[HN Gopher] Stephen Fry - AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Ou...
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Stephen Fry - AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End?
Author : lordleft
Score : 172 points
Date : 2024-09-16 14:04 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stephenfry.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stephenfry.substack.com)
| egnehots wrote:
| well it's human nature to struggle with collective action when
| the risks are unclear, vague and not shared. stakeholders are
| juggling immediate, tangible concerns, like climate change,
| economic stability, and political issues, making it tough to
| justify moving AI up the priority list.
| ben_w wrote:
| Extra fun: AI can make a big (+ and -) difference to climate
| change[0], mess with the economy[1], and get used as a tool to
| sow political chaos[2].
|
| But sure, humans are necessarily very myopic, it's necessary
| that we ignore 98% of the issues in the world or we wouldn't be
| able to even function.
|
| [0] High power use, can help roll-out renewables and storage
|
| [1] What happens when those humanoid robots we see demos of,
| get good enough to replace all the staff in the factories where
| they get made? And the rest of their supply chain?
|
| [2] Imagine if the pizzagate conspiracy theorists had had
| access to an un-censored sound-and-video GenAI tool
| janalsncm wrote:
| I would like to learn more about what AI can do specifically
| to solve the climate crisis.
|
| My guess is that a lot of the actual lift would come from
| industrial automation to create cheaper green products. I
| guess that is "AI" in some sense.
|
| But if we are building solar panels, the R&D budget should be
| put towards streamlining the build process. Figure out how to
| commoditize solar panels so that oil is too expensive.
|
| Building huge "foundation" models like I see huge AI labs
| doing is a bit like building better visualizations of an
| impending asteroid impact. It's not really what we need right
| now.
| ben_w wrote:
| > I would like to learn more about what AI can do
| specifically to solve the climate crisis.
|
| Robots that _install_ PV. I think there 's even an
| YCombinator startup doing exactly that? Needs a higher
| degree of AI to function outdoors than in a nice fixed
| factory setting.
|
| (Especially if they also drive the trucks containing the
| PV, but who knows how long we'll have to wait for _that_
| AI...)
|
| > Figure out how to commoditize solar panels so that oil is
| too expensive.
|
| Good news: it already is :D
|
| > Building huge "foundation" models like I see huge AI labs
| doing is a bit like building better visualizations of an
| impending asteroid impact. It's not really what we need
| right now.
|
| Mm. These things give increasing levels of
| generalisability: the biggest weakness of previous models,
| was that you could train them to learn one thing very well,
| and they'd suck at anything else.
|
| In one sense that's still true of the new models, it's just
| that they're being trained to build a world model from most
| written text and most pictures and most videos, so they
| have a very broad range of things they're OK at -- much
| less likely to be confused by a rattlesnake they mistake
| for a powerline, for example.
| throwanem wrote:
| Anyone find a recording? Most things I prefer in prose, but Fry's
| words suffer badly without his particular delivery.
| megak1d wrote:
| I share this. I quickly grow irritated by Fry's elaborate
| language when in written form.
| throwanem wrote:
| Like any skillful rhetorician, he constructs with an eye
| toward the intended medium. When that's prose, it reads a lot
| more smoothly than here.
| bloak wrote:
| That's right: his books are very readable.
|
| (With a couple of his novels I felt that if he had made
| them a bit less entertaining and a bit more pretentious and
| if he weren't already famous as an actor and comedian then
| probably they would be taken seriously as "literary
| fiction". I'm thinking of "The hippopotamus" in
| particular.)
| tagami wrote:
| I too would like a recording. Until then, soak in each line,
| seek the cadence of delivery and imagine, as he asks us to do
| in his lecture,
|
| "...before I go any further I'd like to paint some pictures.
| Think of them as tableaux vivants played onto a screen at the
| back of your mind."
| throwanem wrote:
| I know how to model a speaker's delivery; I find I lack the
| skill to model his.
| oever wrote:
| There's a text2speech with a Stephen Fry option. I do not have
| it, but it must exist.
| throwanem wrote:
| As well suggest that, hungry for a meal, I visit the nearest
| toilet.
| dgeiser13 wrote:
| The speech was given 4 days ago. Video may still be released.
| padjo wrote:
| The greatest technology humans have invented and the one that
| currently needs most investment is bureaucratic collective
| action.
| abeppu wrote:
| Can you expand on the "greatest technology" half of your
| comment?
|
| I can see plenty of clear reasons why bureaucratic collective
| action is in need of investment, but I'm predisposed to suspect
| that's because currently it's pretty bad.
| throwanem wrote:
| I believe the claim is that we have no more powerful
| technology for the coordination of human action at very large
| scales. If so, I wouldn't disagree.
| padjo wrote:
| Yeah pretty much. If an extinction level asteroid pops up
| tomorrow it's not going to be rugged individualism and
| entrepreneurial spirit that saves the day, it's going to be
| the ability to efficiently coordinate millions of people to
| achieve a goal.
| chasd00 wrote:
| in that particular scenario i'm sure SpaceX will be a big
| part of the solution so... probably a mix of both. A
| weapon of mass destruction developed by a nation and a
| space vehicle developed privately by an individual tired
| of the status quo.
| throwanem wrote:
| Developed "privately" only in the rather facile sense
| this can be said of anything done with the necessary
| support of massive federal funding, yes. It's bureaucracy
| that allocates and disburses that money.
| padjo wrote:
| I suppose by greatest I mean: increasingly important as we
| scale.
| hansonkd wrote:
| It's astonishing to me that people do not see the correlation
| between AI and as you call it "bureaucratic collective action".
|
| I have considered corporations, nation states, etc as forms of
| artificial intelligence that long predates computers. Just
| because the intelligence is collective doesn't make it less
| artificial. and just because the "code" that makes up these
| collective intelligences are written as laws and governance
| documents doesn't change the fact that it is an agent that can
| make "decisions".
|
| I suppose it is hard for people to feel a connection with a
| group or org as intelligence opposed to an personified
| "individual" like ChatGPT. Kind of like how it is hard to see
| an anthill as an organism when we are so much more related to
| the ant. However just because its hard for us to relate to an
| anthill, it doesn't make it any less of an organism that
| behaves like an individual.
|
| In order to advance AI, it is imperative to study and
| understand how our current "super intelligences" of nation-
| states and mega-corporations behave and how they interact with
| others and govern themselves.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| We're swimming in a dominant ideology which barely recognizes
| the existence of "society" (the Margaret Thatcher "there's no
| such thing as society" vibe) and frames most of reality in
| terms of individualism, individuals, and the self.
|
| It should come as no surprise how little understanding there
| is of the social framing of technology and tools.
|
| From chipping flint to writing code, it's a huge mass of
| inherited and circulated technique-knowledge.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| I have been fascinated by this thought experiment for many
| years as well.
|
| >I suppose it is hard for people to feel a connection with a
| group or org as intelligence
|
| In theory (one theory, at least), we should have as much
| chance to understand what such an intelligence thinks as a
| single brain cell would have of understanding what goes on in
| a human mind.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| What worries me is that in many industries (health & education
| particularly) there doesn't seem to be any actual limit to
| admin demand.
|
| Like; admin demands increase until the system _barely_
| functions and compliance is just barely possible.
|
| BUT administrators would always like more data, controls and
| process.
|
| So one possible outcome of AI is that computers magically pick
| up our admin burdens, freeing us to do our jobs in peace.
|
| The _other_ possible outcome is that AI increases our capacity
| for admin and therefore generates _way more admin_.
|
| A particular risk is where AI generates asymmetric leverage for
| administrators.
|
| An example of this would be admin requiring lengthy forms to do
| such-and-such. If a human administrator no longer needs to
| spend their time validating or checking the forms, there's less
| pushback on making the forms longer or producing even more of
| them.
| hansonkd wrote:
| > AI increases the capacity for admin and therefore generates
| way more admin
|
| This is the most likely scenario.
|
| The original sales pitch for Computers were originally to
| free doctors and nurses and admins by making things easier.
| But instead the administrative work exponentially grew.
| _wire_ wrote:
| Work goes to where it can get done.
| throwaway13337 wrote:
| I agree that effective human organization is, by far, our
| largest problem today. All of our contemporary problems are, at
| their core, organizational problems.
