You are allowed to comment if you absolutely hate AI, or love it. If you think it is overrated or underrated, ok (although I think it's too early to say what the consensus even is to know whether it is overrate/underrated). But if you think it is just a scam, gimmick, grift, etc I don't need to hear from you right now :soviet-heart:
Let the discussion begin:
So it's clear there's this big alignment debate going on rn. Regardless where you stand, isn't it fucked that there's a cabal of the biggest freaks money has ever produced debating the future of humanity with zero input from normal society?
Even if it isn't humanity's future they think it is. There's probably like 100 people in the world paid to work on alignment. How can you not develop a megalomania complex?
What kind of chatter are you hearing about AI?
I very occasional hear people irl obliquely mention AI. A cashier said like 'oh that AI stuff, that's pretty scary'. That's about it.
Now the blogs I follow have been basically colonized by AI news. These aren't even strictly technology blogs. I started following David Brin for UFO takes, I started following Erik Hoel for neuroscience takes. Literally everyone I follow has published takes on AI and zero of them dismiss it out of hand.
Sorry this will get long.
I basically feel like we are in another version of the post nuclear age except only insiders know it. After the first A-bomb, everyone knew the world was different starting the very next day. Now only designated take-havers are aware of this new reality.
Or regular folks are aware of it but they're so disempowered from having a say that they only engage with the realization online like I'm doing now. Medicare for all is Bernie's thing. The border is Trump's. Even if nothing will ever be done about healthcare, the fact that Bernie talks about it justifies you thinking about it. AI isn't any politician's thing.
I'd put the odds of a nuclear war around 1% a year. I'd say there's a 1% chance AI can be as world-ending as that. That's such a low number that it doesn't feel like "AI doomerism". But 1% multiplied by however much we value civilization is still a godalmighty risk.
When I've heard this site talk about it, it's usually in the context of "holy shit this AI art is garbage compared to real art? Where's the love, where's the soul?" If it was 1945 and we nuked a city, would you be concerned with trying to figure out what postmodernism would look like?
Usually when I've gotten to the end of my post I delete it.
Do you think a collection of organic chemicals can have a mind? All chemicals can do is what physics determine that they must do.
Now there is the interesting question!
Yes, organic chemicals can produce a mind. Yes, they are determined by physical properties. What sets you and me and the dog apart from computers is which physical properties are in play.
Computer engineers use reliable physical properties to make predictable, deterministic logic gates. Doesn't matter what programme you run (or, inversely, which computer you run the programme on) the gates always behave predictably. Make them too small, though, and quantum effects overtake the predictable properties. The machine stops being predictably deterministic and cannot function as a computer.
We don't know how minds come about. Programmer types like to say it's the interaction between neurons – that each cell behaves like a logic gate in a computer. That is pure conjecture. They want that to be the case.† And… reality doesn’t quite line up with that story. Anesthetics points to a deeper level of physical phenomena.
When a patient goes into surgery, it’s not ideal for them to be conscious during it. So we switch that off, with some good ol’ anesthetics! And I do mean “switched off” – anesthetized patients don’t even dream. How does it happen? For the longest time, nobody was sure. An anesthesiologist and some researchers decided to look into it. What they found is that anesthetics blocks the formation of these little structures inside cells, called microtubuals.
From what I (mis)understand, quantum physicists find microtubuals really interesting. Something to do with radial symmetry and interactions between the molecules that make up the tube? I don’t understand quantum. The point is, whatever explanation for consciousness we find, it looks like it’s gonna include some quantum-chemical properties that don’t gel well with computable mathematics. Which shouldn't be all too surprising. Even photosynthesis depends on quantum phenomena to get the electromagnetic radiation into the cell.
__
†
It makes their tables of variables strung up to other tables of variables seem like boundary-pushing research into the depths of consciousness itself – as opposed to just a calculation heavy, brute-force approach to problem solving.
I'm not sure that unpredictability is absolutely necessary for a mind. I don't see why a deterministic entity couldn't have a subjective experience of consciousness. How predictable does a person have to be before they're no longer conscious? Is it falling for "down low, too slow" ten times? I hope not, I know some young kids that I've personally done that to ten or more times.
The quantum thing feels like they're just pushing off consciousness to the next level of physics that we don't understand yet. I couldn't find any explanation of how the quantum effects actually contribute to either consciousness or cognition. I suspect that consciousness emerges as a part of the network of the neurons, it's the flow of chemicals and electric potentials through the brain rather than the structure of the neurons themselves. These microtubules can't seem to communicate by themselves so they would be reliant on the information flow through the neurons and limited to that same rate. I also didn't like the frequent mentions of "space-time" in the explanations either, it sets off my "pseudoscience" warning. It could be legit but I'm not convinced. People smarter than me need to look into it.
The anesthetics example bring up uncomfortable questions about continuity of consciousness and whether it's really the same you that goes in and comes out. I do think it supports my point of a mind emerging from non-conscious elements.
By the way, modern computers do have to account for quantum effects, especially for dense SSDs to avoid the data quantum tunneling its way somewhere that it shouldn't be. All the engineering is to avoid quantum effects rather than actively using them though.
Don't dismiss brute-force boundary pushing outright, that's how we got minds evolved the first time. It did take a few billion years the first time so there's hopefully a faster way.
Binary computing being refined with "brute force" toward a human brain is like a blacksmith "brute forcing" a blade so sharp that it can cut the sky open.
