There is pretty much one thing advances in AI tells us. Most of humanity is nothing more than a statistical approximation algorithm. But that doesn't mean human intelligence is. What is fundamentally lacking from modern AI is the ability to "invent". They can perfectly (at least very soon) approximate the behavior of "Joe". But they get nowhere close to even touching anything like the Einstein's of humanity.
The main problem I see with AI is that it is very easy to approximate "general human intelligence", which is essentially equal to "being indistinguishable from the Joe next to you". But it is a completely different league to actually advance the human race. For that, statistical approximation will never work.
The next step is to create AI that innovates. As long as that isn't done, all we have is a demonstration of how "unintelligent" most human beings really are (i.e. nothing more than a statistical approximation + pattern matching... Instagram and social media essentially is like an AI forcing function for human beings, to make them become average).
And yes, we can couple AI with things like a Go-Engine, SAT solver, theorem provers, etc. to give them abilities beyond what humans can do in these categories, but who builds that? Humans... As long as AI can't build an AI for a category it knows nothing about and has had no training for, that AI remains "as unintelligent as a brick". All it can do is reproduce what its creator taught it.
That isn't necessarily a bad thing at all. This could still be extremely useful for society and put a new evolutionary pressure on the human race to become "above" average. Something that has been utterly lacking in the past century. With general, yet stupid AI becoming a reality soon, >90% of humanity is rendered obsolete. This will cause a significant pressure to improve on an unforeseen scale, which is probably a good thing overall.
Truly intelligent AI on the other hand, might as well lead to our immediate extinction, since it renders the entirety of the human race irrelevant.
They can perfectly (at least very soon) approximate the behavior of "Joe". But they get nowhere close to even touching anything like the Einstein's of humanity.
This is profoundly underestimating the intelligence of 99.999% of the human race. GPT-3 is doing nothing even remotely close to 'approximating the behavior of "Joe"'. It's not even close to approximating the behavior of a rabbit. It doesn't have goals that it tries to achieve, it doesn't understand its environment and formulate plans for achieving those goals. It can't look at its past and distill some events into a life lesson, or teach you how to perform a basic skill.
The only thing that GPT-3 is good at is producing output that looks like what humans produce when they close down their minds. Yes, GPT-3 is as good as a human at making up stories that don't mean anything, or arguments that go nowhere. It cod probably even produce decent elevator music. But that only shows how mind numbing and devoid of creativity some tasks that we force humans to do really are.
I remember a story about a research group who created an AI to prove Euclidean geometry theorems. The researchers were surprised by its inventiveness almost at the very start, when the AI came up with a new concise proof about the equality of the base angles in an isoceles triangle, which none of the researchers were familiar with.
What the AI had done was demonstrate a side-angle-side congruence of the triangle with itself (BAC ~= CAB) and then immediately deriving the equality of the base angles. I for one find this kind of outside-the-box thinking that an AI can perform to be extremely inventive.
Truly intelligent AI on the other hand, might as well lead to our immediate extinction, since it renders the entirety of the human race irrelevant.
Are we really extinct if we are outlived by AI that we created that emulates our thought patterns, speech and minds, that is a continuation of our art, science, history and culture? I'm not personally that attached to my DNA, if my mind can exist in a form free of DNA, I could care less.
I would argue that we would indeed be extinct. The phenomenon of apparent subjective experience is perhaps the most critical property of our existence, and based on the foundations of computer science as we understand them today, it is not necessary for computers to have a subjective experience in order to produce output that exceeds human capabilities.
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at, so let me ask a clarifying question.
Lets suppose that we encounter a civilization that evolves independently outside of our solar system. This alien civilization is based on radically different chemistry - whatever it has that's analogous to a brain doesn't resemble any evolved natural brain on earth, it might not even be carbon based.
Nonetheless this alien civilization presents with language, culture, history, art and science. Would you argue that this civilization also lacks consciousness? How would you know these aliens do or do not have subjective experience, compared to human beings?
I'm wondering how particular you think the experience of consciousness is. Do you need to have carbon based, biological neurons to possess it? How do you determine if something has "subjective experience" or not?
“Homo sapiens” would be extinct, but our legacy and lineage would live on through whatever entities evolve from the first intelligent machines that we build.
I don't think this is very far from innovating. The foundation is building up an accurate mental model of the world, especially in the area you want to innovate in, and then running thought experiments, following through them step by step, and testing in the real world to make sure you're not straying too far. I think being able to write a new, coherent essay involves a lot of the same skills.
