xcode42 · HackerTrans

By the way, you can replace the fandom in the url with breezewiki and get a much more pleasant experience without ads. it's not that much of a difference on desktop, and the layout might debatably be uglier, but it's a godsend on mobile where the search bar doesn't even work half the time for me.

xcode42

2 年前discuss

I mean, you are their parent, if you believe that your kids don't have enough work to do, give them more work to do? why would that need to be handled through homework? the purpose of homework is to serve as a teaching aid to help students internalize and memorize the lessons given. If your kid is an honors student it sounds like he has learned what he needs to learn, why give them more homework?

xcode42

2 年前discuss

> (Many, but not all) Animals do in fact have consciousness, emotions, and dreams(the kind that happens during sleep that is). It's not just human projection.

Maybe we are defining consciousness differently but how do you know? how do you prove that? Don't get me wrong I too believe that animals have consciousness, but I think humans other than me have consciousness too and I can't prove that either. That's a big part of the whole issue particularly in regards to whether the current ai of the week is conscious or not.

You can demonstrate that animal and human brains achieve similar brain states given similar stimuli but how do you demonstrate that those brain states are sufficient for/require consciousness? for all we know every animal is a philosophical zombie and we can't prove otherwise.

xcode42

2 年前discuss

I don't think the argument is to not care how society works at all. But if people are caring so much that it's making them act in irrational and harmful(both to themselves and others) ways maybe we/they need to dial it back a bit for both our/their and society's good. It's not at all clear that this "culture of outrage" is having a positive impact in how society works, and if it isn't maybe we need to stop.

xcode42

2 年前discuss

I would love nothing more than to not be special, the only solutions that I can conceive of for the hard problem of conscience are ones that requires something other than the physical. Either there is a soul or conscience is just inherent to the universe(the whole everything has a conscience theory) neither of these is particularly satisfying to me if for no other reason than they are both unfalsifiable. I would love for there to be an available algorithm that my brain could compute that would spit out conscience.

But I don't see how, it seems intractable to me. The brain could theoretically do anything it does from information processing, problem solving, planning or even develop a theory of the mind without a conscience, it's computation all the way down. But why and goddamned how does a human brain go from perceiving and processing the visual information of red light hitting your eyes to "feeling" red, how does it "feel" anything at all, heck what is this "observer" that does all the "feeling" even made of? if you could break "him" down into constituent parts(theoretically computable sub-problems) at all that would be nice, it would be more progress than I've done over years of thinking about this bullshit problem.

The "observer" seems indivisible to me, heck it seems made of nothing at all, it just is. Sure it being indivisible might be an illusion made up by the brain, but, if so, it's an illusion that still needs to be fed to "something", and I haven't heard any working theories that I actually buy that explain how the brain comes up with that "something".

xcode42

2 年前discuss

Good luck. I've given up trying to explain qualia to people, and why they are at the core of why conscience matters. It's so frustrating. Once I heard it for the first time it seemed obvious to me and I was glad someone had already made up a word for it, but every time I try to explain it to people in the consciousness discussion people just look at me cross-eyed I must just be explaining it wrong :)

xcode42

3 年前discuss

Regarding the first one, it's actually a surprisingly difficult problem. Sure we can try right now but deep learning systems currently have a lot of issues with continuous learning, if you just do it the naive way they keep forgetting all they learned to get better performance on the most recent examples. But yeah the second one definitely seems like the harder of the two. The building blocks of intelligence and the mind are indeed endless fascinating, I spend way too much time thinking about this stuff.

Oh no I agree, the current AI systems have already caused notable changes in society and even if the development of even more powerful AI stagnates here(for now) we are bound to continue to see societal changes for some time as this is all quite new and society is still adapting and figuring out the "right way" to handle all this. In particular the impact it has had on artists of all kinds is widespread and I'll be curious to see how it pans out and how we handle it as a society.

xcode42

3 年前discuss

Ai is having explosive growth and the hype around it and research is definitely at a high. You could say we are in a "bullish market" when it comes to AI R&D ;). Assuming that this persists for 10 more years or even beyond that seems like a bad bet but I guess we'll see.

xcode42

3 年前discuss

Thank you for the paper, this seems awesome, I'll have a look later. Deepmind pretty consistently comes up with interesting ai research results, so this should be pretty neat at the very least. Regarding what would convince me that AGI is around the corner, I guess I should start by defining what I'm thinking of when I say AGI, because to be fair AGI is pretty vague.