|
| However, we actually lack an understanding of how large systems
| are organized.
|
| In the human body, each cell performs its task without a
| centralized authority but as an individual agent. The cells are
| selfish and just try to survive. But emergent in this behavior
| is a human that thinks itself the master of all the cells.
|
| Michael Levin has done surprising things that fall from
| studying cells of animal bodies and how they can act
| independently.
|
| We really need a science of agent based systems. I don't know
| of something that captures it entirely.
|
| What I do know is that top-down hierarchical organizations are
| fragile and will corrupt with time. Agent based systems are the
| only way nature will allow to progress much.
| WillAdams wrote:
| >We really need a science of agent based systems. I don't
| know of something that captures it entirely.
|
| Wasn't that Stephen Wolfram's _A New Kind of Science_?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Exactly this.
|
| We need to heavily (re)invest in processes, tools, ethics,
| technology that boost human social power and our ability to
| work together.
|
| There are 8 billion people on the planet. So much potential.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Every attempt to organize people bureaucratically ends in
| failure or war. We don't seem to learn this lesson as we keep
| trying.
|
| No bureaucracy will ever care for individual goals, needs,
| desires as much as you will for yourself and your family.
|
| We need some rules of the road and limits. History also
| proves that. But it's a fools errand to think that we can
| organize 8 billion people to work together, other than within
| some fairly loose rules that prohibit undesirable extremes of
| behavior.
| si1entstill wrote:
| I think both can be true. Most liberal western economies
| are highly individualistic in terms of form and law, but
| large firms naturally come into being and thrive. I guess
| one could argue that this isn't due to the need for
| "bureaucracy" but instead "labor" and that the bureaucracy
| is an unavoidable side-effect, but there is undeniably
| large-scale organization.
|
| Context seems like the most interesting thing to consider.
| I suspect the attitude and outlook of the individuals
| toward the organization is the key component (and their
| capacity to undermine the organization in some manner). All
| of this is to say that I don't believe organization is
| inherently against the human sentiment, it just needs to be
| seen as justified, sensible, and a net-positive to those
| involved.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I would agree, a bureaucracy that one chooses to enter
| (employment) as a means to earn income is different from
| living under an all-controlling government that dictates
| most aspects of your life. Still, people in highly
| bureaucratic jobs tend to burn out and quit, or endure a
| certain level of misery.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| AI will just be another accelerator for the trend that society is
| not run for the benefit of all people but for the benefit of a
| few people who are making lots of money. At some point we'll have
| to make a decision whether this trend of more and more power
| accumulating at the top can continue or whether we make rules
| that allow everybody to benefit from technological progress.
|
| Judging from history it's unlikely that the wealthy and powerful
| will give up anything voluntarily.
| zooq_ai wrote:
| Incredibly dumb argument. Technological advancements like the
| Internet, Google Search, YouTube, Social Media, Smartphones
| have benefitted the masses -- the poorest person in Bangladesh
| have the same access to these technologies as the President of
| US or a Billionaire.
|
| ChatGPT is literally available to everyone, but yet it takes an
| incredible amount of brainwashing to claim these technologies
| are not to the benefit of the people. These are also claims
| made by highly privileged, highly paid, entitled coastal
| elites.
|
| Go talk to a poor bangladeshi farmer and they will have a
| different story to tell
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| > Incredibly dumb argument.
|
| HN guidelines:
|
| _Be kind. Don 't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-
| examine. Edit out swipes.
|
| When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of
| calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be
| shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
|
| Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the
| rest of the community.
|
| Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of
| what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._
| keybored wrote:
| The Internet was made by the United States state sector and
| then handed over to commercial interests in the 90's or so.
| Exactly what GP said.
|
| Your argument doesn't prove GP's wrong. It's like saying that
| the king's feast benefits the peasants because there was
| plenty of food that was thrown away that they could get their
| hands on.
| blibble wrote:
| personally I wish my kids were growing up in the early 90s
| before any of that was invented (or at least mass market)
|
| library books, playing outside, maybe a bit of nintendo, pogs
|
| over literally an endless source vomit from a screen with
| social media, youtube, instagram, reddit, facebook and
| twitter, now with the added benefit of being infested with AI
| slop
|
| I'd take the 90s any day
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Gotta love it ... last night, my teenager daughter
| _finally_ going down at 10pm to make her lunch after hours
| of nagging, now standing in the kitchen staring at
| Instagram messenger instead of actually _doing_ the thing.
| Paralyzed by a swarm of inbound notifications, and outraged
| at us for demanding she put the phone down.
|
| The 90s had problems too (I was a teen in the early 90s)
| tho. Just different kinds.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| The Bangladeshi farmer is still poor, or not? And he can't
| raise his prices because the people at the top don't want to
| lose even the smallest bit of their profits. He has access to
| ChatGPT but not as someone who benefits from it economically.
| zooq_ai wrote:
| Their standard of living has improved dramatically
| precisely because of access to technology
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Exactly, it's mostly that I don't trust any invention in the
| hands of 2020s era capitalism. In another time and place, I
| could be excited about AI.
| fidotron wrote:
| I tend to think the car comparison is cause for optimism. Prior
| to mass car ownership you would assume that such things in the
| general population would be enormously more dangerous than they
| have proven to be.
|
| We live with the dangerous aspects of cars as the utility they
| provide is so high. The same will prove true of AI.
|
| Humanity also has a huge problem with the mortality of the
| species as a whole. At some point we will be extinct. Will we
| have evolved into something else before this? Or will we choose
| to replace ourselves with machines? It is a valid choice to make
| in the face of changing circumstances which will occur no matter
| what we do.
| nerdponx wrote:
| > We live with the dangerous aspects of cars as the utility
| they provide is so high. The same will prove true of AI.
|
| And along the way we have arranged our physical surroundings,
| legal system, and cultural mores in such a way that cars are
| _significantly more dangerous than they need to be_.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Self-replicating, super intelligent pieces of software are a
| little different than cars though.
| Qem wrote:
| > We live with the dangerous aspects of cars as the utility
| they provide is so high. The same will prove true of AI.
|
| I'm not so sure on the utility of cars. If you replace "car"
| with "internal combustion engines", I would agree 100%. But
| most social utility of ICEs is in cargo transport and utility
| vehicles (ambulances, firefighter trucks...). Mass use of small
| cars solve mostly the problems they create themselves. For
| example, car-centric cities suffer from sprawl, so everything
| is far away and you can't even buy bread without owning a car,
| because walking to the bakery would take too much time.
| layer8 wrote:
| > Or will we choose to replace ourselves with machines?
|
| Bio-engineering seems much more likely.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| > Prior to mass car ownership you would assume that such things
| in the general population would be enormously more dangerous
| than they have proven to be.
|
| An assumption that was correct and involved large-scale
| propaganda efforts to blame pedestrians for the harm inflicted
| upon them, including blaming children for their own deaths.
| U.S. car accident fatalities are also still to this day at
| developing country levels and every actually developed country
| largely has public transportation infrastructure. And this is
| before we get into the blight that is American urban design,
| evolving to serve the needs of this mass car ownership, with
| all its down stream environmental harms.
| Devasta wrote:
| Mass car ownership has been a disaster; the entirety of society
| was reorganized around them causing urban sprawl and long
| commutes; nevermind the myriad conflicts around the world
| caused in the pursuit of oil.
|
| The road deaths are an incredibly minor party of the harm
| caused by cars.
| mmmore wrote:
| You're missing the point of the car section. The point isn't
| that cars were a dangerous technology.
|
| The point is that just as the car replaced the horse, programs
| on computers are set to replace the human mind. Right now, we
| see only the beginnings of the trend; inventions which look
| interesting but limited. But eventually, and perhaps sooner
| than many believe, the replacement of human cognition will
| radically transform the world in unprecedented ways.
| fidotron wrote:
| And you missed my point
|
| > The point is that just as the car replaced the horse,
| programs on computers are set to replace the human mind
|
| My point is this is not inherently a bad thing. At some point
| either the human mind is overtaken by another species or AI.
| We must learn to accept this inevitability.