But the one building the coherent essay is the author of the article, not GPT-3. The author of the article is taking GPT-3 output that sounds good to them, and stitching it together into an essay.
Also note, the one giving the words meaning in the first place is you. GPT-3 is simply repeating patterns that it discovered, but it doesn't have any notion of meaning, any model of the world outside "this is what text I expect to see following this text".
I am not merely being philosophical here. Two GPT-3 instances couldn't "teach" each other even the slightest bit of new information, or prime each other to get some specific kind of response, perhaps trying a few different things to see which prompts are more likely to produce the desired outcome in the other instance - because there is no "desired outcome" - it's all just trying (and usually succeeding exceedingly well!) to produce text that sounds like text it has seen before, while matching the prompt.
You may be right, I honestly don't know how this particular algorithm works. We may be closer to true AI intelligence than I think, but I am not sure anyone should wish for that. I am certain that we are still decades away from true human intelligence (Einstein level), and maybe a few years to a decade away from fully replacing the cognitive abilities of an average human. But it will come. And I am not sure the human race will be able to survive it.
I have no more evidence than you do, so take it with a grain of salt; but I think you're mistaken on the intelligence axis. As in, I think the distance from GPT-3 right now to average human, is way larger than from avg human to Einstein. And I agree we're not that far from replacing the work of an average human.
I think I agree with those points. However, the most interesting thing about GPT-3 in my mind is how it was largely a naive scaling up of GPT-2.
I would be very surprised to not see a GPT-4-like system built in the next several years by simply scaling up by 100x again (perhaps with some algorithmic improvements thrown in as well). I don’t know how it will perform but I expect it to be significantly more impressive than GPT-3. Which would be a very interesting thing... the world would look very different. Potentially even scary, especially with immediate follow-up reapplications of the techniques in other areas.
How about consciousness? On the surface GPT3 may appear to act like a human, but by almost any definition of you choose - it still lacks consciousness.
I don't think anyone would throw you a murder charge if you dumped the servers hosting GPT3 into the ocean.
Or maybe they would and statistical approximation is all humans are under the hood despite all our insistence we are more "sophisticated".
Despite the supposed "mystery" of consciousness, it won't be hard to reproduce in an AI. Take a general intelligence system, give it the ability to sense its own mental state (e.g. by feeding the output of its intermediate layers back into its inputs). Pretty soon it will start building a conceptual representation of itself and the evolution of that representation over time will be conscious self-awareness.
I honestly don't think consciousness is necessary for AI. Consciousness is more like an "invention" of humans to make themselves feel special. If an AI can understand consciousness and simulate it, that will be sufficient. It doesn't have to be conscious to be intelligent.
I don't think anyone would throw you a murder charge if you dumped the servers hosting GPT3 into the ocean.
This argument is fascinating. What is it supposed to prove? Human beings have dumped boatloads of other human beings into the ocean without facing prosecution as well.
Truly intelligent AI on the other hand, might as well lead to our immediate extinction, since it renders the entirety of the human race irrelevant.
I am sorry but when has irrelevance itself ever stopped life? The radiotrophic fungi of Chernobyl essentially spawned as a sick joke evolutionarily speaking. They have one anonalous environment for generations that once they head outside of the scope are essentially on an unviable alien planet.
Irrelevance is never listed as the cause of death on by a coroner. Oh humans and others certainly have rendered species extinct from carelessness, for getting in their way, being too tempting for short term greed, and other reasons but irrelevance is actually protective. Does anybody feel a need to try to render sulfur vent tube worms extinct? There is nothing we want there or really want from the extremeophile creatures to justify genocide.
Even if any offspring AI cared nothing for us they would be more likely to just fuck off to space to find more favorable environments.
TL;DR: In order to be "heard" or to achieve enough of a following to be economically/politically relevant, you must "dynamically range compress" everything to sound the same and appeal to the largest audience, which removes diversity.
That sounds like why old broadcast media is so frothing mad at the new - they have to try to please large bodies with lowest common denominator models to try to get the "average" to max yield.
New media can engage in discovery and targetting to a homunculus generated from the individual based upon their models and what they think about them. The model may be a twisted imaginary construct but it is a better fit than the also imaginary "average" human used to target. Now the old media did have their own demographics ranges but they dealt with it backwards and more proxies - asking are people 20-40 interested in foo instead of "is individual person X probably interested in foo?".
