Skip to content
By using Twitter’s services you agree to our Cookies Use. We and our partners operate globally and use cookies, including for analytics, personalisation, and ads.
  • Home Home Home, current page.
  • About

Saved searches

  • Remove
  • In this conversation
    Verified accountProtected Tweets @
Suggested users
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Language: English
    • Bahasa Indonesia
    • Bahasa Melayu
    • Català
    • Čeština
    • Dansk
    • Deutsch
    • English UK
    • Español
    • Filipino
    • Français
    • Hrvatski
    • Italiano
    • Magyar
    • Nederlands
    • Norsk
    • Polski
    • Português
    • Română
    • Slovenčina
    • Suomi
    • Svenska
    • Tiếng Việt
    • Türkçe
    • Ελληνικά
    • Български език
    • Русский
    • Српски
    • Українська мова
    • עִבְרִית
    • العربية
    • فارسی
    • मराठी
    • हिन्दी
    • বাংলা
    • ગુજરાતી
    • தமிழ்
    • ಕನ್ನಡ
    • ภาษาไทย
    • 한국어
    • 日本語
    • 简体中文
    • 繁體中文
  • Have an account? Log in
    Have an account?
    · Forgot password?

    New to Twitter?
    Sign up
vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

Tweets

  • © 2020 Twitter
  • About
  • Help Center
  • Terms
  • Privacy policy
  • Imprint
  • Cookies
  • Ads info
Dismiss
Previous
Next

Go to a person's profile

Saved searches

  • Remove
  • In this conversation
    Verified accountProtected Tweets @
Suggested users
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @

Promote this Tweet

Block

  • Tweet with a location

    You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

    Your lists

    Create a new list


    Under 100 characters, optional

    Privacy

    Copy link to Tweet

    Embed this Tweet

    Embed this Video

    Add this Tweet to your website by copying the code below. Learn more

    Add this video to your website by copying the code below. Learn more

    Hmm, there was a problem reaching the server.

    By embedding Twitter content in your website or app, you are agreeing to the Twitter Developer Agreement and Developer Policy.

    Preview

    Why you're seeing this ad

    Log in to Twitter

    · Forgot password?
    Don't have an account? Sign up »

    Sign up for Twitter

    Not on Twitter? Sign up, tune into the things you care about, and get updates as they happen.

    Sign up
    Have an account? Log in »

    Two-way (sending and receiving) short codes:

    Country Code For customers of
    United States 40404 (any)
    Canada 21212 (any)
    United Kingdom 86444 Vodafone, Orange, 3, O2
    Brazil 40404 Nextel, TIM
    Haiti 40404 Digicel, Voila
    Ireland 51210 Vodafone, O2
    India 53000 Bharti Airtel, Videocon, Reliance
    Indonesia 89887 AXIS, 3, Telkomsel, Indosat, XL Axiata
    Italy 4880804 Wind
    3424486444 Vodafone
    » See SMS short codes for other countries

    Confirmation

     

    Welcome home!

    This timeline is where you’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you.

    Tweets not working for you?

    Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account.

    Say a lot with a little

    When you see a Tweet you love, tap the heart — it lets the person who wrote it know you shared the love.

    Spread the word

    The fastest way to share someone else’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Tap the icon to send it instantly.

    Join the conversation

    Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Find a topic you’re passionate about, and jump right in.

    Learn the latest

    Get instant insight into what people are talking about now.

    Get more of what you love

    Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about.

    Find what's happening

    See the latest conversations about any topic instantly.

    Never miss a Moment

    Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      My own initial reaction to gpt2 helps me understand why pre-modern tribes reacted to being filmed and shown the footage like the camera was stealing their souls. Except, I *like* the idea instead of being horrified by it. Unfortunately as untrue for AIs as for film cameras.

      6 replies 8 retweets 81 likes
      Show this thread
    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      In fact, gpt2 has helped me clarify exactly why I think the moral/metaphysical panic around AI in general, and AGI in particular, is easily the silliest thing I’ll see in my lifetime. It’s the angels-on-a-pinhead concern of out time. Not even wrong.

      3 replies 0 retweets 26 likes
      Show this thread
    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      AI won’t steal our souls AI won’t terk ehr jerbs AI won’t create new kinds of risk AI isn’t A or I I’d call it “cognitive optics”... it’s a bunch of lenses and mirrors that reflect, refract, and amplify human cognition. AIs think in the same way telescopes see. Ie they don’t.

      9 replies 13 retweets 65 likes
      Show this thread
    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      “AIs reflect/reproduce our biases” misses the point by suggesting you could prevent that. That’s ALL they (deep learning algos) do. Biases are the building blocks. Take that out and there’s nothing left. Eg. gpt2 has picked up on my bias towards word like “embody” and “archetype”

      2 replies 7 retweets 39 likes
      Show this thread
    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      Taking the bias out of AI is like taking the economy out of a planned economy. You’re left with regulators and planners with nothing left to regulate and plan. Or the lenses and mirrors out of a telescope. You’re left with a bunch of tubes with distortion-free 1x magnification.

      4 replies 3 retweets 30 likes
      Show this thread
    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      Intension vs intention, mediocritization vs optimization, hard problem of consciousness vs mirrors and cameras

      1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
      Show this thread
    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      None of this is to say a useful and powerful new class of tools isn’t emerging. It definitely is. But you can’t just slap a sensor-actuator loop onto a tool and install a utility function into it and define that to be sentience. That’s just regular automation.