I expect it to be an agent capable of independent action(even if limited by whatever restraints we put on it) it should be able to want to do things rather then just waiting around idling waiting for human input. It should be always learning, rather than only learning in batches when we tell it to. It should be able to encounter completely new forms of input/problems/scenarios and start learning on its from that and actually use concepts learned from other forms of input to learn faster in new inputs. Like for instance, if I grab an LLM and train it on an image set that doesn't contain any cars, but contains other vehicles, when I show it a car will it know that it's a car on the first shown image because it already knows what a wheel is from the other images and know that a car has 4 wheels from its language model even though it's never seen a car? It should be able to connect previously learned concepts like that. For that matter it shouldn't need absurd amounts of data to learn a new example after it has gained some basics on that specific form of input, like if it knows what cats and dogs are it shouldn't need thousands of examples of rats to know what a rat is(I'm assuming it was trained in a generalist dataset so it starts learning about the real world, it just never saw a rat specifically). It should be able to do this stuff for arbitrary stuff consistently. It should be able to explain its reasoning when asked why it did thing X. It should be able to ask questions when in doubt and learn from singular answers. Assuming it has already learned fundamentals of the real world like language and video It should be able to make predictions of the real world from learning from raw real world data with no human processing.

My impression is that a lot of these requirements are still very much unachievable and more importantly they probably won't be fixed by just making a single more powerfull ANN, they require whole new ideas to figure out, which we might figure out tomorrow or we might figure out 50 years from now or 100, we don't know, it will happen when it happens, in which case I'm defaulting to longer timeframes because I'm a pessimist I guess :). I realize that you can reduce the bar for AGI a lot to make it easier to achieve but that just makes the jump from AGI to ASI even larger. And my complaint was ultimately not specifically about AGIs I just used them as indicator of how unattainable ASI still is. If we are having problems with AGI what hope do we have of figuring out ASI on a short timeframe? And I mean ASIs are the real threat that the doomers complain about so much. You can't "just turn off" an ASI but you should definitely be able to "just turn off" an AGI.

Sorry for the long post hope this helped explain my point of view on the issue.

xcode42

3 年前discuss

why do you assume that the brain is quantum? it seems very obviously not? on stuff the size of neurons quantum effects are already negligible at anything except near 0K temperatures which the brain isn't at, right? as this ever been shown to not be true. have we ever seen quantum effects on warm super-mulecular sized structures?

xcode42

3 年前discuss

While I find this story a fun and intelligent allegory for the issue of ASIs and a fun thought experiment, I find all the doomsaying around ai safety research kind of tiring. AI safety research is an important and worthwhile field without us needing to constantly be worrying about a far off doomsday that may never come. Yes ASIs are an existential threat and yes once they are out, they are out, and there's no stopping them nor turning them off or anything so we better get them right the first time, but like we don't seem to be anywhere close to ASIs. I have my doubts we will even achieve AGI in this century let alone ASI which I'm not even sure are possible for us non-super-intellegences to create. It seems obvious to me that we are still several major breakthroughs away from AGIs and if these are anything like the deeplearning breakthrough we will probably have a few AI winters between now and then, we have plenty of time to see this supposed doomsday scenario coming and preparing for it. And again this is not to say that ai safety research isn't important. The alignment problem is very much an important and immediate issue right now for Narrow AI let alone for AGI. But seriously the ai isn't going to go from Narrow to running a thousand loops around the whole of humanity in 2 seconds flat, no need for all this doomsaying.

xcode42

3 年前discuss

While I agree that ChatGPT is surprisingly impressive, I think you might be underestimating what's still missing. For starters, what you describe as "the spontaneous eruption of a meta hypervisor that would “think” " is such a hard problem that they literally call it the "Hard problem of consciousness" and is debatably a much harder problem than what we've already solved. Secondly, it is very much an open question whether having this "conscience" would solve the arbitrary problem/context/environment abstraction generation, since it doesn't seem to me that that is the way our own brains/conscience work. I(my conscious mind) don't generate the abstractions that allow me to solve problems, I look at problems and the "right way to look at the problem to better solve it" just kind of "clicks"/pops into my head as an idea, so it is most likely being handled by some algorithm in the background I'm not aware off. And that's not even mentioning that as far as I am aware(someone who is more uptodate with the most recent AI advancements correct me if I'm wrong) but I don't think learning on-the-go processing new input data as it comes along without screwing up/forgetting/overffiting your previous learning is a solved a problem. ChatGPT still needed to be explicitly and manually trained from a large dataset right? It isn't continuously learning, right?

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