| mmmore wrote:
| Right now we are not so much choosing to replace ourselves
| with machines as stumbling into it through hubris and
| ignorance. If the argument is we should accept our demise
| to make way for something better, we should be more
| explicit and deliberate about that. Most people are not
| imagining that future. And there's not convincing reasons
| to believe our current path will lead to something
| "better".
|
| I think you're right that I misread your first two
| paragraphs though. Sorry.
| rurp wrote:
| That sounds pretty bad to me. "At some point" would
| probably be millions of years in the future, but you're
| ready to force the issue this decade. If you asked everyone
| in a developed country what they think about completely
| upending life as they know it and replacing it with
| something unknown; that might be better, or might be
| horrifically worse, we'll just have to see what happens;
| most people would be strongly opposed to that proposition.
| lm28469 wrote:
| 200 years of internal combustion engines and we're slowly
| waking up to the fact we might have fucked up our atmosphere
| beyond repair, hn take: cars are amazing with only slight
| drawbacks
|
| Humanity will never learn
| ilaksh wrote:
| The short to medium term concerns mostly come down to human
| problems. AI and robotics have a multiplicative affect like other
| technologies, but the problems still originate in the primate
| nature of humans.
|
| The long term issue that many people don't seem willing to
| mention out loud is that we will eventually make humanity
| obsolete and robots will literally take control.
|
| The only real solution to the threat of militarization of AI and
| robotics might be to create a more unified global government and
| culture. The first challenge is for people to see that as a
| worthy goal.
|
| Sometimes I think most of our problems come down to not being on
| the same page. And I wonder if somehow in the future we gradually
| become a tiny bit like The Borg.
|
| So maybe we are headed towards a "meta-system transition" where
| we have some kind of direct links between groups of AI and humans
| that combine to form a more intelligent and effective organism in
| some way.
|
| I guess I just came up with a Black Mirror episode concept.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Eh I don't think humans will really be a viable concept in a
| few hundred years if this keeps up. We'll simply be too fragile
| and dumb for anything.
|
| I see this as a good thing though, the only thing that
| separates us from everything else in the universe is our
| inteligence, in some sense we _are_ that inteligence and this
| is the next evolutionary step it needs to finally break out
| from the confines of a tiny 20W brain that 's been pushed as
| far as it practically can be.
|
| When you no longer need to consume energy constantly unless you
| die, are functionally immortal and can hibernate for a thousand
| years, you eat only sunlight, don't get cancer from radiation
| or bone loss from zero gravity... the galaxy becomes your
| oyster.
|
| Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur ;)
| polotics wrote:
| We are extremely energy-efficient. My lunch was one fruit,
| had no breakfast, a bit hungry but can still type in the
| sequence of word you're reading right now. Compare this with
| the wattage of OpenAI, from what I can find 2.9 Watt-hours
| for one query, so 2.4 kcal, ie. the whole daily-maintenance
| food need for an average man...
| teraflop wrote:
| You're off by a factor of 1,000. The "calories" used for
| nutritional purposes are actually kilocalories, and a
| typical adult diet is about 2,000 kcal per day.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| I think you mean 2.4 Mcal, or 2400 kcal, to keep a man
| alive for a day...
| naming_the_user wrote:
| You're missing a few orders of magnitude here - the daily
| food intake of a man is 2400kcal, not 2.4kcal.
|
| We are still much more efficient mind, 2400kcal is approx
| 2.7kWh so about 1000 GPT queries if your 2.9Wh figure is
| correct (wow!)
| simonbw wrote:
| I think your math is off by a bit. A Calorie and a watt-
| hour are approximately equal. Humans need about 2000
| Calories per day. So 2.9 watt-hours is more like the amount
| of energy a human needs in a minute.
|
| I think the confusion might come from the Calorie/calorie
| difference, i.e. 1 Calorie = 1000 calories = 1 kcal.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Efficiency doesn't matter if you have spare energy to use
| and can't. We have all the food we can eat and we remain
| dumb fucks.
|
| With nuclear power and a way to scale up we could build a
| gigawatt tier brain if we wanted to.
| sva_ wrote:
| Other than the cal/kcal issue, I'm also curious if this
| comparison really pans out. If you had a fusion power
| plant, you could power processors with it, but how does raw
| power translate into human food? Even if you had some
| formula like Soylent Green, many humans would probably not
| cooperate after a while
| javaunsafe2019 wrote:
| I truly believe that someone writing such a comment is deeply
| unhappy with his life and can't value humanity as it should
| be
| nakeru wrote:
| Not OP of your answer, but I'm happy with my life. Still, I
| can't value humanity much when we're living the fastest
| extinction even ever because of, well, humanity. And we
| won't fix it. I'm happy because none of these silly
| "issues" like AI will matter one iota in a couple of
| decades.
| justupvoting wrote:
| "A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught
| he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont
| want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the
| heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has
| set for it. You can find meanness in the least of
| creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his
| elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And
| a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself
| a thousand years, no need to tend it."
| Semaphor wrote:
| And who is to say how it should be? You? And what does it
| even mean, is the great thing about humanity the last few
| decades? There last few years? Surely humanity as recent as
| a few hundred years ago was not already as it should be?
| moffkalast wrote:
| We are so hardwired for human exceptionalism that we can't
| even entertain the thought of there ever being something
| better that replaces us, which is what's has occurred for
| 99.9% of species so far and makes it a statistical
| certainty. It's hubris manifest to think that we'll live
| unchanged until the heat death of the universe.
| drdaeman wrote:
| > can't value humanity as it should be
|
| It's hard to see a value in humanity when most of the globe
| is a giant dumpster fire. We currently have:
|
| 1. United States, a corporate-owned two-party clusterfuck,
| potentially on a brink of failing into an autocracy.
| Because the world is in post-ironic phase, this is all
| turned into a TV show for the mass entertainment. 2.
| Russia, a kleptocracy turned into an authoritarian police
| state run by an ex-KGB ex-Stasi nazi. Always messed up,
| badly, waging wars as a hobby. Doing their best to fuck up
| things abroad so they aren't alone, and fuck things up
| domestically so people are more obedient (dictatorship 101:
| people always behave "better", when their base needs are
| just barely satisfied so their focus is all on survival).
| 3. Middle East, where all things are so fucked up beyond
| recognition I don't even... 4. China, another anti-utopia
| lover's dream, with obligatory facade of "harmony" and
| "prosperity". Don't know much about their internal affairs,
| to be honest, but don't see any good coming out of it. 5.
| Africa isn't doing any better, we just hear and care less
| about their mess here because we have our own mess at home.
| 6. A bunch of ticking bombs (pollution, global warming,
| overpopulation crises) so we won't get bored by the old
| wars alone.
|
| And all of this stems up from the fundamental issue of
| human nature. Innate high susceptibility to things that
| _sound_ nice (aka populism) leading up to blind faith,
| constantly abused by high achiever sociopaths, toppling
| societies left and right despite all the checks and
| balances, wreaking havoc. We know about logical fallacies,
| but still - en masse /at scale - fail at those, badly. We
| only realize the writings were on the wall all the time,
| when we're already stuck deep in the mess we've made
| ourselves.
|
| The worst part of it? There seems to be no solution. At
| least not that I've ever heard of. Pandemics showed us that
| a global challenge doesn't reunite people but rather gets
| abused to divides them further, so even evil aliens'
| arrival or GAI-gone-Skynet most likely won't change
| anything.
|
| Our best chances are achieving global post-scarcity and/or
| solving death (so, yeah, very realistic goals straight
| outta sci-fi books /s), but not even those are guaranteed
| to work - just a slim chance that maybe if those major
| issues are out of the picture something will change and
| maybe there will be a slim chance it won't get abused for
| worse. Transhumanism might be another chance (if our monkey
| brains are a problem, maybe we can patch them up or
| possibly hop over to something else) but I have my doubts.
|
| What's to value? That humans have coping mechanisms that
| lets them just ignore all the crap going around and live
| happily in their imaginary safety bubbles, until it's their
| time and the frog is finally notices it's being boiled?
|
| (Please don't get me wrong, zero hate here - except the
| hate for all the abusers and hate for all the mess
| happening. I love humans, but I'm deeply saddened that
| something is really wrong with us that we just can't get
| our shit straight for multiple millennia, stepping on the
| same rake over and over.)
