Since this thread might actually catch the eye of some people who are responsible for these kinds of things (nothing ever seems to happen with stuff that comes up in the Apple Support forums), I'll add my current pet peeve bug:
On iOS, I use the notes app to keep track of my workout routine. Just a simple table with columns for exercises and rows for workout sessions. For a while now, there's a bug where the text gets confused about which row it should display on. Only in some columns though. So in one or a few columns, the entry for the last workout will be a few rows above where it should be – sometimes it's between rows. When I press the cell in the bottom row to input a new entry, the text marker will end up somewhere above. This bug is quite inconsistent, but often persists between reboots of the app. It seems to have something to do with there being empty cells in a column
I completely agree, though I haven't been thinking in terms of the cancer metaphor myself. I have been thinking a bit about how we could limit the negative effects of both advertising and other phenomena like social media algorithms:
1. Almost all advertising is based on manipulation of human cognitive biases. There is a limited set of biases, and the mechanisms by which they can be exploited are both limited and easily detected – we can most likely train AI to do it. Therefore, it's possible to start thinking seriously about making laws that ban corporations and organisations from creating marketing that exploits these cognitive biases.
2. When it comes to social media platforms, there are two routes we could go down. Either we could regulate their algorithms the same way – or we could force social media platforms to both make their recommendation algorithms open source, and to open up their platforms to third-party recommendation algorithms that people can choose to use instead. This would be like a recommendation algorithm app store that the company has to provide to their users. You might want to select a youtube recommendation algorithm that optimises for personal development – or a facebook feed that optimises for creating real-world connections
Of course corporations would fight this kind of legislation with tooth and claw, but that's how it is. I would be happy to get some thoughtful feedback on these ideas, their technical and legal plausibility, and any potential negative unintended consequences or loopholes that could undermine them
The story begins at a kitchen table in Stockholm in 2015, playing Scrabble with my flatmate. I tell my friend I want to see if we can come up with a new type of word game
Playing around with the game tiles, after a while I put four of them together in a square, and realise that this could be a good start
At the time, I've recently learned iOS app development watching tutorials on Lynda.com (Simon Allardice is probably still my all-time favourite teacher), so I start developing the first iteration of the game using the newly released Swift and SpriteKit combo. Having a lot of fun, learning as I go
After about a year, I have a functional - but not too beautiful - two player game that works ok for local pass & play games. Only on iOS though. Should have thought about the multi platform thing earlier on...
In 2016 I get my first jobs as an iOS developer, first in a tiny startup at an incubator office in central Stockholm, then at FEO Media, the company behind the huge global success QuizClash. After a few months working on their Swift remake of the original game, I join a new project to create a sequel to QuizClash, using Unity3D. After some time, I ask a friend and colleague on the team – the UI designer – if he'd be keen to work on my game with me as a side project, and he agrees. We start iterating designs, while I start reworking the game from scratch in Unity
After about a year, we have the QuizClash sequel ready for release, but this unfortunately coincides with the company being acquired by a competitor, MAG Interactive, who choose to keep going with the original game. Bad timing, and a year of work wasted. Such is life.
I go off to Vietnam in early 2018 to work on another startup idea. Unfortunately I end up in a health crisis there and that falls through. Once I'm kind of back on my feet again, I decide to refocus on the word game. I'm living off savings and subleasing my apartment in Stockholm, so I can work pretty much full time, and some family and friends have joined as beta testers, some of them becoming quite obsessive players. This is a good phase
After a few more ups and downs, on-periods and off-periods, we finally get around to making a proper release of the game. This year is now 2022. I have some plans for marketing, have even created a tool that I can use to create animated clips of finding interesting words, to post on social media sites. But I can never get myself to do the job of marketing, partly because of a strong aversion to self-promotion and marketing in general, partly life, health and work getting in the way, partly because of laziness, and possibly partly because of some underlying psychological problems that someone else might be better positioned to see than me
Since the release, I've thought of getting around to marketing the game, but still, it's just there. A fully functional, genuinely fun and challenging multiplayer word game, with some unique game mechanics I've not seen elsewhere. Unseen, unloved, gathering virtual dust on the iOS App Store and Google Play
Not sure what triggered me to write this post just now. Maybe I'm hoping for someone to read this, check out the game, and go "That's a great game, I want to help make it big!". Maybe I want to find a new burst of motivation to get started on the marketing that never happened. Maybe I just want some interesting replies from other creators with similar stories
Anyway, the name of the game is Lingo Lords, and you can find it on the iOS App Store and Google Play Store. If you want to challenge me at the game, my player name is Henk0. Expect to be beaten, as I've played the game more than literally anyone else. Available game languages right now are English, Swedish and Dutch. If you try it and like it, maybe post your player name here for others to challenge you. If you want to invest or help out with marketing for a percentage of shares, pm me. Consider reviewing it on the app store(s), etc. etc.