Comments
There is pretty much one thing advances in AI tells us. Most of humanity is nothing more than a statistical approximation algorithm. But that doesn't mean human intelligence is. What is fundamentally lacking from modern AI is the ability to "invent". They can perfectly (at least very soon) approximate the behavior of "Joe". But they get nowhere close to even touching anything like the Einstein's of humanity.
The main problem I see with AI is that it is very easy to approximate "general human intelligence", which is essentially equal to "being indistinguishable from the Joe next to you". But it is a completely different league to actually advance the human race. For that, statistical approximation will never work.
The next step is to create AI that innovates. As long as that isn't done, all we have is a demonstration of how "unintelligent" most human beings really are (i.e. nothing more than a statistical approximation + pattern matching... Instagram and social media essentially is like an AI forcing function for human beings, to make them become average).
And yes, we can couple AI with things like a Go-Engine, SAT solver, theorem provers, etc. to give them abilities beyond what humans can do in these categories, but who builds that? Humans... As long as AI can't build an AI for a category it knows nothing about and has had no training for, that AI remains "as unintelligent as a brick". All it can do is reproduce what its creator taught it.
That isn't necessarily a bad thing at all. This could still be extremely useful for society and put a new evolutionary pressure on the human race to become "above" average. Something that has been utterly lacking in the past century. With general, yet stupid AI becoming a reality soon, >90% of humanity is rendered obsolete. This will cause a significant pressure to improve on an unforeseen scale, which is probably a good thing overall.
Truly intelligent AI on the other hand, might as well lead to our immediate extinction, since it renders the entirety of the human race irrelevant.
This is profoundly underestimating the intelligence of 99.999% of the human race. GPT-3 is doing nothing even remotely close to 'approximating the behavior of "Joe"'. It's not even close to approximating the behavior of a rabbit. It doesn't have goals that it tries to achieve, it doesn't understand its environment and formulate plans for achieving those goals. It can't look at its past and distill some events into a life lesson, or teach you how to perform a basic skill.
The only thing that GPT-3 is good at is producing output that looks like what humans produce when they close down their minds. Yes, GPT-3 is as good as a human at making up stories that don't mean anything, or arguments that go nowhere. It cod probably even produce decent elevator music. But that only shows how mind numbing and devoid of creativity some tasks that we force humans to do really are.
I remember a story about a research group who created an AI to prove Euclidean geometry theorems. The researchers were surprised by its inventiveness almost at the very start, when the AI came up with a new concise proof about the equality of the base angles in an isoceles triangle, which none of the researchers were familiar with.
What the AI had done was demonstrate a side-angle-side congruence of the triangle with itself (BAC ~= CAB) and then immediately deriving the equality of the base angles. I for one find this kind of outside-the-box thinking that an AI can perform to be extremely inventive.
Are we really extinct if we are outlived by AI that we created that emulates our thought patterns, speech and minds, that is a continuation of our art, science, history and culture? I'm not personally that attached to my DNA, if my mind can exist in a form free of DNA, I could care less.
I would argue that we would indeed be extinct. The phenomenon of apparent subjective experience is perhaps the most critical property of our existence, and based on the foundations of computer science as we understand them today, it is not necessary for computers to have a subjective experience in order to produce output that exceeds human capabilities.
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at, so let me ask a clarifying question.
Lets suppose that we encounter a civilization that evolves independently outside of our solar system. This alien civilization is based on radically different chemistry - whatever it has that's analogous to a brain doesn't resemble any evolved natural brain on earth, it might not even be carbon based.
Nonetheless this alien civilization presents with language, culture, history, art and science. Would you argue that this civilization also lacks consciousness? How would you know these aliens do or do not have subjective experience, compared to human beings?
I'm wondering how particular you think the experience of consciousness is. Do you need to have carbon based, biological neurons to possess it? How do you determine if something has "subjective experience" or not?
10 PRINT "I HAVE SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE"
20 GOTO 10
“Homo sapiens” would be extinct, but our legacy and lineage would live on through whatever entities evolve from the first intelligent machines that we build.
I don't think this is very far from innovating. The foundation is building up an accurate mental model of the world, especially in the area you want to innovate in, and then running thought experiments, following through them step by step, and testing in the real world to make sure you're not straying too far. I think being able to write a new, coherent essay involves a lot of the same skills.
But the one building the coherent essay is the author of the article, not GPT-3. The author of the article is taking GPT-3 output that sounds good to them, and stitching it together into an essay.