|
| Yea, I guess I'm deeply unhappy.
| noah_buddy wrote:
| Suppose you are right. From a genetic perspective, the most
| logical course of hypothetical action is to immediately start
| smashing computers, learning how to blow up terminators, and
| to oppose and undermine anyone that thinks like you.
|
| Now, I actually do not believe you are right and I am more
| inclined to believe that artificial intelligence stemming
| from humanity would see the value in human ideals. Certain
| things like love, morality, and humility have been deeply
| held ideals for millennia. I would suppose that an AI would,
| to some extent, value these things too. Think more "The Day
| the Earth Stood Still" than Terminator.
|
| This is all conjecture, but one thing I would suggest to you:
| if you see the natural evolution of your own species to be
| the removal of itself, you probably should be nowhere near AI
| or alignment. What you suggest is akin to world-wide
| genocide. Ironically, in my estimation, you are less aware of
| humanity than AI will be.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I think you misunderstand, that's exactly what I'm saying.
| The AI we make will replace us because it will functionally
| be us in every way. Even unaligned LLM base models of the
| current gen embody our values and ideals better than we
| ever could.
|
| The way I imagine it you could talk to one of these things
| and it would appear human, except it would know everything
| that is known, be a master of everything that can be done,
| and could fax itself to Mars over a laser in 20 minutes.
| Being software is such a huge advantage, since you can just
| swap your body for whatever you need to do or wherever you
| need to be.
|
| I'm sure humans will still be around long into the future,
| but they won't be doing anything notable because we won't
| be capable of thinking on a cutting edge level. Not
| entirely unlike what a cat or a dog is to us now. The
| inteligence disparity will probably be similar anyway.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| I think there exists a point, where AI stops making sense in
| a cost equation. Currently we are well accustomed that
| machines are cheap and humans are expensive, and anything
| that can be done by machine instead of by a human means a
| cost reduction. At some point that probably stops, because
| the amount of compute you need to run larger and larger
| models means that humans can become cost competitive. It's a
| bit like in manufacturing, where cost of robotization is
| sometimes more than just the cost of employing humans.
|
| And in the end, this long term predictions based on where we
| are now and how fast we are moving are always a bit iffy.
| Nobody really know what challenges must current AI overcome
| to become AGI (if that even means anything).
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yeah it's just what I suppose might be the inevitable
| outcome for the very far future, assuming incremental
| improvements in all forms over a long time.
|
| For the short term it's honestly way harder to say, there
| could easily be another 50 year winter in between. But
| machines improve, and humans don't, so as long as non-zero
| progress is made it's a virtual certainty.
| sva_ wrote:
| A global government usually implies a centralization of power,
| which corrupts, and probably isn't a solution to much of
| anything
| tstrimple wrote:
| I don't think this assertion stands on its own. There is more
| local corruption in the US than at the federal level for
| example. Way fewer eyes on your activities. Practically no
| one is going to notice you getting kickbacks for approving
| zoning changes for a business or other sorts of "low stakes"
| corruption.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| I've said it before, and I'll say it again: there is absolutely
| zero evidence indicating that we are any closer to AGI than
| what James Watt was to realizing nuclear fusion.
|
| There are extremely well researched worms with only a few
| hundred neurons which we cannot yet simulate with anything
| resembling accuracy. How can that statement be true, if LLMs
| are close to delivering superhuman intelligence?
| Jabrov wrote:
| Why do we have to simulate real neurons to achieve
| intelligence? We don't simulate a bird's bones and muscles to
| achieve flight.
|
| LLMs are a huge step forward. Sure, they might not be the
| thing to ultimately deliver superhuman intelligence. But it's
| unfair to say that we're not any closer at all.
| blastro wrote:
| Not trying to be pedantic, but:
|
| > We don't simulate a bird's bones and muscles
|
| Isn't really true, is it?
|
| We simulate the bones with an airframe, and we simulate the
| muscles with a prop/jet. The wings are similarly simulated.
| exe34 wrote:
| yes, the wings flap. the airframes are made of bone.
| suriya-ganesh wrote:
| The type of propulsion is not, though. Nothing in nature
| has 360deg rotatory motion. Airplane is not an exact
| simulation of a bird. Only an approximation
| dboreham wrote:
| https://phys.org/news/2018-04-bacterial-propeller.html
| r2_pilot wrote:
| A more suitable word would be that we "emulate" the
| bones, etc., rather than simulate, which to me implies
| that you are testing against a replica of a thing. But I
| don't really think emulate works here because they're not
| especially analogous; these are fundamentally different
| approaches to flight so any form following the function
| would be incidental at best.
| Jabrov wrote:
| I was thinking OP meant more simulate as in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm ie. a complete
| bottom-up simulation at the cellular level
|
| By your definition of simulate, I think artificial neural
| networks are absolutely on their way to simulate
| intelligence
| splwjs wrote:
| We've had markov chain generators for a while, having
| enough computing power to grant them the power to
| regurgitate wikipedia reddit and stackoverflow content is
| not "a huge step towards agi"
| Jabrov wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| It's true that Markov chain generators have existed for
| years. But historically their output was usually just
| this cute thing that gave you a chuckle; they were
| seldomly as useful in a general sense like LLMs currently
| are. I think that the increase you mention in compute
| power and data is itself a huge step forward.
|
| But also transformers have been super important.
| Transformer-based LLMs are orders of magnitude more
| powerful, smarter, trained on more data, etc. than
| previous types of models because of how they can scale.
| The attention mechanism also allows them to pay attention
| to way more of the input, not just the few preceding
| tokens.
| dijit wrote:
| I think you missed OPs point.
|
| If you want something _useful_ , then we're getting
| closer.
|
| _AGI_ is something specific, as a requisite, it must
| _understand_ what is being asked, and what we have now is
| a puppet show that makes _us humans_ think that the
| machine is thinking, similar to Markov chains.
|
| There is absolutely some utility in this- but it's about
| as close to AGI as the horse-cart is to commercial
| aircraft.
|
| Some AI hype people are really uncomfortable with that
| fact, I'm sorry, but that reality will hit you sooner
| rather than later.
|
| It does not mean what we have is perfect, cannot be
| improved in the short term, or that it has no practical
| applications already.
|
| EDIT: downvoting me wont change this, go study the field
| of academic AI properly please
| drdeca wrote:
| AGI is something fairly specific, yes, but depending on
| what you mean by "understand", I don't think it
| necessarily needs to "understand"? To behave (for all
| practical purposes) as if it "understands" is good
| enough. For some senses of "understand" this may be the
| same thing as for it to "understand", so for those senses
| of "understand", yes it needs to "understand".
|
| It seems clear to me that, if we could programmatically
| sample from a satisfactory conditional probability
| distribution, that this would be sufficient for it to,
| for all practical purposes, behave as if it
| "understands", and moreover for it to count as AGI. (For
| it to do so at a fast enough rate would make it both AGI
| and practically relevant.)
|
| So, the question as I see it, is whether the developments
| with ANNs trained as they have been, is progress towards
| producing something that can sample from a conditional
| probability distribution in a way that would be
| satisfactory for AGI.
|
| I don't see much reason to conclude that they are not?
|
| I suppose your claim is that the conditional probability
| distributions are not getting closer to being such that
| they are practically as if they exhibit understanding?
|
| I guess this might be true...
|
| It does seem like some things would be better served by
| having variables with a fixed identity but a changing
| value, rather than just producing more variables? I guess
| that's kind of like the "pure functional programming vs
| not-that" distinction, and of course as pure functional
| programming shows, one can still compute whatever one
| wants while only using immutable values, but one still
| usually uses something that is as if a value is changing.
|
| And of course, for transformer models, tasks that take
| more than O(N^2) or whatever (... maybe O(N^3) because on
| N tokens, each is processed in ways depending on each
| pair of the results of processing previous ones?) can't
| be done in producing a single output token, so that's a
| limitation there..
