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” 
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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
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“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.
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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.
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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?
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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...
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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?
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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.
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End of conversation
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enjoyed reading this thread in reverse
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Totally agreed
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