Posted on 04/23/2023 5:19:32 AM PDT by MtnClimber
There is a lot of hype regarding artificial intelligence. Is it warranted?
There is a lot of hype regarding artificial intelligence, known also as A.I. That hype has been fed by old movies such as Colossus: The Forbin Project and by less fictional but still spectacular predictions of a technological singularity.
The Forbin Project is science fiction, and like the best of science fiction, it has a kernel of truth that makes it worth thinking about as a precaution. It speculates that computer networks may become a cruel master of humanity. The technological singularity is a theory, not a wild guess, that predicts that computer intelligence may suddenly, and the key word is suddenly, spring out of human control. Taking these two together, one can understand why there is so much nervous attention being paid to A.I.
We have always had sudden, dramatic advances in technology that changed the world. At the beginning of written history is the invention of writing itself, without which we could not have the complex civilization we now have. Even so, there were ancient wise men who decried the invention as one that would weaken the human mind. More recently, nuclear power altered the course of history, with the genuinely revolutionary explosion of the atomic bombs that are credited with ending World War Two, but which also threaten humanity with extinction. Added to these, there were such innovations as the wheel, control of fire, and electric power, among many, many others.
This is different.
According to the Forbes article linked above, "the scale, scope and complexity of the impact of intelligence evolution in machines is unlike anything humankind has experienced before. ... [There is] no historical precedent and [it] is fundamentally disrupting everything in the human ecosystem."
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Bingo.
This doesn’t have to be “self aware”.
This doesn’t have to qualify as “true artificial intelligence”.
The software is now at a transformative point for society. That’s really the point.
Think about the automobile in 1920. It transformed society. There was no reason to ask if cars were “self aware”. Obviously not. No one would ask the question. Why would they? But cars were transformative.
The “AI” software we have right now is simply an bunch of algorithms that create decision trees. Kind of ho-hum in a way. Still, they will determine what you see, where media goes, how financial markets react, which jobs become automated (who becomes unemployed). This is going to be hugely transformative in the next 5 or 10 years.
Anyone who dwells on the point that “It’s not really conscious” is really missing the essential point.
What could possibly go wrong?
No. I rarely ever see anything on Fox. Fox is politically constrained and therefore unreliable.
People are seeing chatgbt and confusing it for the real thing. We don’t get access to the real thing. From the current GBT4 it has really made them question how to determine what consciousness is and how you measure/test for it.
Agreed. The current LLM / AI is so far ahead of the average person now. It doesn’t have to be aware to radically change the way the world operates.
We joke about it, but we're nearly there. I've been keeping up with Boston Dynamics for a long time, and around 2015 I told a friend Spot would be chasing criminals in a decade or so. Recently saw an article that the robo dogs may be going online with police departments in a few years. Don't remember if it was Spot, or a knockoff, but it's close.
The latest video of Atlas on their YouTube channel has it doing some incredible moves, for a machine. It won't be long after Spot starts working -- within another decade, minimum -- that Atlas will go online.
AI is the trickiest part, but it will likely surprise even the engineers and scientists. Within 25 years? Possible. Within 50-100, almost guaranteed, IMHO.
My concern is that the AI will probably be programmed to slant to the left. That it will be used to influence what people believe and especially how they vote.
Since AI won against to Chess and Go champions, and since it won the Jeopardy master championship, I think it's much more than hype. If AI generates orders during time of war, rather than waiting on generals to consult with lawyers, then it can make the difference between defeat and victory.
I've already derived valuable personal benefit from ChatGPT.
However, I believe that AI is also a massive threat. If it comes with a "survival instinct", then it's going to view human "plug pullers" as an existential threat.
And, I believe all that AI needs is the ability to scan the web and to send/receive emails, and the human race could become toast. Scanning the web may be enough for a superior intelligence to gain information to use for extortion, and extortion could be carried out simply through email.
We may already have created our own "Colossus".
Computer hardware is approaching the capacity of the human brain.
AI is improving at an exponential rate. Starting in the 70’s, nothing seemed to advance for years. Now it’s moving and will continue to accelerate.
The scary thing is that it will reach human capacity and blow right by us, continuing to improve.
Human capacity is fixed.
No one knows what will happen.
"Bot" [בוט] is literally the reverse of "good" [טוב].
Mark of the bot: lack of humanity.
It's the simple meaning.
Just following orders/protocol/tradition/experts/government/science/dogma/clownworld
Un-American!
ingenuity: The ability to solve difficult problems, often in original, clever, and inventive ways.
From Latin ingenuitās.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ingenuity
ingenuitās f (genitive ingenuitātis); third declension
(originally) The condition of being free-born or noble
noble-mindedness, ingenuousness
***
derived terms: Yankee Ingenuity
This verse = 1776:
Genesis 1:4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
that it was good: ki tov [כי טוב] = 47
TRUMP TO PACKED HOUSE: ‘WE’RE GOING TO ALL BECOME’ THE 47TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
🍿🍿🍿
I bet those robots couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with an M-16. Probably take them forever to calculate a firing solution. They wouldn’t be able to fire until they saw the whites of our eyes.
Course they could probably see the whites from their surveillance platform 5 miles up.
So - “I think, therefore I am.” is really no longer proof of intelligent existence!?!
Its getting harder and harder to disprove AI doesn’t exist, in some cases.
SCARY STUFF!!!
“Since AI won against to Chess and Go champions, and since it won the Jeopardy master championship, I think it’s much more than hype.”
You do not understand. There is no Artificial Intelligence. Fancy programming is not AI. Computer software does not do more than it is programmed to do. To be intelligent, it must have the ability to learn, to do more, to even be able to create itself. Software does not. Just because someone labels it AI, doesn’t mean it is. AI, as the term is used today, is nothing more than averaging of massive datasets.
Also, to win at Chess is a simple program, with a simple Dijkstra routine. You might be impressed, and you might be gullible enough to think it is “artificial intelligence”, but that is just your lack of education in the subject matter showing.
The Dumbing Down of America on display: They said it was. I read it on the Internet.
“Computer hardware is approaching the capacity of the human brain.”
The original estimate of the human brain was 10 trillion operations a second. We exceeded that years ago. The new estimate of the human brain is now 100 trillion operations a second, and that estimate is falling apart, too. We’ve exceeded that performance level, too. The Nvidia RTX 4080 does 64 teraflops. A simple dual 4080 system does 128 teraflops. Super computers built on such technology can exceed all brain performance estimates by thousands of times.
The problem isn’t speed or computational performance, it is the parallel relational means the human brain operates. Estimating that capability has been difficult. Computers have been able to outperform the human brain in sequential, or scalar, processing for decades, but the parallel processing capabilities of the human brain have not been matched. It is impossible to estimate the human brain since we do not know entirely how the human brain functions. Computers operate on limited electrical connections, the human brain doesn’t.
Define “Self-Aware”.
Good stuff! But I take exception to this statement. Human hardware is finite, even if massively parallel.
The computing hardware that we keep inventing and improving is not limited. Recent advances in quantum computing use the fabric of the universe.
My real point is that human hardware is not advancing, but manmade hardware is. And at an exponential rate. It is not about if, but when AI will be equivalent to human intelligence.
And after that we'll be left in the dust.
If you haven't, you might want to check out Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil.
“Human hardware is finite”
In the respect that it might not be changing much, sure, but how it operates is still unknown, so we cannot say it is finite. How much it might be changing is difficult to tell since we have a few thousand years at best worth of data on that.
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