Skip to content

AGI is here (and I feel fine)

robinsloan.com
4 pointsheadalgorithm4 comments
On HN

Comments

Discussion (15 points, 17 hours ago, 21 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46494830

AGI is here!

Can AGI not speak for itself? Does it need humans to speak and act on its behalf? Who are the high-priests and what are the sects?

This is why I pro­pose uni­lat­eral dec­la­ra­tion as a strategic countermove [... tearing] away the veil of any-minute-now mil­lenar­i­anism to reveal deployed tech­nology

I think that in an ideal world, this would thoroughly embarrass the over-promisers by forcing them to put-up-or-shut-up, and it's fun to imagine... however I worry that it won't work out that way. Instead of deflating the nonsense in its tracks, it'll just give it more momentum and worsen the eventual mess.

What do I mean by AGI ?

Can we fight it with a better term? Something like... Oh, I dunno, maybe "Artificial Narrative Intelligence", in the same sense that we could say A* is a kind of pathfinding intelligence.

I say "narrative" because we've got these machines that grow "fitting" documents, and are often used with stories to "decide" what happens next. For example, the story setting is a Support Page, the Customer Character says X, and the Very Helpful Robot Character then does Y and says Z in response, etc.

However just because these stories fit surprisingly well doesn't mean it's doing the kind of "thinking" we really dreamed of.

You some­times read about employees of AI com­pa­nies absorbed by their own products. Nobody on Earth has spent more hours talking to YakGPT than Katie Echo! Nobody can pump more code out of Shan­non­Soft than Johnny Narcissus! Recalling my Twitter expe­ri­ence, I think boasts (and posts) of this kind should inspire caution.

To me a lot of that feels like just the thing-of-the-day LinkedIn Lunacy, albeit running at an unusual intensity.

To summarize the article: "If you can't define it, I'm right."

This has a nice litany of logical fallacies, but that's the main one.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.