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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Over the last few months, I've followed someone named Alexander Kruel on Substack. Every single day, he writes a post about 10 important things that happened that day - typically AI breakthroughs, but also other of his pet concerns including math, anti-wokeness, nuclear power, and the war in Ukraine. It's pretty amazing that he is able to unfailingly produce this content every day, and I'm in awe of his productivity.

Unfortunately, since I get this e-mail every morning, my information diet is becoming very dark.

The advances in AI in the last year have been staggering. Furthermore, it seems that there is almost no one pumping the breaks. We seemed doomed to an AI arms race, with corporations and states pursuing AI with no limits.

In today's email, Kruel quotes Elizier who says:

I've already done my crying, late at night in 2015…I think that we are hearing the last winds start to blow…I have no winning strategy

Elizier is ahead of the curve. Where Elizier was in 2015, I am now. AI will destroy the world we know. Nate Soares, director of MIRI, is similarly apocalyptic.

We've give up hope, but not the fight

What comes after Artificial General Intelligence? There are many predictions. But I expect things to develop in ways that no one expects. It truly will be a singularity, with very few trends continuing unaltered. I feel like a piece of plankton, caught in the swells of a giant sea. The choices and decisions I make today will likely have very little impact on what my life looks like in 20 years. Everything will be different then.

So, party until the lights go out? How do I deal with my AI-driven existential crisis?

Language models aren't sentience. When you ask the AI if it feels pain, and it generates some thoughtful paragraph about it being a machine or whatever, that's not 'the AI' sharing it's thoughts. It's a text completion algorithm generating some text based off human literature about fantasy AI personas waxing philosophical.

And yet it understands.

Someone, I think Bertrand Russell, said we compare the mind to whatever is the most complex machine we know. Clocks, steam engines, telephone relays, digital computers. For AI, it’s the opposite: as capabilities increase, and our understanding of AI systems decreases, the analogies become more and more dismissive.

The mainstream, respectable view is this is not “real understanding”—a goal post currently moving at 0.8c—because understanding requires frames or symbols or logic or some other sad abstraction completely absent from real brains. But what physically realizable Chinese room can do this?

[...] What is left of rationally defensible skepticism? For once I’d like to hear an argument that doesn’t rely on Cartesian dualism, stoner metaphysics, or from people still clinging to GOFAI nostalgia like the Japanese holdouts.

If you’re going to tell me intelligence requires symbolic rules, fine: show me the symbolic version of ChatGPT. If it is truly so unimpressive, then it must be trivial to replicate.

There is a species of denialist for whom no evidence whatever will convince them that a computer is doing anything other than shuffling symbols without understanding them, because “Concepts” and “Ideas” are exclusive to humans (they live in the Leibniz organ, presumably, where they pupate from the black bile). This is incentivized: there is infinite demand for deeply credentialed experts who will tell you that everything is fine, that machines can’t think, that humans are and always will be at the apex, people so commited to human chauvinism they will soon start denying their own sentience because their brains are made of flesh and not Chomsky production rules.

All that’s left of the denialist view is pride and vanity. And vanity will bury us.

I appreciate the response, but again, this isn't sentience. GPT is just text completion. It's not an intelligence, it's a tokenized list of words. Finding links between ideas by consuming the literary cannon of the human race is a really cool trick, and undoubtably helpful, but not general intelligence.

For once I’d like to hear an argument that doesn’t rely on Cartesian dualism, stoner metaphysics, or from people still clinging to GOFAI nostalgia like the Japanese holdouts.

Sure: I'll consider AI to be possibly sentient when it can tell me a thought it had 10 minutes ago, and then prove that it actually had that thought by showing me a peek into the workings of it's mind.

GPT is just text completion.

Back when I used to participate here actively, I ruminated a fair bit on why the Culture War Thread was so compelling to me. The urge to write, to argue, to contribute opinions, at full flow, was powerful to the point of absurdity, irrationality, compulsion. From an outside perspective, it made no sense. Everyone here is doubtless familiar with the "someone is wrong on the internet" meme, but why should it be so?

The best likeness I could come up with was bees building a hive. Pretty clearly, the bees have no conception of what they're doing or why, and yet they generate complex order. How? Instinct, clearly. They generate wax as part of their normal biological functions, and they put the wax where it should go. That this produces the hive that secures and sustains them is irrelevant to an individual drone; to the extent that they can be said to have "intentions", those intentions are simply to fullfil basic, granular biological imperatives.

It seemed to me that my own engagement with the Thread was analogous. When I read the thread, I was assessing my environment. If the environment seemed incorrect, if the wax was in the wrong place, I posted, moving the wax to the right place. Sometimes this process required deeper thought or analysis, and those moments were particularly interesting, but the majority of the time what I as engaged in was mainly memory and pattern-matching, call and response. @DaseindustriesLtd has mentioned a time or two how they find a new commenter, are impressed at first by their novel thinking, and then gradually come to see the repetitions and loops in their pattern of thought, till what seemed worth being excited about revealed itself as just another limited, too-human, simplistic pattern. I've definately had this experience with others. I've definately had it with myself.

All this to say, I think you should consider the degree to which "text completion" describes humans as well.

...Come to think of it, why do we do the Turing Test with a human and a computer? Why not have two computers talk to each other, while the human observes? What happens when one instance of ChatGPT talks to another?

What happens when one instance of ChatGPT talks to another?

Well, here's one example https://moritz.pm/posts/chatgpt-bing

What happens when one instance of ChatGPT talks to another?

They already did that...sort of, and with GPT-3.

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