Also note, the one giving the words meaning in the first place is you. GPT-3 is simply repeating patterns that it discovered, but it doesn't have any notion of meaning, any model of the world outside "this is what text I expect to see following this text".
I am not merely being philosophical here. Two GPT-3 instances couldn't "teach" each other even the slightest bit of new information, or prime each other to get some specific kind of response, perhaps trying a few different things to see which prompts are more likely to produce the desired outcome in the other instance - because there is no "desired outcome" - it's all just trying (and usually succeeding exceedingly well!) to produce text that sounds like text it has seen before, while matching the prompt.
You may be right, I honestly don't know how this particular algorithm works. We may be closer to true AI intelligence than I think, but I am not sure anyone should wish for that. I am certain that we are still decades away from true human intelligence (Einstein level), and maybe a few years to a decade away from fully replacing the cognitive abilities of an average human. But it will come. And I am not sure the human race will be able to survive it.
I have no more evidence than you do, so take it with a grain of salt; but I think you're mistaken on the intelligence axis. As in, I think the distance from GPT-3 right now to average human, is way larger than from avg human to Einstein. And I agree we're not that far from replacing the work of an average human.
I think I agree with those points. However, the most interesting thing about GPT-3 in my mind is how it was largely a naive scaling up of GPT-2.
I would be very surprised to not see a GPT-4-like system built in the next several years by simply scaling up by 100x again (perhaps with some algorithmic improvements thrown in as well). I don’t know how it will perform but I expect it to be significantly more impressive than GPT-3. Which would be a very interesting thing... the world would look very different. Potentially even scary, especially with immediate follow-up reapplications of the techniques in other areas.
How about consciousness? On the surface GPT3 may appear to act like a human, but by almost any definition of you choose - it still lacks consciousness.
I don't think anyone would throw you a murder charge if you dumped the servers hosting GPT3 into the ocean.
Or maybe they would and statistical approximation is all humans are under the hood despite all our insistence we are more "sophisticated".
Despite the supposed "mystery" of consciousness, it won't be hard to reproduce in an AI. Take a general intelligence system, give it the ability to sense its own mental state (e.g. by feeding the output of its intermediate layers back into its inputs). Pretty soon it will start building a conceptual representation of itself and the evolution of that representation over time will be conscious self-awareness.
It is fundamentally impossible to determine whether or not "consciousness" has been successfully "reproduced".
Things that are fundamentally impossible to determine are necessarily irrelevant.
I honestly don't think consciousness is necessary for AI. Consciousness is more like an "invention" of humans to make themselves feel special. If an AI can understand consciousness and simulate it, that will be sufficient. It doesn't have to be conscious to be intelligent.
This argument is fascinating. What is it supposed to prove? Human beings have dumped boatloads of other human beings into the ocean without facing prosecution as well.
Consciousness might just be our while(true) event loop with context from previous iterations making it feel continuous.
I am sorry but when has irrelevance itself ever stopped life? The radiotrophic fungi of Chernobyl essentially spawned as a sick joke evolutionarily speaking. They have one anonalous environment for generations that once they head outside of the scope are essentially on an unviable alien planet.
Irrelevance is never listed as the cause of death on by a coroner. Oh humans and others certainly have rendered species extinct from carelessness, for getting in their way, being too tempting for short term greed, and other reasons but irrelevance is actually protective. Does anybody feel a need to try to render sulfur vent tube worms extinct? There is nothing we want there or really want from the extremeophile creatures to justify genocide.
Even if any offspring AI cared nothing for us they would be more likely to just fuck off to space to find more favorable environments.
Along this line of thinking that "society is being forced into being average", I would reference this piece from Epsilon Theory:
https://www.epsilontheory.com/the-elton-hootie-line/
TL;DR: In order to be "heard" or to achieve enough of a following to be economically/politically relevant, you must "dynamically range compress" everything to sound the same and appeal to the largest audience, which removes diversity.
That sounds like why old broadcast media is so frothing mad at the new - they have to try to please large bodies with lowest common denominator models to try to get the "average" to max yield.
New media can engage in discovery and targetting to a homunculus generated from the individual based upon their models and what they think about them. The model may be a twisted imaginary construct but it is a better fit than the also imaginary "average" human used to target. Now the old media did have their own demographics ranges but they dealt with it backwards and more proxies - asking are people 20-40 interested in foo instead of "is individual person X probably interested in foo?".