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A guy used TNT back in the day, blew a hole straight through his head and that certainly affected his personality, he got all aggressive and dour. Neuralink. Lobotomies. So much for uniform failure. It's just that the interaction is fairly primitive compared to what we can do with AIs, for a mix of technical and ethical reasons.
We have a map of what the brain does, we've isolated what parts do language or other roles and can turn parts off and on. You underestimate what progress has been made in neuroscience: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151014084955.htm
What is the distinction between channelling intelligence and possessing it? AIs can reason, plan, problem-solve. That's intelligence. What specifically is missing? I too use Opus and Fable, I'm satisfied that they're intelligent. They are not like humans in all respects of course but they certainly possess intellect.
Black powder, actually, and last time I read up on him, I recall a fair amount of evidence for replication crisis issues. That is, there's evidence the scientists studying him had an agenda, and shaped their studies and the reporting of those studies to fit that agenda, rather than impartially reporting facts. which actually feeds directly into:
Neither impinge on the objection I'm raising, though the actual history of Lobotomies is actually a really good example of the history I'm pointing to. Psychology and Psychiatry and the medical field generally repeatedly claimed they could deliver practical mind reading or mind control, gained massive sociopolitical power from these claims, and then failed to deliver them while gaslighting the public into a messy, ad-hoc combination of "we delivered them" and "we never promised to deliver them". Massive parts of history make a lot more sense if you understand this, because this particular scam was wildly impactful on the political history of the Modern era. If you want a bit of the flavor, read old Sci-Fi, it's absolutely riddled with the resulting tropes. If you dig into the political and institutional histories, you'll find the same thing, because the Sci-Fi was extrapolating from the understanding of science promulgated by the actual scientists. Lobotomies were established as a legitimate technique because the scientists claimed that psycho-surgery was a real thing they could do, and fell when it became unavoidably evident that those claims were categorically false.
I don't think I do. Mind Reading and Mind Control were the table stakes proposed by the Humanist contingent in the turn of the last century, and it does not appear to me that we are any closer to these now than we were then. If the brain is a computer, we are researching how to plug in different keyboards, monitors, mice and headphones, and at the bleeding edge we're figuring out how to bypass damaged USB ports by soldering wires directly to the board, while the modernist claim you seem to be repeating is that we can edit the source code. The distinction matters. In this too, I'm open to being proven wrong: maybe next year we'll actually have mind reading and mind control. But I observe that one of the worst and most common failures of the Scientific Materialist mindset is the propensity to assume things are empirically proven when they haven't. And again, mind reading and mind control is both what we should expect if the brain really is like a computer, and something science as an institution started claiming it could deliver something like a hundred years ago.
I'm making mathematical models of tank guns. The AI is amazingly knowledgeable about physics, engineering, math generally, military history, and on and on. I say I want to figure out a general model for gun weight based on peak pressure generated by the propellent and the shell. It can do this! It calculates hoop-stress for steel, calculates the pressure curve...
...and then it explains to me that shortening a gun's barrel increases the peak pressure its shell generates. Only, that's not true. Hold the shell weight and propellent charge constant, and barrel length cannot increase peak pressure, only reduce it. I'm not particularly proficient in physics or mathematics or engineering, but even I know that. It's simple logic if you understand even the basics of what these words in combination are describing.
It "knows" a vast amount, and it presents its "knowledge" in what appears to be a very human way from the perspective of the user, but the knowledge is not integrated or manipulated in the way I would expect from a human. The gaps in knowledge and certainty appear in places I've never seen in humans, and working around those gaps involves a different process than I've ever used with humans. The AI doesn't actually understand anything about hoop stress or the physical properties of steel or the internal ballistics of tank cannons, or possibly anything at all. It's not an actor in its own right, the way we commonly think of them. It's a lens, some sort of high-dimensional refractor that concentrates diffuse, disparate elements into a specific focal point, but fundamentally dependent on the physical positioning of those elements and of the lens itself for the content of that focal point.
...And again, maybe this is me just using it wrong. If so, I'm very interested in how to use it better! I'm only a bit over a month into my career as a serious AI prompter, so I claim no deep insight into the actual frontier capabilities of all AI or even the models I'm using. I'm just describing what I'm personally seeing. Further, even this is fundamentally amazing! We've legitimately created a repeatable, mass-production terminal for coding in Grad Student! That by itself with no further improvement is probably the biggest technological breakthrough of the last century! But while it presents itself as a person, it pretty clearly isn't a person, and the illusion only holds even briefly at the focal point itself. sidestep, and it fuzzes out and breaks apart.
OK, so they oversold what could be done with crude brain surgeries. But wireheading definitely works, there was that woman who rubbed her thumbs raw against the button. How is that not direct interaction with the brain? You switched from 'uniform failure' to 'they were overselling the practical benefits of the technologies that were widely deployed, even though this was due to ethical rather than purely technological reasons.'
Lobotomies also work, it's just that they aren't really helpful.
I never claimed that we could directly edit the source code of the brain right now (noting that source code is not quite analogous). But eventually something like that is going to be possible. I don't understand how you could possibly disagree with its plausibility. We could for instance add or remove certain genes that are strongly linked with aggression in an embryo for example. Add the warrior gene, get a more aggressive child. The source code is genes, we can edit genes. We don't quite understand what they all do and how they work together and it's easier to wreck than improve but we could definitely do these things.
Editing the brain 'in flight' would be rather harder but it's a physical object, it could be altered with sufficiently precise electrodes or other manipulations. Brain surgery is a real thing. This would just be an extension of brain surgery. Why are you so skeptical of this?
Furthermore, I linked that old paper about disabling parts of the brain with magnets. That is a kind of mind control, just not very useful. Cheap, precise, non-invasive, long-lasting, permitted by the ethics board... That's the missing part, there's no actual impossibility.
OK, it made a mistake? Shortening the barrel increases muzzle pressure but not peak pressure.
I use AIs a lot. They make mistakes in my projects, I suspect they might not be smart enough to do some of the most complicated tasks proficiently. Why should that mean they were not intelligent? Many humans also make mistakes. Give a basic, basic statistics/probability/science test to your national representatives, see how they perform. Half the British Parliament couldn't tell you the chance of two coins coming up heads. Few humans can make a 4X AI actually smart, it's very rare to see.
If AI weren't intelligent it wouldn't be able to get anything correct at all about hoop strength or do any maths or coding. If it weren't intelligent you wouldn't be using it at all. You wouldn't, couldn't use GPT-2 for your project because it would just babble nonsense at you. That's a true lack of intelligence, you'd need to squint to find its intellect. The original GPT-4 was a bit like this too, context limit too short for much serious work past a certain level of complexity (I tried), too many hallucinations. Sonnet 3.5 also had its own flaws, it got incoherent past a certain point and I'd just have to say 'ok it still doesn't work, come at this from another angle' or 'think outside the box' and it was painful getting anywhere.
But their inability then didn't mean they weren't intelligent, just that their intelligence was weaker.
Just because it doesn't fail in the same ways that humans fail, doesn't mean it's not intelligent at all. I don't claim that they are human, there are many aspects where they're clearly not. But some important aspects where they are like people and could reasonably be expected to have other human properties.
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