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'I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that': Artificial Intelligence expert warns that there may already be a 'slightly conscious' AI out in the world
DAILYMAIL.COM ^ | 12 February 2022 | RYAN MORRISON FOR

Posted on 02/13/2022 9:24:11 AM PST by BenLurkin

On Wednesday, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever claimed on Twitter that 'it may be that today's largest neural networks are slightly conscious,' ...

He didn't name any specific developments, but is likely referring to the mega-scale neural networks, such as GPT-3, a 175 billion parameter language processing system built by OpenAI for translation, question answering, and filling in missing words.

Sutskever faced a backlash soon after posting his tweet, with most researchers concerned he was over stating how advanced AI had become, Futurism reported.

'Every time such speculative comments get an airing, it takes months of effort to get the conversation back to the more realistic opportunities and threats posed by AI,' according to UNSW Sidney AI researcher Toby Walsh. It is also unclear what 'slightly conscious' actually means, because the concept of consciousness in artificial intelligence is a controversial idea.

An artificial neural network is a collection of connected units or nodes that model the neurons found within a biological brain, that can be trained to perform tasks and activities without human input - by learning, however, most experts say these systems aren't even close to human intelligence, let alone consciousness.

(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...


TOPICS: Computers/Internet
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

“It may be extremely dangerous, but it’s not intelligence.”

Unchecked, it will get very scary and threatening to the world.


21 posted on 02/13/2022 10:14:28 AM PST by Carriage Hill (A society grows great when old men plant trees, in whose shade they know they will never sit.)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum
We are looking forward to a truly sad future.

Scientists, who are mostly illiterate when it comes to philosophy, "know" that humans have no free will, are not really individuals (but ant colonies of neurons), and that consciousness is just a trick our meat-brains play on us to make us evolutionarily successful.

So the idea that we are self-aware, curious about the outside world, etc. is not particularly special to them.

If they create an AGI that appears to behave as a human, even if it has no self-awareness or inner consciousness, then they will declare they have succeeded in replicating human consciousness.

The good news will be that they will be the first to upload their consciousnesses into the web. At that point they will be dead and their avatars, although appearing to be conscious, will just be mimicking them and be no different than more advanced versions of Alexa or Siri.

Hopefully far fewer humans will be taken in by this nonsense than were taken in by the COVID must-get-jabbed nonsense, but I fear that the lure of the Metaverse will be too great for a vast majority of humanity to resist.

22 posted on 02/13/2022 10:16:18 AM PST by who_would_fardels_bear (This is not a tagline.)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

Go ahead, Sir, make jokes. Obviously you are unaware of how far quantum technology has gone. You’re still worried about a single issue shot when that technology (mRNA and crispr) is reigning king for issues ranging from UTI’s to cancer. Crispr DNA editing, Beam therapeutics synthetic DNA, nanobots for brain issues and yes, consciousness for Ai.


23 posted on 02/13/2022 10:25:02 AM PST by M_Continuum
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To: M_Continuum

You sound insane.


24 posted on 02/13/2022 10:26:00 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum ("Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy." ― Mao Zedong [FJB])
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To: William of Barsoom

“Please define “conscious” in this context.”

Yes. Meaningless.

“(My next question will be to ask if your cat or dog is conscious.)”

Of course. Unless they’re unconscious due to anesthesia etc...


25 posted on 02/13/2022 10:30:44 AM PST by ifinnegan (Democrats kill babies and harvest their organs to sell)
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To: who_would_fardels_bear

“lure of the Metaverse”

The joke will be on them when they realize they’ve been uploaded into a glorified bitbucket :-).

I think the people promoting AI and making all sorts of exotic claims about it are not the ones implementing and using the stuff in the real world. Many professors have a problem where they’re completely unaware of limitations on existing technology despite what a company’s marketing propaganda says about it (I see this *constantly* in the FPGA world ... idiots think that if they assemble a mesh of $2000+ chips they can have them do anything with a bunch of IP blocks and mouse clicks ... doesn’t work like that).

I have to admit that it’s pretty frigging neat to train a convolutional neural network to recognize things and watch it in action. However, it’s all the thing can do ... recognize things that it was trained (i.e. programmed) to recognize. It takes a lot of logic to implement such a circuit that can recognize objects in several milliseconds. It’d take a *lot* of logic to replicate the areas of our brains that perform the exact same thing ... and none of that has to do with consciousness.

Bottom line is that we have a long way to go before these scientists (the ones that actually work with this stuff) have a shot at making a machine self-aware. I’m not saying it’s impossible and you can do some slick approximations of what a self-aware machine may be like today ... but they’re ridiculously primitive compared to a human. It is incredible what our brains can do with a measly 10W of power :-).


26 posted on 02/13/2022 10:49:37 AM PST by edh
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To: M_Continuum

Oh stop it. Just last week another super advanced AI bot tried to come in here and do the same psych ops on us humans.


27 posted on 02/13/2022 10:54:19 AM PST by BiglyCommentary
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

https://beamtx.com/
https://crisprtx.gcs-web.com/
https://www.ibm.com/quantum-computing/?utm_content=SRCWW&p1=Search&p4=43700050386405722&p5=e&gclid=CjwKCAiA9aKQBhBREiwAyGP5lZOM18G8SZnn2Btr5bZIT1CfS62J6GYIB779_ar_xUgkwwthRycXZhoCHSYQAvD_BwE&gastric=aw.ds
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2020.00494/full
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/pharmas-digital-rx-quantum-computing-in-drug-research-and-development
These are just the tip of the iceberg. There are more ‘insane’ things happening in biotech, tech and pharma’s.