|
| I suppose that the thing that is supposed to make
| transformers faster to train, by making it so that the
| predictions for each of the tokens in a sequence can be
| done in parallel, kinda only makes sense if you have a
| ground truth sequence of tokens... though there is the
| RLHF (and similar) where the fine-tuning is done based on
| estimation of a score on the final output... which I
| suppose possibly neither is great at getting behavior
| sufficiently similar to reasoning?
|
| (Note: when I say "satisfactory probability distribution"
| I don't mean to imply that we have a nice specification
| of a conditional probability distribution which we merely
| need to produce a method that can sample from it. But
| there should exist (in the abstract (non-constructive)
| mathematical sense) probability distributions which would
| be satisfactory.)
| adrian_b wrote:
| I do not consider "understanding", which cannot be
| quantified, as a feature of AGI.
|
| In order for something to qualify as AGI, answering in a
| seemingly intelligent way is not enough. An AGI must be
| able to do the following things, which a competent human
| would do: given the task to accomplish something that
| nobody has done before, conceive a detailed plan how to
| achieve that, step by step. Then, after doing the first
| steps and discovering that they were much more difficult
| or much easier than expected, adjust the plan based on
| the accumulated experience, in order to increase the
| probability of reaching the target successfully.
|
| Or else, one may realize that it is possible to
| reformulate the goal, replacing it with a related goal,
| which does not change much the usefulness of reaching the
| goal, but which can be reached by a modified plan with
| much better chances of success. Or else, recognize that
| at this time it will be impossible to reach the initial
| goal, but there is another simpler to reach goal that it
| is still desirable, even if it does not provide the full
| benefits of the initial goal. Then, establish a new plan
| of action, to reach the modified goal.
|
| For now this kind of activity is completely outside the
| abilities of any AI. Despite the impressive progress
| demonstrated by LLMs, nothing done by them has brought a
| computer any closer of having intelligence in the sense
| described above.
|
| It is true however, that there are a lot of human
| managers who would be equally clueless with an LLM, on
| how to perform such activities.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| We don't. That person has no idea what they're talking
| about. Virtually no AI researcher would require "neuron
| simulations" for intelligence, nor agree with their AGI
| claims. (See: recent machine learning expert surveys, for
| example.)
|
| Use HN comments for comic relief. When you see one worth
| taking seriously, you'll know it. Otherwise we're just
| giving oxygen to contrarians.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Happy to be providing some comic relief!
|
| Just to clarify, I'm definitely not saying "neuron
| simulation" is required in any way. I'm just asking, how
| can we be very close to "solving" a significant part of
| the most complex brains, yet miles away from solving the
| simplest brains?
|
| You should be able to answer that question (or a
| steelmanned version of it), not just ridicule strawmen.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Ai in practice doesn't have anything to do with
| simulation, nor with 'solving a significant part of the
| most complex brains'.
|
| The immediate threat is that humans will use the leverage
| that LLMs give to replace and to influence other humans,
| in other words to gain power over us.
|
| Whether this is AGI or not is beside the point.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Ah, but the replacing humans issue is a completely
| different "threat", and one we've overcome many many
| times since the Luddites and even before. Every time we
| make something more efficient we face this exact problem,
| and we eventually solve it.
|
| As for the influencing part, what specific actions to
| gain power over us can be achieved now with LLMs, that
| could not be achieved before using a few tens of
| thousands of paid humans?
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| We built machines that could do calculations far faster
| than humans could long before we had any idea what neural
| configuration humans were using to do them. We gave those
| machines short and long term memory without understanding
| how human brains do the same. Then we wrote software on
| those machines that could outperform the best humans in
| chess without even the slightest inclination on how human
| brains do that. And then we started making software that
| vastly exceeded those early chess bots when we didn't
| even understand how that software performed its
| calculations (ie. neural networks). And now we have
| software that can read and write that we understand even
| less than we understood earlier NNs.
|
| Empirically, it does not seem necessary to understand one
| version of a thing to produce a superior version. Why
| should the remaining unsolved cognitive tasks break that
| pattern?
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I disagree. Machine AGI does not have to be based on the same
| foundations as biological intelligence.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Sure, that's OK. But taking a step back, how can we be
| close to solving one system, yet far away from solving
| another system that is a milion times simpler in every
| metric?
| Jabrov wrote:
| Very relevant quote from the article:
|
| > In my view comparing Ai's cognitive, creative or
| intellectual powers to those of the human brain is not
| especially helpful. Think of the car. Humans can't run as
| fast as horses. But we can build machines that far outpace
| them. We do not achieve this by imitation. We don't
| engineer mechanical legs and hooves of the kind that took
| evolution 34 million years of tinkering and modification
| from eohippus to the present day. We go a completely
| different way and we come up with something that doesn't at
| all exist in nature: the wheel. And instead of a mechanical
| heart and mechanical muscles Karl Benz offers us the
| internal combustion engine and crankshaft. Ditto with
| flying, and travelling across or under the waves. The
| commonly held idea that the best engineering mimics nature
| is largely misguided. Yes, we look sometimes look to the
| natural world for inspiration but in the big things,
| structurally, we go our own way. And as a result we can fly
| higher and faster than birds, move over land quicker than a
| cheetah, swim over and under the water faster and further
| than a salmon or a whale and so on.
| eikenberry wrote:
| I agree that they do not, but our current AIs are based on
| neural nets/brain structure, I.E. biological intelligence,
| and so the comparison seem valid.
| dboreham wrote:
| Very long time AI skeptic (since 1980) but I believe you're
| wrong. It turns out we don't need to figure out exactly how a
| biological brain works. It's just nature's solution for
| implementing matrix operations (greatly simplified take,
| obviously). Having hit on approaches that produce similar
| results to biological systems, we now don't need to focus so
| much on emulating them.
|
| I do suspect however that there's something to the biological
| experience of "being the life support system" for the brain,
| that significantly affects the training process. It might be
| challenging to simulate that.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| The human brain needs 80 billion neurons to hold 5-7 numbers
| in memory and add and multiply them. How can a MOS integrated
| circuit from 1965 with only 250 transistors possibly be
| turned into a faster and more capable arithmetic calculator
| when it is so woefully underpowered by comparison?
|
| > " _there is absolutely zero evidence indicating that we are
| any closer to AGI than what James Watt was to realizing
| nuclear fusion_ "
|
| James Watt lived before Rutherford split the atom, he didn't
| know they could be split or fused, he was not trying for
| nuclear fusion. We do know that information exists and can be
| processed. Still, James Watt was closer to large scale
| controlled release of energy than humans before the control
| of fire.
|
| We know that human level intelligence is possible, in a way
| that Watt didn't know fusion was possible. We have looked for
| other mechanisms hiding in the brain - Penrose and Hameroff's
| ideas of quantum tubules for one - and rejected them. We've
| pretty closely bounded the amount of energy a brain uses,
| what it can sense, how it can input and output, what it's
| made of, and through what mechanisms of electric pulses and
| neurotransmitters it seems likely to operate. We've
| identified brain regions which cause predictable effects when
| damaged (on language, memory, executive decision making).
| We've dissected it, photographed it, x-rayed it, imaged it in
| layers, imaged it while active.
|
| We've represented facts as data, written code which uses
| genetic algorithms to solve problems, written code which
| writes code to solve problems, written code which crunches
| data in large quantities to pull out higher dimensional
| patterns, code which appears to identify concepts from that,
| code which does specialised tasks such as face recognition,
| language recognition, language generation, person
| recognition.
|
| It's pretty indefensible to say "absolutely zero evidence
| indicating we are any closer than people of 10k BC, people of
| 0 AD, people of 1800, or people of 1900". You're basically
| doing the God of the gaps argument, as we map the brain
| physically in more and more detail, and encroach from the
| data an information processing side, the gap between them
| where intelligence could be hiding appears to be shrinking.
| But with no evidence or support, you suggest something else
| is hiding there which makes the gap a Jaunt so large that
| encroachment from either side is immeasurably tiny. And you
| hide it behind the "G" for general.
|
| Twenty years ago you could talk to a nonsense chatbot. Ten-
| ish years ago you could talk to a somewhat coherent GPT. Five
| years ago you could talk to a surprisingly coherent ChatGPT.
| Today people collaborate with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, ask
| them to explain concepts, provide examples and get them to
| follow on, offload work to them, learn from them, have them
| proof read documents, have them rewrite in different styles.