Yes, LLM:s currently only deal with text information. But GPT-5 will supposedly be multimodal, so then it will also have visual and sound data to associate with many of the concepts it currently only knows as words. How many more modalities will we need to give it to be able to say that it understands something?
Also, GPT-4 indeed doesn't do any additional training in real-time. However, it is being trained on the interactions people have with it. Most likely, near future models will be able to train themselves continuously, so that's another step closer to how we function
I took the liberty of asking GPT-4 to take the second statement and your response to it, and turning it into a fable:
"Once upon a time, in a village nestled by a grand mountain, lived a wise Sage. The Sage was known throughout the lands for his vast knowledge and understanding, for he had spent his life studying the texts of old and the secrets of the world.
In the same village, an Artisan, skilled in the craft of making extraordinary mirrors, lived. These were no ordinary mirrors, for they were said to reflect not just physical appearances, but also knowledge and experiences. Intrigued by the wisdom of the Sage, the Artisan decided to make a mirror that would reflect the Sage's knowledge.
After many days and nights of meticulous work, the Artisan finally crafted a mirror so clear and pure, it held a reflection of all the knowledge and wisdom the Sage had gathered throughout his life. The mirror could answer questions about the world, cite ancient texts, and reflect the wisdom it was imbued with.
Word quickly spread about the Sage's Mirror, and villagers began to claim, "This mirror is as wise as the Sage himself! It knows and understands as much as he does!"
However, a wise Old Woman of the village, known for her insightful observations, gently corrected them, "This mirror, as remarkable as it is, contains a reflection of the Sage's knowledge. It can share what the Sage knows but doesn't truly understand the way the Sage does."
The Old Woman continued, "The Sage has spent years learning, pondering, and experiencing life, which the mirror cannot replicate. The Sage's understanding implies the ability to think, reason, and learn in ways that the mirror, no matter how complete its reflection, simply cannot. The mirror's reflection is static, a snapshot of a moment in time, while the Sage's wisdom continues to grow and adapt."
The villagers learned a valuable lesson that day. They realized the mirror was an extraordinary tool that held vast knowledge, but it was not a substitute for the genuine understanding and wisdom of the Sage."
- Not too bad for a mirror.
