diet of facts and knowledge. But hey, once you manage to 'get into orbit' you get access to more facts and then the old 'installed hardware' theory of yours starts breaking down. The rational position regarding these matters is to admit "we do not have sufficient information and knowledge to make conclusive determinations based on reason alone". Who knows, one day Humanity may make it to the orbit and realize the 'simple and self apparent idea' of "everything revoles around the Earth" is false.

gspencley 1y ago

Philosophy and religion are not mutually inclusive, though one can certainly describe a religious belief as being a philosophical belief. Even a scientifically inclined atheist has philosophical ideas grounding their world view. The idea that the universe exists as an objective absolute with immutable laws of nature is a metaphysical idea. The idea that nature can be observed and that reason is a valid tool for acquiring knowledge about nature is an epistemological idea. Ethics is another field of philosophy and it would be a mistake to assume a universal system of ethics that has been constant throughout all cultures across all of human history. So while I certainly agree that there is a very common hand-wave of "look the atheists have just replaced God with a new 'god' by a different name", you don't have to focus on religion, theology and faith based belief systems to identify different categories of philosophical ideas and how they have shaped different cultures, their beliefs and behaviours throughout history. A student of philosophy would identify the concept of "my truth" as being an idea put forward by Emmanuel Kant, for example, even though the person saying that doesn't know that that's the root of the idea that reality is subjective. Similarly, the empirically grounded scientist would be recognized as following in the footsteps of Aristotle. The pious bible thumper parroting ideas published by Plato. The point is that philosophy is not the same thing as religion and philosophy directly shapes how people think, what they believe and therefore how they act and behave. And it's kind of uncanny how an understanding of philosophy can place historical events in context and what kinds of predictive capabilities it has when it comes to human behaviour in the aggregate.

staunton 1y ago
This sounds very educated but I don't really see what it has to do with the comment you're responding to (or with AI).

authorfly 1y ago

Would you say LessWrong posts are dogmatic?

tsunamifury 1y ago

I jsut want to comment here that this is the classic arrogant, underread “I reject half of humanities thoughts” foolishness that OP is referring to. I mean the lack of self awareness you have here is amazing.

evantbyrne 1y ago
To the contrary. I sped through my compsci capstone coursework first year of college and spent most of the rest of my time in philosophy, psychology, and sociology classrooms. The "hey if you squint this thing it looks like religion for the non-religious" perspective is just one I've heard countless times. It is perfectly valid to have a fact based discussion on whether there is a biological desire for religiosity, but drawing a long line from that to broadly critique someone's well-articulated ideas is pretty sloppy.
- tsunamifury 1y ago
  Quoting your college classes is the first sign of inexperience but I’ll Share some modern concepts. In Adam Curtis‘s all watched over by machines of loving Grace, he makes a pretty long and complete argument that humanity has a rich history of turning over its decision-making to inanimate objects in a desire to discover ideologies we can’t form ourselves in growing complexity of our interconnectivity. He tells a history of them constantly failing because the core ideology of “cybernetics” is underlying them all and fails to be adaptive enough to match our DNA/Body/mind combined cognitive system. Especially when scaled to large groups. He makes the second point that humanity and many thinkers constantly also resort to the false notion of “naturalism” as the ideal state of humanity, when in reality there is no natural state of anything, except maybe complexity and chaos. Giving yourself up to something. Specially something that doesn’t work is very much “believing in a false god.”
  - evantbyrne 1y ago
    You seem to be lost. While referencing a TV show may or may not be a rebuttal to a very specific kind of worldview, it is out of place as a response to my post to which you've failed to actually directly reference at all. I'm addressing this point at you personally because we can all see your comments: being nasty to atheists on the internet will never be a substitute for hard evidence for your ideology.

keiferski 1y ago

I didn’t say that “it’s just a new god,” I said: The notion that history is just on some inevitable pre-planned path is not a new idea, except now the actor has changed from God to technology. This is a more nuanced sentence.

evantbyrne 1y ago
Before that quoted sentence you drew a line from the reformation to people believing that AI is inevitable, then went on to imply these people may even believe such a thing will happen without the involvement of people. These are generalizations which don't fit a lot of the literature and make their best ideas look a bit sillier than they are. It is situations like these that make me think that analogies are better suited as a debate tactic than a method of study.

madrox 1y ago

I've read LessWrong very differently from you. The entire thrust of that society is that humanity is going to create the AI god.

handoflixue 1y ago
They are literally publishing a book called "If you build this, everybody dies" and trying to stop humanity from doing that. I feel like that's an important detail: they're not the ones trying to create the god, they're the ones worried about someone else doing it.
- madrox 1y ago
  I don't think what you said negates anything I said

namcheapisdumb 1y ago

> I also would not describe them as appearing poorly read. YOU come off as poorly read, so I wouldn't trust your judgement on this one, champ. "common trope" lmfao.