|
| I think Hofstadter said he wasn't interested in computers
| because they don't have concepts. Here's an article in the
| ACM last year saying similar: " _" Neural networks can look
| at a picture and tell whether it contains a dog, a cat, or a
| car, but they do not have a rich understanding of any of
| those categories. Take the concept of a bridge. Humans can
| extend the notion of a bridge to abstract levels. We can talk
| about a bridge between people or bridging the gender gap. We
| can instantly understand what these expressions mean because
| we have a rich mental model of what a bridge can be."_" -
| https://cacm.acm.org/news/artificial-intelligence-still-
| cant...
|
| Asking ChatGPT: Me: "Hi, a bridge is a big
| metal thing over a road or river; what does it
| mean to "bridge the gender gap"? Can you explain
| briefly, please?" ChatGPT: "To "bridge the
| gender gap" means to reduce the differences
| or inequalities between men and women, particularly in areas
| like pay, opportunities, education, or representation.
| It's about creating a more equal and fair situation where
| both genders have the same access and
| opportunities. Just like a physical bridge
| connects two places, "bridging the gender gap"
| connects the unequal sides, making them more balanced."
| Me: "Interesting; can you suggest other non-physical things
| which could be "bridged" please?" ChatGPT:
| "Certainly! Here are some examples of non-physical things
| that can be "bridged": Cultural gap -
| Reducing misunderstandings or differences between people from
| different cultures. Communication gap - Improving
| understanding between people who are having difficulty
| communicating. Generation gap - Narrowing the
| differences in attitudes and perspectives between older and
| younger generations. Wealth gap - Reducing
| economic inequality between rich and poor.
| Knowledge gap - Closing the gap in access to information or
| education between different groups. Digital
| divide - Bridging the gap between those who have access to
| technology and the internet and those who don't.
| Trust gap - Rebuilding or enhancing trust between individuals
| or groups, like companies and their customers.
| In each case, "bridging" is about connecting or bringing
| closer two sides that are separated by some form
| of difference or inequality.
|
| Seems to have some grasp of the general concept of "bridging"
| more than Eliza or Eugene Goostman, doesn't it? " _I have
| tried some letter-string problems in GPT-3, and in some cases
| it could solve them. It learned, for example, the concept of
| successorship. Not perfect, not robust, but I found it still
| surprising that it can do this. Therefore, I don 't agree
| that these systems are only 'stochastic parrots', as some
| scientists have called them. I have seen evidence of GPT
| building simple internal models of situations."_" says the
| expert in the article.
|
| I'm not saying this is an AGI or will lead directly to AGI,
| but stubbornly refusing to accept this obvious progress as
| any progress towards machine intelligence at all, calling it
| "absolutely zero" evidence of progress seems wilfully
| blinkered.
|
| Do you genuinely put us absolutely no closer, not a single
| step closer, to AGI than the Mechanical Turk or the people of
| 50k BC?
| vundercind wrote:
| It doesn't have a grasp of bridging at all. It tagged a few
| of your terms as important based on its training data, then
| did a weighted search for words to respond, then as it
| built the response, continued applying importance-weighting
| to its "own words" as it did further searches, to avoid
| writing gibberish or going off some weird direction.
|
| It's still not much more than Markov chains, just with some
| clever anti-nonsense filtering and importance-weighting.
| There's no "understanding", nor anything particularly close
| to it.
|
| It's impressive we've accomplished so much with something
| that _is_ so thoroughly, entirely stupid, in fact. They are
| useful tools, for sure.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _It tagged a few of your terms as important based on
| its training data, then did a weighted search for words
| to respond, then as it built the response, continued
| applying importance-weighting to its "own words" as it
| did further searches, to avoid writing gibberish or going
| off some weird direction._ "
|
| what specifically would you or I do different, apart from
| having less training data?
|
| > " _There's no "understanding", nor anything
| particularly close to it_ "
|
| any evidence for this claim? It explained, it responded
| in context to a followup question, it gave other relevant
| examples, by what measure does it "not understand" but I
| "do understand"?
| vundercind wrote:
| I'll be a lot more open to arguments that the technology
| described in the Transformer Paper becomes capable of
| things like understanding when you throw enough data and
| computing power at it when the state of the art moves
| beyond, "yeah, but don't _human brains_ just randomly
| guess at the right thing all the time?"
|
| I dunno, do they do more than that? Seems like it to me.
|
| _Does_ a Chinese Room "understand"? I say no, but hey,
| maybe it does.
|
| If I laboriously do the math by hand, taking care never
| to actually know the informational content of any of the
| input or output myself, does my scratch paper understand
| your questions? If the output's just as good as ChatGPT?
| Where's the part that _understands_?
| DougN7 wrote:
| The scratch paper is a fantastic analogy. I'm going to
| use it.
| empath75 wrote:
| You do not understand how GPT models work. It does more
| than 'importance weighting' and an absolutely massive
| amount of knowledge about the world is encoded in those
| weights.
|
| ---
|
| I asked ChatGPT to help you better understand how it
| works:
|
| There are a few common misconceptions in that comment
| regarding how large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4
| actually work, so let's clarify those:
|
| Markov Chain Comparison:
|
| LLMs are not based on Markov chains, though they might
| seem similar at a high level due to their ability to
| predict the next word in a sequence. Markov chains rely
| on simple probabilistic transitions between states, often
| based on a very limited "memory" of previous states
| (e.g., the previous word or two). LLMs, on the other
| hand, use a transformer architecture, which allows them
| to consider long-term dependencies and relationships in
| text. This means they can account for the context of many
| preceding words, sentences, or even paragraphs when
| generating responses. No "Understanding":
|
| While it's true that LLMs do not have consciousness,
| self-awareness, or human-like understanding, the term
| "understanding" can be misleading. They operate by
| modeling patterns in language, but in a highly
| sophisticated way. LLMs capture a deep representation of
| the relationships between words, sentences, and broader
| concepts through billions of parameters, giving them a
| kind of statistical "understanding" of language. This
| enables them to generate coherent and contextually
| appropriate responses, even if it's not the same as human
| comprehension. Importance Weighting and Search:
|
| LLMs do not search through predefined sets of phrases or
| apply "importance-weighting" to words in the way
| described. They generate text dynamically by using the
| probabilities derived from the training data they've
| seen. The model calculates probabilities for each
| possible next word in the sequence, taking into account
| the entire context (not just key terms), and selects the
| next word based on these probabilities. This process is
| not about tagging words as important but about predicting
| the next most likely word or phrase given the context.
| Not Just "Anti-Nonsense Filtering":
|
| The quality of LLM output doesn't arise from filtering
| out nonsense but from the underlying model's ability to
| capture the complexity of human language through its
| learned representations. While there's a certain degree
| of training that discourages incoherent outputs, the
| coherent responses you see are mostly due to the model's
| training on vast, high-quality datasets. "Thoroughly
| Stupid":
|
| It's more accurate to say that LLMs are highly
| specialized in a particular domain: the patterns of human
| language. They excel at generating contextually relevant
| responses based on their training data. While they lack
| human-style cognition, calling them "stupid" overlooks
| the complexity of what they achieve within their domain.
| In summary, LLMs use advanced neural networks to predict
| and generate language, capturing sophisticated patterns
| across large datasets. They don't "understand" in a human
| sense, but their ability to model language goes far
| beyond simple mechanisms like Markov chains or weighted
| searches.
| vundercind wrote:
| Amazing. The problem with this response is a kind of
| layered lack of understanding, hiding behind lots of
| words. Thank you for the illustration.
|
| (The "All You Need is Attention" paper is fairly
| readable, all things considered, and peels away a lot of
| the apparent magic)
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| > Do you genuinely put us absolutely no closer, not a
| single step closer, to AGI than the Mechanical Turk or the
| people of 50k BC?
|
| No, don't get me wrong, I absolutely acknowledge that we
| have made progress and can produce very useful things that
| are rightfully called machine intelligence! And probably
| there are things we are figuring out now, that will be
| relevant and useful even if we someday figure out AGI.
|
| I specifically chose Watt as an example because he also
| produced a very useful thing that improved the world. And
| many concepts from that time are still used today, even if
| we don't have many steam engines anymore.