I'd be interested to hear what you think is so special about human understanding? We also just absorb a lot of data and make connections and inferences from it, and spit it out when prompted, or spontaneously due to some kind of cognitive loop. Most of it happens subconsciously, and if you stop to observe it, you may notice that you have no control of what your next conscious thought will be. We do have a FEELING that we associate with the cognitive event of understanding something though, and I think many of us are prone to read a lot more into that feeling than is warranted
Great points. Will just add a point 1.5: There's usually an inverse correlation between ill intent and competence, so the subset of people who both want to cause harm to others on a mass scale and who are also able to pull it off is small
So many of the people who opine about AI, its trajectory, and its possible effects on society, have latched on to one or two possible effects - like it overtaking jobs, or massively increasing misinformation. These are both very valid concerns, but they're only a tiny part of the big picture
The thinker who I perceive as having the best holistic (in the non-wooey sense of the word) understanding of how the rapid development of AI will affect this and a number of other social and existential risks is Daniel Schmachtenberger. He lays it out well in this episode of the Theories of Everything Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7WtcTATa2U&t=2373s
Highly recommend watching it, even if it's long. Some main points though:
- AI will increase the rate of development of every other technology it is applied to
- In fields like biotech, this can lead to cancer cures, but also to increasingly dangerous bioweapons
- Our current economic system is based on exponential economic growth in a limited resource world. AI applied in the service of profit will amplify this, leading us increasingly fast towards a number of tipping points. Of course, AI can also help steer us away from that path, but that is not the natural attractor
- Game theoretic multipolar traps (aka Moloch) incentivise arms races and races to the bottom just like we see now. Those who are willing to move fast and break things have an advantage in these dynamics vs. those who prefer to move slowly and carefully
- Cheaper and more efficient AI models will lead to increasing decentralisation of the technology, making it very hard to control - unlike current weapons of mass destruction
List goes on, but Daniel makes a much better case. Again, I would love to hear a good critique of his thinking, but haven't come across one yet
I'm completely dumbfounded by obviously highly intelligent people consistently not getting this, and dismissing current generation AI systems as not being intelligent because they can't reliably solve massively complex problems in one go. Like anyone would expect a human programmer or researcher to just intuitively come up with a complex program, or the correct answer for a hard problem every time, instantly
Human thinking and problem solving involves a lot of trial and error, iterative thinking, and sharing and discussing the problem with other humans. Processes that AI researchers are just now beginning to explore, with results like increasing reasoning ability by 900% in a recent paper. Every thinking human runs a near constant loop of thought, with no conscious control of which thought will appear next (we're very good at fooling ourselves that we have control though)
We do have super-intelligences already, but they're severely handicapped by lacking a bunch of these - apparently fairly straightforward to implement - abilities, plus a few senses and the ability to directly effect change in the physical world (which really isn't needed if they can get access to human agents who will do their bidding, wittingly or unwittingly), and to self-improve. With regards to self-improvement, the increasing coding skills combined with iterative 'thought' loops should get there in very little time considering the current rate of progress
There's also the idea that a single AI model should be able to do everything our human brains do, when our brains actually contain a number of specialised subunits that handle different aspects of our behavioural repertoire. It reasonable to allow for the same thing with an AI system, where specialised sub-networks handle input, output and other subtasks. AI systems also have the advantage of being able to add any arbitrary number of subunits to increase its capacity to solve various problems
We seem to suffer from a species-wide narcissism with regards to our own intelligence and capabilities, and there's this huge focus on the number of connections in the human brain – most of which deal with things that are by no means necessary to act on the world unless one has a meat body and the need to navigate social situations, make friends and mate. Fact is, we have terrible short-term memory (worse than chimpanzees), slow processing time, lots of cognitive heuristics, many of which cause more harm than good in the modern world. We are emotional and easily fooled. Even the most intelligent people historically have believed in what we now consider fairy tales. We are slow to take in information, bad at storing it, and generally bad at transmitting it. A few of us can generate great ideas – building on accumulated knowledge from our forebears and peers – but most of us are just not that great at coming up with anything original or useful
I've been actively looking for good arguments against AGI being much closer than we should be comfortable with, and reasons why we should not fear systems that surpass us in intelligence. All I've come across so far is some combination of the above, often expressed with a dismissive attitude, disparaging current LLM:s as parrots (that can apparently reason on the level of university level humans, but much more quickly), and pejorative terms like fearmongerers and doomers to describe those of us who really don't think its a good idea to pursue more intelligent systems. My guess is these people will act surprised when the arms race inevitably leads to some very bad unintended consequences. I don't see a way to stop it though, so I'm just strapped in for the ride along with the rest of humankind
Again, if you have good arguments against any of the points above, please do share them with me
On iOS, I use the notes app to keep track of my workout routine. Just a simple table with columns for exercises and rows for workout sessions. For a while now, there's a bug where the text gets confused about which row it should display on. Only in some columns though. So in one or a few columns, the entry for the last workout will be a few rows above where it should be – sometimes it's between rows. When I press the cell in the bottom row to input a new entry, the text marker will end up somewhere above. This bug is quite inconsistent, but often persists between reboots of the app. It seems to have something to do with there being empty cells in a column
Anyone else experience this?