I liked the book releases best. They are really missing something without the book releases. I guess they want to save money, but they are probably underestimating how much it motivated people to attend all the sessions and speculate on what themed talk was a book title.
slimboyfat
JoinedPosts by slimboyfat
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36
Did anyone really enjoy assemblies?
by SydBarrett inthe twickenham post made me think of this.
i have a few jw family members on facebook and being summertime, their pics of the convention have shown up in my fb feed.
along with their comments about "i wished it would never end" or "what a glorious weekend".
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69
Where Does Watchtower Doctrine Contradict Scripture?
by Vanderhoven7 inhere are some areas that i have found:.
not only is watchtower eschatology offbase, which is not critical, but so is watchtower soteriology … which is critical.
the bible says not to put trust in men who cannot save.
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slimboyfat
Phil 2.11 says that everyone bending their knee to Jesus is “to the glory of God the Father.”
I’ve yet to read any statement in scripture that even hints that worship of God is “to the glory of” an another. Clearly Jesus is distinguish from God in this verse because worship to God is his alone by right, whereas bending the knee to Jesus is for the purpose of elevating Jesus’ God and ours.
God is the source of everything and the rightful recipient of worship.
Jesus is God’s Son through who God created everything and through whom he will reconcile all creation. Thus all honour and praise to Jesus is, as scripture plainly says, “to the glory of God the Father.”
Paul spells out the difference between God and Jesus extremely clearly again in 1 Cor 15.27 and 28:
27 For “God has put all things in subjection under [Jesus] feet.” But when it says, “all things are put in subjection,” it is plain that he is excepted who put all things in subjection under him. 28 When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.
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It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars
by Newly Enlightened inoriginal reddit post (removed).
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slimboyfat
I think that website scrapes the data from the Patreon site, so if it is no longer available on Patreon then the graph site might stick at the last known count of 508
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11530
It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars
by Newly Enlightened inoriginal reddit post (removed).
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slimboyfat
It looks like the patron number has been removed from LE’s Patreon account?
I guess he didn’t enjoy the monthly speculation about how far his support would drop, or the reminder that his boost from the begging video was only temporary.
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69
Where Does Watchtower Doctrine Contradict Scripture?
by Vanderhoven7 inhere are some areas that i have found:.
not only is watchtower eschatology offbase, which is not critical, but so is watchtower soteriology … which is critical.
the bible says not to put trust in men who cannot save.
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slimboyfat
The Watchtower magazine bases its articles on Bible teaching. If you are questioning that then you are undermining the basis for believing it is the truth. Honestly, sometimes I think this discussion forum is beginning to develop apostate leanings. 😁
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Is AI going to change the world?
by Reasonfirst inhad lunch with a friend, whose a lecturer in the accounting dept.
of one of australia's best universities.
he told me he expects to lose his job at some point in the next 5 years, as the accounting dept, will disappear, as all accounting will be done by ai programs, so why teach it.. if his fears are correct, that means that any profession that involves the mind, may one day face the same future.
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slimboyfat
I got a lot of wrong answers from ChatGPT too.
https://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/6003458855927808/frustrating-discussion-chargpt
1. Do you think AI gave better or worse answers to your questions than the average human? The percentage of humanity who could give the correct answer to the first question for example must be exceedingly tiny. The fact that we are testing it out on obscure pieces of knowledge already is testament to how far it has come. AI is already better than the average human in general, and better than specialists in some particular areas. That already makes it useful before the weak points are improved.
2. Have you tried the same questions on GPT 4? Do you think you will get better answers? Because ongoing improvements are substantial. The “hands” problem in early AI image generation has already largely been fixed, for example. (See above) GPT 2 apparently spat out nonsense most of the time. If the trajectory of improvement continues then most of the issues you highlight may be resolved relatively quickly. People have also reported substantial improvements in output if you adjust the prompt slightly. For example, you could try prefacing your maths question with the stament: “answer the following question as if you are a mathematics professor”. It sounds stupid but it makes a difference.
3. I think it’s fundamentally a mistake to assume that AI that makes errors is neither useful, nor a threat. AI could still be issuing “wrong” answers to basic questions right up to the day that it devises a new way for killing all humans on the planet in short order. It is apparently already very good at suggesting new pathogens, toxins, other weapons, and methods of delivery. Even if it’s singing the wrong lyrics to “Eve of Destruction” while doing it, we could all still be dead.
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Is AI going to change the world?
by Reasonfirst inhad lunch with a friend, whose a lecturer in the accounting dept.
of one of australia's best universities.
he told me he expects to lose his job at some point in the next 5 years, as the accounting dept, will disappear, as all accounting will be done by ai programs, so why teach it.. if his fears are correct, that means that any profession that involves the mind, may one day face the same future.
