Removed by mod
The advancement of AI scares me.
Removed by modAI couldn’t do this a year ago, it required computer hardware that was supercomputer levels of expensive to even create something like this. IMO development was actually held back by crypto and covid-19. Now AI is the #1 focus of the techbros and it isn’t going to slow down. This shit is going to put so many journalists, artists, and even programmers out of work. I don’t know how else to explain this, HUMANITY LITERALLY CREATED AI THIS YEAR. WE MADE FUCKING SKYNET!
You want to talk about technological progress, this shit mogs fusion, it mogs the vaccines, it mogs whatever dumb space colonization shit we did. We made fucking AI! I bet we will have sentient AI in our lifetime. And what are we going to do with this stuff? Porn, lots of porn. Deepfakes of celebrities and politicians sacrificing children to moloch, dead actors staring in new movies, a new album by Tupac, fake war footage, fake everything.
Have you ever heard about how a monkey can write Shakespeare given enough time? We have fucking done that, we pressed random buttons enough times that we ended up with something legible. Now we turn memes into real people.
We need a butlarian jihad or some shit.
You will lose that bet unless the immortality losers figure something out. The "AI" we have is no more sentient than a list of numbers on a page, and will continue to not be sentient regardless of how big the page is. Unless you take the, in my opinion, very dim view that sentient beings are still just stimulus response machines, in which case your lightswitch is sentient as well.
Machine learning algorithms will be sentient in the same way capital is. A neural network functions almost identically to human social systems. Where the data is the historical initial conditions, the trained "brain" is the mode of production, and the output is the productive sum of the historical conditions and the instantaneous social order.
You could say that the whole of society is intelligent, but it's a different kind of intelligence to individual intelligence. The historical data that these systems (both society and machine learning) are trained on are built on the outputs of vast amount of human systems while the human system is built on a vast amount of interactions with the material world.
Machine learning is incapable of (at least now) replicating the human experience because it's nerve endings don't understand heat, cold, pain, light, etc, they understand written language. A system designed to form a social being that's above all humans but totally separate from them.
This dynamic is also why machine learning will be absolutely crucial to any and all centrally planned economies in the future. No human is able to process the amount of raw data that a specialized machine can, and no machine can process the vast amount of sensory inputs a human can. And as these machine systems begin to get closer to the levers of social order, the conditions for revolution will begin appearing more frequently and aggressively. Suddenly the social god has buttons you can press and code you can modify, and the working class has 200 years of experience pressing buttons.
i think that using the same word for those concepts is probably suboptimal
It is, but that was kinda my point that "Artificial Intelligence" as we have it now is a control system that functions almost identically to societal modes of production. So the absurdity of calling the whole of society "Intelligent" in the same way we call humans intelligent is nonsense.
Machine learning is a control loop that's optimized to return an output for a series of inputs, in the most common case, text strings to text strings or text strings to pixel values. Capitalist society is a control loop that takes labor and resources and outputs profit.
Humans are more complex as the inputs and outputs of our biological systems are essentially infinitely less binary. Hypothetically you could use machine learning systems to simulate every nerve ending and biological state of the human body, but as of now our best machines can't even do that for a single cell.
extelligence
as in, external. the inverse of to intelligence
is there a materialist alternative to this view? Sentience to me seems to be an emergent property of a very complicated biological machinery, and if that machinery becomes damaged, so does the sentience. But I'm open to hearing your thoughts on the matter.
I mean, materially there probably isn't even free will, there's no way to make that suddenly pop out of particles. I just don't bother factoring that into a worldview that actually affects the lives of other people, for the same reason I discard what could very well be biological fact that we are all stimulus response machines. And in fact I agree with you, treating free will and sentience and any other hard to pin down concept as an emergent property is probably the right way to do it - it's like a phase transition.
My issue with applying those things to any kind of AI running on a von Neumann architecture is really just that I'm not convinced that system, which regardless of what AI nerds will tell you is still a billion times less complex than a nervous system, can ever hit that phase transition. Whether that's a difference in kind or just in scale, I can honestly say I have no idea.
But more than anything, I think we as a species are so desperate for something like us, we're at a real risk of anthropomorphizing what is 100% just a function spitting out what it was optimized for.
No idea if any of the above is particularly coherent or even a good argument, and of course this is putting aside all the actual concerns with the AI we have, re: intellectual property and accuracy and labor and everything else. Thanks for reading either way
There was a poll a while back that asked people what they thought of and expected from artificial intelligence. Apparently, the majority of people said it would be nice to finally have someone to talk to.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
not for a while, certainly, but I think what we have created is already so much more complex than what we would have imagined ourselves to be capable of only a few centuries ago.
I think we've already done this with ourselves, and that it's not necessarily a bad thing. Humanization is the opposite of dehumanization. I think sufficiently complex material phenomena that show signs of self awareness, pleasure, pain, empathy, and so on, deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, and not mistreated or used like an object. Since animals and humans deserve that, so would any emergent artificial intelligence (which I still think is a very very long way off, but possible through several avenues)
Centuries, sure. My only quibble here is that it's really not that much more complicated than what we would've thought of 100 years ago. Neural networks have been around in theory since at least the 70s, and all the math behind this is even older. I don't exactly know when gradient descent was invented per se but it's really just an extension of what has basically been done since calculus was discovered. This isn't really meant to shit on people doing ML and AI work because they absolutely are doing complicated work and finding innovative solutions, but I just think sometimes we lose sight of the fact that, at it's core, these programs really are just big matrices. And the only thing that makes them particularly more powerful than what we've known about for decades is scale - it's not any kind of fundamental change in "complexity" in my mind. The engineers are doing great work combining different dedicated AIs and wrapping them up nicely, but to me that's sort of a level outside any kind of real "AI". But who knows, maybe that's the "emergent property" we were dicussing.
I do like this point. And if some day there is some AI I am convinced has some kind of genuine feeling in the same way as a real person (including non-human persons, as it were), believe me I will be right there fighting for their rights. I just cannot imagine that will be possible without some new fundamental understanding of what consciousness is, and a fundamentally different architecture for it to arise from, and I'm not willing to say we need to give what is effectively a big math equation a nap. Not that I'm implying that's what you're saying just, it's something I hear from people who I feel aren't really examining this issue critically.
Thanks for the reply
there's the term sapience as in homo sapiens, and a bunch of non-human animals for short of that as well.
some SF writers used sentient life to refer to aliens a long time ago and people just rolled with the term even though they usually mean something more specific than what plants and termites have going on internally.