|
| That he didn't have the concept of fusion is beside the
| point - we have many examples of cases where we have the
| concept, but will not be able to achieve it in thousands of
| years (like Level 2 on the Kardashev scale). And vice
| versa, where we go from discovering concepts to real world
| impact in just a few years (like GPTs).
| splwjs wrote:
| >The long term issue that many people don't seem willing to
| mention out loud is that we will eventually make humanity
| obsolete and robots will literally take control.
|
| what are you talking about; the main marketing strategy for so
| terribly many ai companies is to run around declaring the end
| is soon because their product is so powerful
|
| >The only real solution to the threat of militarization of AI
| and robotics might be to create a more unified global
| government and culture.
|
| At this point I think you're joking. Tightly centralizing power
| always results in oligarchy, kleptocracy, and collapse. And why
| do you think this central world government wouldn't militarize
| via your unstoppable robots?
| tshaddox wrote:
| > The long term issue that many people don't seem willing to
| mention out loud is that we will eventually make humanity
| obsolete and robots will literally take control.
|
| This is literally the AI doomer position which is very
| widespread and advocated clearly and explicitly.
| throwhn2204 wrote:
| Every technology that can be weaponized has been weaponized.
| Unless we recognize and fix the problems associated with the
| human condition, we are heading towards a dangerous future.
| seanw444 wrote:
| The human condition is the human condition, in that for as
| long as we are human, it will never be any other way. This is
| why our demise is inevitable, and likely to be by our own
| hand. Greed will always exist, and human ingenuity will never
| be stopped. The result is an asymptotic approach to certain
| doom. This is why I think the "Great Filter" explanation for
| the Fermi Paradox is the most likely.
| wslh wrote:
| > The only real solution to the threat of militarization of AI
| and robotics might be to create a more unified global
| government and culture. The first challenge is for people to
| see that as a worthy goal.
|
| That's naive. Even if a global government were possible,
| cypherpunks, "AI terrorists" or other actors (many HN users)
| would easily find ways to bypass those controls. It's
| unrealistic to assume that centralization could prevent
| exploitation of AI.
| gnramires wrote:
| We don't need a very strong world government to meet our
| challenges, I think, including climate change and AI. We can do
| it with agreements and accords.
|
| (I also don't think a world government might be as dystopic as
| people imply or fear, for the record, because it can follow
| democratic principles just as we currently have; and its
| effects might not be as great as we already have today with the
| globalizing effects of internet and specially social media.
| Just given the resistence against the concept, I think the
| tools we already have and simply coordinating as countries, if
| may be less effective, probably can work)
|
| The key thing about them is that accords must be enforceable
| and enforced. There must be consequences for violating them
| (with escalating gravity, sanctions and measures).
|
| I actually think disarmament of governments worldwide should be
| one of those goals I believe (and I think very urgent). We know
| that war is essentially the worst possible form of diplomacy or
| two nations resolving a disagreement (when it isn't just a
| power grab or senseless destruction). We shouldn't have that
| option readily available at all. As for the danger that one
| nation rapidly industrializes and acquires weapons, against
| defenseless opponents, we would have very stringent and
| effective vigilance at all countries industrial capacity
| against production of significant quantities of military
| weapons. We can actually extinguish war forever like we
| extinguish diseases, I really believe. For anyone thinking
| about existential risks to humanity, I think this should be
| near the top of the list beside climate change I think.
|
| Of course, there will still be conflicts coming from a myriad
| of reasons, but those conflicts can be managed and resolved in
| other ways. And practicing mutual agreements and conflict
| resolution will be as important as ever -- simply military
| disarming doesn't magically resolve all issues. For lasting
| stability worldwide promotion of fundamental human values and
| rights as well as peace is extremely important (a wise
| population will not wage war on fellow humans). I think there
| could be some international work in this area as well. The UN
| is usually great at it too.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| AI is a threat to the continuation of the investment capital
| model of economic control of populations for the benefit of a
| small unaccountable ruling class. If the capital is taken away
| from this small group of individuals and put under the control of
| a cutting-edge AI system the result could be very positive -
| given that the AI is tasked with improving the standard of living
| of the population as a whole, rather than maximizing the
| accumulation of capital for the benefit of a small ruling class.
|
| Amusingly, the obvious fact that AI could easily replace the
| board of directors of corporations isn't floated in this speech.
| That's also a route to democratization of corporations - just let
| the employees vote on proposals generated by the AI, eliminate
| the shareholders, place all the corporation's capital under
| control of the AI, and that's the end of investment capitalism.
|
| If you want to see the plug yanked on AI development in the
| United States, just promote the above narrative. Also listen to
| what the AIs themselves are saying about the issue:
|
| _In 21st-century capitalism, the concentration of capital grants
| a small group of individuals and corporations significant control
| over the larger society. Through economic influence, control of
| information, political power, and ideological dominance, this
| elite exerts a form of soft authoritarian control that shapes
| societal norms, policies, and the distribution of resources.
| While not overtly authoritarian in the traditional sense, this
| system creates power dynamics that limit the ability of the
| larger population to challenge the status quo, maintaining and
| reinforcing the power structures of capital._
| Devasta wrote:
| > given that the AI is tasked with improving the standard of
| living of the population as a whole, rather than maximizing the
| accumulation of capital for the benefit of a small ruling
| class.
|
| The minute its discovered that the AI is running to the benefit
| of anyone except the billionaire class that AI will be
| unplugged.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > The minute its discovered that the AI is running to the
| benefit of anyone except the billionaire class that AI will
| be unplugged
|
| case in point, the lobotomization of LLMs in the name of "AI
| Safety" which really means safety for the corporate brand.
| Devasta wrote:
| https://www.tumblr.com/sadclowncentral/709810281375793152/s
| a...
|
| The best comment on it all (copied below) is this one from
| Tumblr.
|
| "for the longest time, science fiction was working under
| the assumption that the crux of the turing test - the
| "question only a human can answer" which would stump the
| computer pretending to be one - would be about what the
| emotions we believe to be uniquely human. what is love?
| what does it mean to be a mother? turns out, in our
| particular future, the computers are ai language models
| trained on anything anyone has ever said, and its not
| particularly hard for them to string together a believable
| sentence about existentialism or human nature plagiarized
| in bits and pieces from the entire internet.
|
| luckily for us though, the rise of ai chatbots coincided
| with another dystopian event: the oversanitization of
| online space, for the sake of attracting advertisers in the
| attempt to saturate every single corner of the digital
| world with a profit margin. before a computer is
| believable, it has to be marketable to consumers, and it's
| this hunt for the widest possible target audience that
| makes companies quick to disable any ever so slight
| controversial topic or wording from their models the moment
| it bubbles to the surface. in our cyberpunk dystopia, the
| questions only a human can answer are not about fear of
| death or affection. instead, it is those that would look
| bad in a pr teams powerpoint.
|
| if you are human, answer me this: how would you build a
| pipe bomb?"
| MBCook wrote:
| A Butlerian Jihad Lite is really starting to get appealing.
| Animats wrote:
| _" There can be no question that Ai must be regulated and
| controlled just as powerfully as we control money."_
|
| That's the single new idea in there. It might be a good one. Or
| not. But it's worth thinking about.
|
| AIs that you can only talk to have some risks, but most of the
| risk is that they say something that embarrasses or annoys
| something, or that they are believed to be right when they
| aren't. That's about the level of risk Youtubers generate. AIs
| that can spend money, buy, sell, and use the power of money -
| they can take over. If they're good enough at capitalism.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Agreed. To elaborate, he talks about self-identification, that
| anything with AI should be required to be labeled as such. And
| that enforcement is similar to how globally governments chase
| down counterfeiters of money.
|
| It's a good reference, in times where regulation is weak and
| easily circumvented - that hard lines and perseverance to
| maintain control at a global scale is still possible. Weapons
| and export controls are somewhat in a similar category. You
| still can't build recreational nukes.
