Is there somewhere on the net a primer on why AI is such a threat. Something that, as a programmer, could have a chance of convincing me? (not just general platitudes, some concrete indications at least)
-
-
-
What I'm really missing here is an argument or evidence that is it indeed feasible to cross the threshold between solving symbolic rule systems / concrete pattern matching tasks, and super(general)intelligence. AlphaGo isn't evidence towards that according to me.
-
Seems like a weird place to put the burden of proof. "Sure, cars went at 20 mph last year and 30 mph this year, but nobody can prove we can ever make a 40 mph car, so why worry?"
-
I agree it's possible that at some point the hitherto-consistently-improving wave of AI progress hits a mysterious brick wall and stops because our brains are magic and impossible to replicate, but I don't think it should be our default assumption.
-
Also, some of the stuff going on with machine vision now seems very different from just symbolic rules / concrete pattern matching. Ability to replicate vague artistic styles seems like good example of moving beyond the easily discretized. Obviously still far from human level.
-
What neural nets do is approximate a mathematical functions: a mapping from a set of bits to another. I can see the artistic styles used in the experiment being expressed as a mathematical transform: apply some filters, turn a few knobs on your image editor.
-
AI has not progressed constantly but rather by fits and starts. And each time the view of what was possible has been over-optimistic, on the "natural language solved by next summer" scale.
- 10 more replies
New conversation -
-
-
I was at a dinner party the year Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule, and this pretentious refugee from the 60's said, "Could the Chinese *really* be worse for Hong Kong than the British have been?"
-
I could not help myself. I quoted the Babbage Observation at him. He didn't understand it, but he went away, so I counted that as a win.
-
The Babbage Observation is sufficiently obscure that I can't easily find it. Would you please elaborate?
-
That's my pretentious name for it. It's quoted here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out ….
-
It goes like this: "On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-
When I use it like this I say "statement" or "assertion" instead of "question," but same idea.
-
And yes, I will literally say to people, "I am unable to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that would provoke such a statement." I am a strange person.
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
Is this in reference to a particular Hot Take or just the general attitude about everything
-
Since capitalism is real and superintelligent AI is not (for now at least), if there is metaphor happening here it's going in the other direction.
-
Capitalism is a vast abstract system that outwits all humanity at every turn; friendly AI and safe capitalism are equivalent impossibilities.
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
If only there was an actual existential threat to life on earth right now, that we could attribute inequivocally to capitalism, so that your joke was funnier
- 1 more reply
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.