      3 replies 1 retweet 26 likes
      Show this thread
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      I’m tired of this so-called “debate”. It’s a spectacular nothingburger attempt to narrativize a natural, smooth evolution in computing power as a phase shift into a qualitatively different tech regime. There *are* real phase shifts underway, this just ain’t one of them.

      3:46 PM - 20 Feb 2020
      • 19 Likes
      • Abstract Fairy Rahul Ramchandani airborne caipira visa is working on his ebook Andres Osinski keithmadams Sage Gibbons Maxim Leyzerovich Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏🇺🇸
      2 replies 0 retweets 19 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Phase transitions in tech evolution do not usually have human-meaningful interpretations. When we went from steam power to electric, big changes resulted. That was a phase transition. But we didn’t decide to call electricity “artificial glucose” or motors “artificial muscles” 😶

          5 replies 2 retweets 23 likes
          Show this thread
        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          The output of gpt2 is at once deeply interesting and breathtakingly disappointing. I really was hoping to replace myself with a very small shell script but sadly that outcome ain’t on this vector of evolution, no matter how much compute you throw at it.

          3 replies 1 retweet 12 likes
          Show this thread
        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          If you take out the breathless narratives, I honestly can’t tell how an apathetic AGI that squashes us on the way to paperclip maximization is any different from Australian wildfires or an asteroid headed at us. Yes it could destroy us. No there’s nothing “intelligent” about it.

          2 replies 1 retweet 18 likes
          Show this thread
        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Anthropomorphic design has good justifications (Asimov saw this in 1950). Designing swap-in functional replacements for ourselves cheaply evolves legacy infrastructure. Driverless cars are valuable because driver-cars are a big sunk cost. Without them, we’d automate differently.

          2 replies 1 retweet 14 likes
          Show this thread
        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          But the possibility of anthropomorphic design shouldn’t lead us to reductively misread a tech evolution anthropomorphically (let alone anthropocentrically). We call it pottery, not container-statues, because molding clay ain’t about us. It’s about the properties of clay.

          1 reply 1 retweet 12 likes
          Show this thread
        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Key diff between AlphaGo zero and gpt2 worth mulling: AGZ discarded human training data and conquered Go playing against itself. That can’t happen with gpt2. Because there’s no competition rules or goals about language outside of closed world subsets like crosswords.

          3 replies 2 retweets 15 likes
          Show this thread
        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Now if Boston Dynamics robots evolved an internal language in the process of learning how to survive in an open environment that would at least be comparable to how I use language (in a survival closed loop in a social milieu)

          1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
          Show this thread
        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          But that example suggests the link between survival, intelligence and computation is much subtler. If you wanted to build tech that simply solved for survival in an open environment, you’re more likely to draw inspiration from bacteria than dogs or apes.

          1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
          Show this thread
        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          The only reason to cast silicon-based computation into human like form is a) replace ourselves cheaply in legacy infrastructure b) scare ourselves for no good reason

          1 reply 1 retweet 12 likes
          Show this thread
        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          This is easy to see with arms and legs. Harder to see with mental limbs like human language. Asimov had this all figured out 50 years ago. The only reason AI is a “threat” is the benefits of anthropomorphic computation to some will outweigh their costs to many, which is fine.

          4 replies 1 retweet 8 likes
          Show this thread
        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Non-anthropomorphic computation otoh is not usefully illuminated by unmotivated comparisons to human capability. AlphaGo can beat us at Go A steam engine can outrun us Same story. More geewhiz essentialism that’s it.

          3 replies 1 retweet 14 likes
          Show this thread
        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Same steady assault on human egocentricity that’s been going on since copernicus. Not being the center is not the same as being “replaced.” Risks are not the same as malevolence Apathetic harm from a complex system is not the same as intelligence at work

          1 reply 2 retweets 21 likes
          Show this thread
        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          “Intelligence” is a geocentrism kinda idea. The belief that “our” thoughts “revolve around” us. Like skies seem to revolve around earth. “AI” is merely the ego-assaulting discovery that intelligence is just an illusion caused by low-entropy computation flows passing through us.

          4 replies 7 retweets 47 likes
          Show this thread
        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          What annoys me about “AI” understandings of statistical algorithms is that it obscures genuinely fascinating questions about computation. For example it appears any Universal Turing Machine (UTM) can recover the state of any other UTM given enough sample output and memory.

          1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
          Show this thread
        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          This strikes me as more analogous to a heat engine locally reversing entropy than “intelligence”. But nobody studies things like gpt2 in such terms. Can we draw a Carnot cycle type diagram for it? What’s the efficiency possible?

          2 replies 0 retweets 12 likes
          Show this thread
        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          The tedious anthropocentric lens (technically the aspie-hedgehog-rationalist projective lens) stifles other creative perspectives because of the appeal of angels-on-a-pinhead bs thought experiments like simulationism. Heat engines, swarms, black holes, fluid flows...

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
          Show this thread
        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Most AI watchers recognize that the economy and complex bureaucratic orgs are also AIs in the same ontological sense as the silicon based ones, but we don’t see the same moral panic there. When in fact both have even gone through paperclip-maximizer type phases. Why?

          4 replies 3 retweets 24 likes
          Show this thread
        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 20
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          I’ll tell you why. Because they don’t lend themselves as easily to anthropomorphic projection or be recognizably deployed into contests like beating humans at Go. Markets beat humans at Go via prizes. Bureaucracies do it via medals and training.

          0 replies 1 retweet 13 likes
          Show this thread
        20. End of 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.

        Promoted Tweet

        false

        • © 2020 Twitter
        • About
        • Help Center
        • Terms
        • Privacy policy
        • Imprint
        • Cookies
        • Ads info