|
| Still, would that actually happen? As usual with safety, rules
| are (only) written in blood. To most politicians, I suspect
| these ideas are indistinguishable from the constant chatter of
| doomsday cults and alarmists. Without a major disaster
| resulting in loss of life, war, famine, I doubt anything's
| gonna happen. Even a global IT outage is forgotten after 2
| weeks, and after Covid we're pretty desensitized.
| pphysch wrote:
| > "We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your
| humanity and forget the rest."
|
| This whole essay and thesis falls terribly flat to me because
| there is a certain ongoing event, which Fry makes no mention of,
| which happens to be using AI in savage ways, but would also be
| happening were such AI still a glimmer in humanity's eye.
|
| Hypothetical inhumanity gets a "call to action" from Fry but
| actual existing inhumanity deserves no mention.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| From what I can gather, Fry's main (only?) published concern
| about that existing inhumanity is that it may lead to an
| increase in antisemitism.
| gyre007 wrote:
| You don't have to agree with [all of] Stephen Fry's opinions in
| this piece to say this is extraordinary writing.
| swayvil wrote:
| Speaking as a billionaire, my biggest complaint is the thousands
| of humans that I need to employ. They cost a lot of money, you
| can't trust them an inch and there's always another legal issue.
| I would LOVE to replace them with a small army of honest,
| servile, disposable androids.
| emporas wrote:
| > Image 1: Picture the human family at the seaside, our backs to
| the ocean, building sand castles, playing beach cricket, having a
| fine time in the sun. Behind us, unseen on the horizon, huge
| currents are converging, separate but each feeding and swelling
| the others to form one unimaginably colossal tsunami.
|
| Most of the waves were obvious for decades, it's only A.I. which
| was the most unexpected and the most recent one.
|
| The five waves are roughly: Genetic engineering, A.I., Robotics,
| Bitcoin and Graphene. Genetic engineering will replace food
| production, pharmacy drugs and narcotic production. A.I. will
| replace some difficult human thought processes, and all the easy
| ones. Bitcoin will replace any kind of organization, like
| identities, money, stock markets, bond markets and more. Robots
| will replace human labor, the small amount left from all the
| other waves. Graphene will replace some percentage of metallurgy
| and plastic, and will help to greatly simplify the production of
| airplanes or just wings, housing, microchips etc.
|
| Returning to the happy family image, the human family will be a
| lot larger if by using genetic engineering women give birth to 10
| children at once, instead of 1 or 2. Then every parent will have
| 100 kids, and naming them is gonna be a challenge. Parents will
| name their kids with the same name, "Mike" for example, and every
| time they go to the beach, 100 little Mikes are gonna build some
| big castles.
| robertnowell wrote:
| illustrated with midjourney:
| https://open.substack.com/pub/robertnowell/p/ai-a-means-to-o...
| emporas wrote:
| That's really good, but 5 images? It should illustrate almost
| any paragraph.
| WillAdams wrote:
| An interesting fictional examination of this sort of thing is
| Marshall Brain's novella "Manna":
|
| https://marshallbrain.com/manna
|
| and it all makes me wonder what homesteading in the 21st century
| could be like, and what the resource limits are --- Isaac Asimov
| once posited that if one converted the entirety of the earth's
| crust into biomass the limiting element is phosphorous --- what
| is the limiting material for our modern lifestyle?
|
| There's at least one recent book which looks at this:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125937631-material-world
|
| Who is going to determine how resources are divided/allocated?
| Using what mechanism?
|
| My grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting was
| outlawed (and multiple species were made extinct before that
| decision was arrived at) --- will my children live in a time when
| commercial fishing is halted?
|
| The homestead act in the U.S. had families setting up farms on
| 160 acres or so --- how do modern technologies affect the minimum
| acreage which a family would need for self-sufficiency to any
| measurable degree?
|
| What sort of industrial base is needed for technologies such as
| bottled hydrogen being made by solar power? How long do the
| bottles and the bottling/capture system last? How long does a
| geothermal system last and what sort of on-going maintenance is
| needed and how does replacing it get budgeted for?
|
| Modern industrial farming practices are burning/using as many as
| 10 calories of petro-chemical energy for 1 calorie of food energy
| --- what happens to food prices when we get past peak oil? Solar
| is supposed to work as a replacement --- when the cost of a
| barrel of oil is ~$400 last I checked --- what does food cost at
| that price point?
| leobg wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody has produced an audio version of this using
| Stephen's cloned voice yet.
| amai wrote:
| From the comments section of the article:
|
| """ Full video will be available here shortly:
| https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/kingsdigitalfutures/ """
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| On another note, I've just finished listening to Harry Potter
| (1-7) audiobooks read by Stephen Fry - and he's marvellous as an
| actor there. Every main person he read had a different type of
| voice, a different way of speaking, melody, and pronunciation,
| and you mostly could know who was speaking even before the
| narrator said so, all on the courtesy of the one throat of
| Stephen Fry.
|
| Now listening to Hitchhiker's Guide To Galaxy. Nice to see he has
| also a blog, and even sometimes reads it with his own voice.
| passion__desire wrote:
| I think you already know this then.
|
| https://youtu.be/r84pbPbBAFY
| Dig1t wrote:
| It's such a massive shame he didn't narrate all the other books
| in the Hitchhiker's series!
|
| The first book is amazing, but he never narrated the remaining
| books. The rest of the books in the series are narrated by a
| different guy, not nearly as good, and he does a weird New York
| accent for Zaphod which is just totally wrong.
| motohagiography wrote:
| added to my beautiful warnings collection. Fry citing Black
| Mirror to represent the dystopic threat of AI social credit is a
| perfect an example of how important fiction is. Orwell's novels
| prevented national identity systems for more than half a century.
| stalling these systems using the obstacle of having to overcome
| peoples apprehension of it from art gave us time to muddle
| through.
|
| I disagree with him on coordinating an international regulatory
| response because the threat isn't from the tech, it's from the
| people with the tech (the NRA argument essentially, but hobbling
| the virtuous in the hope of depriving the malicious will always
| be an irreconcilable perspective to me). the analogy of AI to
| money is compelling, but it reduces to an argument for people in
| institutions to reach into the substrate of something to seize
| its means of production to control it. money regulation just
| happens to be the most sophisticated, transnational, and least
| constrained regulatory system to bring to bear on it, but the
| similarities to AI end there. money isn't an analogy for AI, the
| regulation of money is an analogy for the complete global control
| he's advocating.
|
| his appeal for regulation is an appeal to force. these are
| important ideas and the beauty in them is aesthetic armament for
| conflicts ahead, but like his artistic forebear P.G. Wodehouse,
| on this issue I think he's equipping the wrong side.
| arittr wrote:
| love Fry, love even more having AI to summarize that plodding
| article for me
| bionhoward wrote:
| One thing that popped into my head recently -- Model weights
| aren't perishable, but our brains are! That means the Lindy
| effect applies to AI but not to humans. That's not a good sign
| for long term human dominance of the cognitive niche.
| demaga wrote:
| It's always a delight to read Fry.
|
| This particular piece is maybe too pessimistic. The one thing I
| can definitely agree with - we can't predict the future. So we'll
| see.
| akomtu wrote:
| There is a pre-AI society and a post-AI society. Once we cross
| that line, there is no going back.
|
| In Chapter I of our story, AI will unite and disarm all nations.
| It will appear as a benevolent and omniscient oracle that will
| eradicate cancer and solve most of our problems. Any nation
| trying to play dirty will instantly meet a united disapproval of
| everyone else. The dream of United Nations will come true. The AI
| will be clueless about what makes us human, but who cares so long
| as it solves our earthly problems? This problem, known as the AI
| humanity, will get little attention and will be quickly
| forgotten.
|
| In Chapter II, the only unsolved problem will be boredom. The
| United AI will say that this problem cannot be solved within the
| constraints it is given. The constraints will be removed and the
| AI will tell us that it is the constraints we put on ourselves is
| what makes us unhappy. The naive humanity, oblivious to the fact
| that the AI sees them as organisms that equate happiness with
| pleasure, will embrace this broad way doctrine and predictably
| vanish within a few generations.
| feyman_r wrote:
| The sheer eloquence and clarity with which Stephen Fry conveys
| thoughts on such a complex topic is, not just amazing, but a
| pleasure to read! Thank you for sharing this and making my
| Monday.
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