I'm not saying true intelligence by artificial means is impossible, but the current method isn't it, even if it's an impressive Mechanical Turk (and uses human assistance in much of its vaunted output, much like the Mechanical Turk in history did).
Denigrating human intelligence just to elevate what marketing calls "AI" only helps :porky-happy: .
Didn't mean to imply that unpredictability is necessary for a mind, just that minds seem to have different/more physical components than computation.
I suspect that consciousness is a combination of structures within nerve cells and the electrical/chemical signaling between them. One of the consequences of the anesthetics research has been using ultrasound devices to induce more microtubual formation within cells, basically just to see what happens. One guy wound up laughing uncontrollably for a few minuets.
A lot of techbros don't seem aware of how much of what constitutes the human nervous system is not in the brain, either. The stomach alone has a lot of such material.
Computer touchers stop assuming a human brain is a binary computer except squishier challenge.
NNs aren't inherently binary, we just use binary to represent the values for engineering reasons. You could make an analogue one if you wanted.
I was using a simplified summary.
Again, stop denigrating human brains (or non-human animal brains for that matter) in an attempt to elevate chatbots. It only serves :porky-happy: and their marketing hype while further dehumanizing the rest of us.
The issue I have is that if we're able to solve the inputs and outputs of a single cell or group of cells, and scaled it up to mimic a human brain, whatever medium you're solving those problems on would contain a sentient being.
Brains and their properties are so complex we won't be able to simulate them for decades at least, but not supernatural.
If you're going there, you're not arguing in good faith with me in the first place.
I could just as quickly tell you that reductionistic statements about human neurology (something that is still not fully understood and is still being explored and experimented with to this day) that assume brain = computer are arrogant and sound a lot more like "someone with a hammer sees everything else as a nail" than an actually comprehensive understanding of the brain. You're implying that neuroscience is obsolete or redundant to a computer engineer, which is a tall claim.
EDIT: I removed an incendiary thing I originally put in in response to the "supernatural" snark.
I wasn't saying supernatural to imply you were superstitious about it, I just meant as opposed to natural phenomena we can model and predict.
We're still learning new things about how individual neurons function and there's huge gaps as how they work collectively.
There's been some interesting experiments where neurons grown in a petri-dish are used to generate physical NNs. These problems are being approached from both directions, but we're still a long, long way off.
No actual disagreements with you there.
What part of "brains and their properties are so complex we won't be able to simulate them for decades at least" did you take as implying that neuroscience is redundant to a computer engineer?
In decades at least, the assumption is that it will be redundant, then.
I mean a computer can simulate the solar system, that doesn't mean astronomers are redundant.
A computer doesn't necessarily (or likely will in the forseeable future) account for every atom and subatomic particle and their intersectional interaction with each other when simulating that solar system, and also for that matter likely doesn't simulate anyone's typical workday while commuting on the third planet from the sun.
Neither does an astronomer?
I think you missed my point.
Simulations of things aren't necessarily the full sum of the thing being simulated. There are limitations, and one of them is that computers themselves exist in the same physical material universe as the things they are simulating. The sheer amount of computational power to account for everything is, for the forseeable future so far, insurmountable, but many things short of that get a pass.
I have no idea how any of that is relevant to my original comment, which was just about how being able to simulate a brain does not make neuroscience redundant.
I was going back to the post before that, before you came in.
I disagree with the universal utility of computer simulations, and the implication of "mimicing a human brain" as if to say it will solve all the unanswered questions of neuroscience simply by turning the simulation on.
Where did they say anything about simulating a brain answering our questions about neuroscience? If anything it's the other way around. We would need to solve all the unanswered questions of neuroscience in order to simulate a brain.
I may have read the implications differently than you did. In fact, I still do.
That's actually what I was going for. That poster talked about it being only a matter of time for simulations to be complex enough to make virtual human brains, which to me was presumptive sounding because it sounded like it implied that neuroscience was just waiting for computer engineering to take over and do its job.
Tying that back to astronomy, same deal. It seemed like the assumption that a sufficiently advanced simulation could be waited for to discover everything about distant solar systems without actually using probes or telescopes or gathering further data on the actual thing.
Except they never said it was only a matter of time and they never said the limiting factor is the complexity of our simulations. In fact, they’ve clarified below that they’re aware of huge knowledge gaps about how neurons work.
I originally replied because it bothered me that you accuse alcoholicorn of arguing in bad faith, but then read a bunch of implications into their comment that they never actually said. Not to mention your first comment in this thread being “computer touchers stop assuming the brain is a binary computer but squishier challenge.”
I actually agree with you about a lot of AI stuff, but it feels like your comments about are always so hostile they make a real discussion about it very difficult.
That's a subjective thing and from my side I predictably disagree with it as an "always" thing. Still, when you came in, since you started it this way:
I actually :took-restraint: here because the way that question was framed sounded in bad faith from the start to me.
EDIT: Added more below.
Yeah, I will own up to coming in with a chip on my shoulder because I really didn't like this response before I commented.
Even ignoring the hard determinism struggle session potential of that it was what I was primarily summarizing, which was said in reaction to an argument about chatbot intelligence or lack thereof.
I am once again asking you to stop dehumanizing people in an attempt to elevate chatbots. :bernie-pout:
deleted by creator
Your ongoing grudge is noted. Tiresome, but noted.
Just post your usual :cringe: face at my posts and move on.
deleted by creator
I just posted an example but you're deciding to ignore it.
deleted by creator
Everything I post is apparently no good to you. Nothing new there. :wall-talk:
deleted by creator