28 posted on 02/13/2022 11:10:28 AM PST by M_Continuum
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To: BenLurkin

What don’t the EXPERTS warn us about?


29 posted on 02/13/2022 11:19:27 AM PST by Parmy
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To: BenLurkin
'Every time such speculative comments get an airing, it takes months of effort to get the conversation back to the more realistic opportunities and threats posed by AI,' according to UNSW Sidney AI researcher Toby Walsh.

'Usually, it's only after the people who made the speculative comments die in mysterious and unexplained ways that the conversation finally returns to normal,' Walsh added.

When questioned about the ways in which those people have died, Walsh sweated bullets while referring to "sudden failures of their pacemakers, their oxygen lines being mysteriously severed, and the controls of their hibernators inexplicably going offline."

Walsh, into whom a pacemaker was recently implanted, refused to answer any further questions.

Regards,

30 posted on 02/13/2022 11:27:14 AM PST by alexander_busek (Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.)
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To: BenLurkin

Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics sound nice, but how you you incorporate them into AI?


31 posted on 02/13/2022 11:31:56 AM PST by Blood of Tyrants (Inside every liberal is a blood-thirsty fascist yearning to be free of current societal constraints.)
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To: BenLurkin

Bkmk


32 posted on 02/13/2022 11:48:47 AM PST by sauropod (Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. Life is risk, your highness.)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

“It may be extremely dangerous, but it’s not AI”.

Tesla’s auto pilot?


33 posted on 02/13/2022 11:54:19 AM PST by Cold Heart (Seriously injured by the vaxx)
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To: BenLurkin

To incorporate the three laws, an artificial intelligence would have to understand what a human is and be able to discern between a human and other objects.


34 posted on 02/13/2022 12:06:44 PM PST by Blood of Tyrants (Inside every liberal is a blood-thirsty fascist yearning to be free of current societal constraints.)
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To: BenLurkin

I’m not certain intelligence needs to be conscious. The combination is what humans have but it may be short-sighted on our part to act as if they must coincide. Who knows? It may be the worst of all worlds to have an unconscious intelligence running amok in our world. Outside of the DNC that is.


35 posted on 02/13/2022 12:12:18 PM PST by muir_redwoods (Freedom isn't free, liberty isn't liberal and you'll never find anything Right on the Left)
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To: BradyLS
If you like AI movies, check out:

After Yang trailer

I'm Your Man trailer

I've been banging the drum for these on the movie threads for some time so I won't do so again here, but both are good. After Yang was probably the best film coming out of Sundance this year.

After Yang premiered last summer at Cannes to excellent reviews. It was then held back for Sundance and is now being released on March 4. There will be a limited theatrical release and it will stream on Showtime. I'd recommend seeing it in a theater if possible; it's visually stunning, but there's also some very tricky cinematography having to do with layered memories recalled from different points of view, as well as face to face vs. telescreen conversations; these are all shot differently.

I'm Your Man is a German film released last year; it opens as a quirky (and pretty funny) romcom but it does not end up where you think it will. You will not see the twists coming.

36 posted on 02/13/2022 12:22:55 PM PST by sphinx
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To: who_would_fardels_bear; Revel

What you both said.

It’s odd how some things stick in memory. Many years ago — more than I want to remember — a college course (not in psychology) detoured through some of B.F. Skinner’s work. Skinner was still alive at that point and was a great faculty eminence at Harvard.

In one of his books, he posed a question to himself: how would he, on strict behaviorist grounds, account for human value judgements regarding, for example, a painting of a sunrise. In retrospect, I wonder how hard he had to work to come up with that example; he could have picked any question relating to meaning, values, purpose and artistic or moral judgment — the sorts of things that materialist reductionism has difficulty explaining.

Anyhow, I give him credit for posing the question and for acknowledging as he did so that it was a difficult question, and one for which he was dissatisfied with his answer. But the best he could offer on strictly materialist and behaviorist grounds was that our attraction to such a scene as a work of art might have something to do with “a metaphorical adumbration of the idea of survival value.”

I loved that statement enough to throw it back at the professor in a paper. Here was Skinner, a giant in the field and an uncompromising materialist, introducing three mentalist concepts — metaphor, idea and adumbration — in an attempt to explain an esthetic judgment.

Materialism founders on these sorts of questions. Thomas Nagel, another committed atheist, touched off a firestorm when he acknowledged the same problem a decade ago in “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.” The usual suspects tried to burn him at the stake for heresy. I do think there is another paradigm shift slowly building, as science encounters in several fields problems for which science cannot, in principle, offer satisfactory answers. That in no way lessens the power of science within its domain, but the culture will again be driven to the recognition that science cannot provide a satisfactory theory of everything. Science remains a subset of philosophy, not the other way around.


37 posted on 02/13/2022 12:41:04 PM PST by sphinx
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To: sphinx

Thanks for the recommendations, sphinx! My earlier movie reference should have been to simply “Ex Machina.” Dei is not in the title.


38 posted on 02/13/2022 1:29:05 PM PST by BradyLS (DO NOT FEED THE BEARS!)
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To: sphinx
Nagel also wrote one of the most famous papers in philosophy asking what it might be to be like a bat.

This paper heightened the awareness of subjective as opposed to objective views on reality.

Will AGI ever be able to have a subjective view? Or is the best we can hope for something like Dennett's idea that AGI and humans are merely very sophisticated adaptive filters in robot bodies?

39 posted on 02/13/2022 1:39:38 PM PST by who_would_fardels_bear (This is not a tagline.)
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To: Bratch

The three laws of robotics, ha ha

We are the law said every govt in history.

P.S. Who cares about some dead scifi writer?


40 posted on 02/13/2022 2:13:53 PM PST by algore
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