Geoffrey Hinton on how AI differs from human intelligence and why it is a concern.
slimboyfat
JoinedPosts by slimboyfat
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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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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
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.
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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
He fully expected a guilty verdict and has stated just so several times over the past year.
Maybe so. I was reluctant to believe it wasn’t just a game on his part because the average 14 year old could tell you his “case” was bonkers. But maybe he really did believe it had merit, he is that stupid.
But again, the only “crime” in relation to his livestream was his statement that he visits prostitutes every few months, because being a customer to prostitutes is a felony in Croatia. Why was he never worried that he himself would get in trouble if he alerted the authorities to his breaking the law by his stupid defamation case? Has anyone sent the video and/or the relevant confession to the Croatian authorities?
At one point in one of his videos he referred to a comment in the livestream that asked whether prostitution is illegal in Croatia. His response was a bizarre kind of annoyance, even indignation that someone should raise the question. What was that all about? I have no idea what that was supposed to mean. Was it ignorance, pure bluster, or what?
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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
Saying that AI will not learn how to cope with the social aspects of driving on the basis of current driverless cars is a bit like saying planes will never cross the Atlantic on the basis of the early flights by Orville and Wilbur Wright.
We are at early days and the progress is phenomenally fast. Experts such as Geoffrey Hinton are saying the latest AI models are doing things they didn’t expect to see for decades. My own experience of ChatGPT is that it is both astonishingly brilliant and fantastically stupid at the same time. It’s been likened to the best read 10 year old there has ever been who still doesn’t understand basic aspects of the real world. But for how much longer? Nobody is saying ChatGPT will change the world, or endanger it, it’s the trajectory of the progress which is the amazing and/or alarming thing. And GPT 4 is already here.
AI is now better at diagnosing patients than human doctors. And a recent study shows AI interactions are perceived as more empathetic than human doctors too.
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What Did the Following People Have in Common?
by no-zombie inwhat did the following people have in common?.
1 job2 the widow of zaraphath3 naaman4 the samaritan leper (one of the 10 lepers)5 the roman army officer of capernaum6 cornelius and his guestsnone were ...israelitesjewish convertspart of the abrahamic covenantchristianspart of a christian congregationin a dedicated relationship with godorbaptizedhowever ...all were directly given holy spirit or individually blessed by god ... even though, they were not part of 'jehovah's organization'.take time to think what this really means.luke 4:24-29acts 10:34-35.
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slimboyfat
A Jehovah’s Witness might say: what do Korah, Dathan, Abiram, Ananias and Sapphira have in common? They disobeyed God’s channel. Jehovah has worked through an organisation throughout history, especially in these last days when he works through the faithful slave.
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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
Excellent long discussion of the short to medium term impacts of AI assuming that it doesn’t result in extinction in short order. Even if this more optimistic assessment is correct then human society is in for a very rough ride indeed.
Major job losses from late 2024 onward. The 2024 presidential election highly disrupted by new technology and the inability to tell fact from fiction. People withdrawing from society either as a rejection of new technology (older people in general) or being utterly absorbed into it. (Younger people in general)
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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
Douglas Hofstadter reflecting on being wrong about the pace of development of artificial intelligence (he previously thought that super intelligent artificial intelligence was hundreds of years away):
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Only baptised JWs will make it?
by ExBethelitenowPIMA ini think it was a john cedars video or someone else’s where the point was brought up that only baptised jws will be saved?
then one talk about kids of baptised jws hope they will make it but even them don’t know.
most jws probably think that some good people who are not baptised may make it through, but this is not official teaching?.
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slimboyfat
I’ve encountered a whole spectrum of views among JWs on this. Some think you need to get baptised to be sure of being saved. This was sometimes used to pressure people young people or Bible studies who were delaying baptism. Others think interested ones will be saved if not yet baptised. Others think that “honest hearted” ones who haven’t heard the good news (such as in China) might be saved by Jehovah.
On the flip side I’ve heard others assume that only JWs will make it, but that only a proportion of JWs will be judged worthy and make it into the new system - maybe a half, two thirds, or one third, depending on the view of their fellow brothers and sisters. One sister used to say “half of us are here to try the other half”, meaning that only around half of JWs will be saved at Armageddon, and the function of the other half who won’t make it is to serve as a test of faith, presumably by their behaviour and antics, for the other faithful half.
In terms of official Watchtower teaching, they are all over the place too. Some Watchtowers imply that baptism is required for salvation. Others say that Jehovah is the judge and it is not for us to say. They have also flip-flopped on the issue of whether unbaptised children of JWs will survive Armageddon, at times implying that they might not, and and other times implying that they would. I don’t think they currently have a firm ruling on the issue in print, but certain talks in recent years have revisited a hardline attitude.
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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 could be a jurisdictional matter, or it could be something way worse and they told him he was reading the law wrong.
Or worse than that. If anybody in the process caught sight of his livestream, didn’t he confess to actual crimes in Croatian law in that video, because prostitution is illegal in Croatia? Might he not face legal consequences himself?
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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
I don’t see how AI won’t develop beyond human intelligence at some point.
AI experts such as Geoffrey Hinton say they have been surprised how fast AI has developed in recent years and expect to see superhuman level intelligence in years rather than decades.
Many who who have studied it for a long time such as Max Tegmark say that humans are not ready for superhuman AI and it will probably lead to extinction. He says he has a new son and wonders how old he will live to be before this happens.
I’ve read quite a bit about this over the past few months and I don’t see much ground for optimism. Every answer you can think of, such as “we can just turn it off”, or “why would AI want to kill us anyway?” unfortunately have good counter arguments.
In conclusion humans may go extinct because of AI within 10 years or so. The only ways I can see to avoid this include:
1) humans voluntarily and unanimously agree worldwide not to develop AI with no exceptions anywhere
2) there is a God who steps in and saves humans from themselves (as he reportedly did in the past at Babel)
3) aliens with ability to control super intelligent AI save us
4) there is a devastating worldwide war before AI reaches super intelligence and human technology is knocked back centuries
5) the majority of experts in AI have are mistaken about how close we are to super intelligence
6) super intelligence turns out unexpectedly to be automatically aligned to human goals and wellbeing
In short I think humans are probably doomed in the short to medium term.
Max Tegmark below tries to put a brave face on it saying that regulation may solve the problem. He has elsewhere acknowledged how hard that will be in practice and the trajectory so far of releasing AI is not encouraging. It needs to succeed everywhere and always. Any instance of super human intelligence surfacing is likely to lead to extinction. People have likened it to handing everyone on the planet a nuclear bomb and then relying on regulation and persuasion so that no one uses them.