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slimboyfat
My own experience of Midjourney is that it has improved over the past few months. At first it made a terrible mess of human hands, but the latest images I have asked it to produce include pretty good drawings of hands. The fuzzy details are beginning to get clearer and the images are more and more accurate and usable. As it is the images that Midjourney and other programmes produce are useable and are already replacing the labour of artists.
Take this image from a few weeks ago. I asked for a depiction of Joseph teaching Jesus how to be a carpenter. This was one of the results. The hands look pretty good.
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If You Can Remember When This Was Displayed in the KH - You Ain't No Spring Chicken!
by mikronboy in.
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slimboyfat
No I can’t remember this. How old do you think I am? I can remember old timers talking about it as something that happened a long time ago.
In my terms, if you can remember what an S8 form was, or food tickets for the convention, then you’re doing well. 😁
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54
Is AI going to change the world?
by Reasonfirst inhad lunch with a friend, whose a lecturer in the accounting dept.
of one of australia's best universities.
he told me he expects to lose his job at some point in the next 5 years, as the accounting dept, will disappear, as all accounting will be done by ai programs, so why teach it.. if his fears are correct, that means that any profession that involves the mind, may one day face the same future.
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slimboyfat
Geoffrey Hinton on how AI differs from human intelligence and why it is a concern.
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Is AI going to change the world?
by Reasonfirst inhad lunch with a friend, whose a lecturer in the accounting dept.
of one of australia's best universities.
he told me he expects to lose his job at some point in the next 5 years, as the accounting dept, will disappear, as all accounting will be done by ai programs, so why teach it.. if his fears are correct, that means that any profession that involves the mind, may one day face the same future.
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slimboyfat
TD
thanks for the interesting response. But I think you have made a few mistakes.
Unlike many of their predecessors, the Wright brothers were not simply mimicking the actions of birds with little to no understanding of power to weight ratios. They were truly, actually flying. --Not exactly like birds do, but via a mechanical application of the same principles.
AI, as we use the term today is a mimicry of the human mind via clever algorithms and vast repositories of facts, but it is not truly intelligent in the sense that humans are. Unless and until we actually understand how the human mind works, we are not likely to be able to build a machine that works along similar principles.
You have hit on exactly the correct idea when you talk about mimicry.
Geoffrey Hinton explained that until a few years ago he thought the best way to achieve artificial intelligence was to copy the way the brain works. What he discovered, to his complete surprise, was that there is a quicker route to producing intelligent outcomes than copying the brain. This is indeed analogous to how the Wright brothers discovered there was a better route to flight that attempting to copy birds flapping their wings. This means that current AI does not function the way the brain does because it uses the large scale data to predict what an intelligent response would look like rather than the human approach of using reasoning to try to work out an actual intelligent response.
Aha, you may say, there you go! It isn’t really intelligent at all, it’s just mimicking what intelligence looks like! Yes, and no. This is the tricky part. Yes in the sense that the AI has no inner life, it doesn’t “work toward a solution” as such, as humans do. It just uses numbers to predict the best next word/move/image/sound. There is nothing “thoughtful” about it. So in this sense AI is stupid and tends to make ridiculous mistakes from our perspective.
But what you’ve got to appreciate is that, in terms of all the things that are really important to us - its usefulness, replacing jobs, existential threat - it really does not matter that AI is stupid in how it goes about producing its outcome from our perspective. What matters are the results it produces.
If a computer beats a human at chess it doesn’t matter if it does it by being clever or by some stupid unthinking process - the outcome is till the same.
If a computer creates images that are as good as artists then it doesn’t matter whether it does it by being creative, or by crunching numbers - the outcome it still the same - major job losses.
If a computer can diagnose patients better than a doctor then it doesn’t matter if it does it by being clever of by a stupid process of data crunching and prediction - the outcome is the same - better diagnosis and less need for doctors and their training.
The same all the way up to existential threat. It doesn’t matter if AI kills all humans because it wants to (it doesn’t really “want” anything, it’s just a machine) or just as a byproduct an unthinking mechanical process, the outcome is still the same - all humans dead.
There seems to be incredulity that AI can produce outcomes that compete with or exceed human capabilities unless it copies the way humans do it. This is an understandable mistake (Geoffrey Hinton admits he made the same mistake him selves n the past) but it is a mistake nonetheless. It is also contradicted each day as AI produces better outcomes than humans at playing chess, diagnosing from scans, summarising, building proteins, discovering new antibiotics, and on and on.
In the past people like Noam Chomsky and Douglas Hofstadter have argued that the “brute force” approach of large language models will never reach human intelligence. In one sense they were correct because language models have no inner life and they have no reasoning ability as we understand the concept. Where they were mistaken was in thinking that “brute force” could not produce the same end results as human style reasoning. What Hofstadter, Hinton and others have realised, only in last few years, is that this alternative route to intelligence can produce results reaching and exceeding human level outputs.