Again I stand by what I said.
"I can't believe I even have to talk about these people. That's how ridiculous it s."
We have the equivalent of the scientologists running the field of AI with untold amounts of money and power and we're the ones who have to do point by point rebuttals of their eugenicists dreams.
"“When you’re aiming at utopia, it offers the promise of transcendence of all limits and the ability to ignore everything else,” Becker argues. “If you know what the end goal is, if you know what the future holds, then you don’t have to worry about laws. You don’t have to worry about morality.” And you certainly don’t have to worry about building a library. It’s survival of the fittest on a disastrous, interplanetary scale."
Know your enemy.
Our enemy, broligharchs, are scary.
@joeinwynnewood @timnitGebru
The titans of science fiction are revered for a reason. They are not mere authors, but thinkers and philosophers who disguised as one.
They have warned us about what can go wrong regardless of our progress, and broligarchs take these works as manuals, not warnings, to build the Torment Nexus.
@bayindirh @joeinwynnewood @timnitGebru
they were writing about things which had already happened.
@imp3tuz superintelligence does exist. Examples are a well functioning team of kind people, or a healthy ecosystem.
An LLM certainly doesn't qualify and probably never will. I know two orders of magnitude less about this than OP, but apparently more than Sam Altman.
They didn't even make it up, they're just utterly clueless about intelligence and how stuff works.
@timnitGebru I think AGI is possible, as an emergent property of systems, like "real intelligence"
It'll be some life that springs up from accounting software, TV static, and fish migration patterns in an old DOS database... and a toaster plugged into a socket with a faulty ground.
It'll be a thing that happens on its own in an ecosystem we create, but we will neither create nor control it.
@timnitGebru @howtophil That same argument applies to AI because there’s no common accepted definition of intelligence, natural or artificial. And yet we have worked on AI for nearly 70 years because we believe that intelligence is a natural phenomenon and that we can model natural phenomena with software.
So, if natural general intelligence exists then we know of no theoretical reason we can’t model it without completely defining it. /1
@timnitGebru @howtophil That said, it seems obvious that LLMs and related approaches are not going to produce AGI and perhaps we should develop a better understanding of natural general intelligence before we model it.
But why can’t attempting to model it be one of the tools for learning to understand it?
@MartyFouts @howtophil that’s not true. I don’t have time to do a lot of back and forth but you can se some works including mine. Eg https://irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2023/09/17/debunking-agi-inevitability-claims/ or https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636
As for AI a number of people have explained how and why it’s a bad term because it doesn’t discuss a coherent set of technologies or concepts. Eg read chapter 1 of The AI Con. AI is a marketing term. But at least there are a set of real things bundled under that ill defined term. There is no such thing wrt AGI
@timnitGebru @howtophil I have read that work before and do not find it relevant to my point. I am not arguing for the inevitability of AGI but rather against the notion that because the term is ill defined there is no value in exploring the concept. AI was ill defined in 1954, and still is; yet considerable good work has been done in the last 70 years after all.
I will not comment on The AI Con except to say that I find it problematic.
@timnitGebru @howtophil “AI” has become a marketing term and too many people see it as the subset of machine learning that is being hyped by scammers but misuse of the term does not invalidate the work done in the field nor does it negate the observation that if intelligence is natural then, in theory, it can be modeled mathematically.
Although, of course, the difference between theory and practice is always larger in practice.
I doubt we’re even the same species.
@timnitGebru this quote was also particularly brilliant imho:
“First, you kill the environment in the process of getting to so-called AGI, and then that AGI is going to somehow magically stop forest fires and storms and the wind?” Gebru asks, dumbfounded. “It doesn’t make any sense. There are no specifics of how this could happen.”
Edit: the full article is definitely worth reading, just in case you haven't yet: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/billionaires-psychology-tech-politics-1235358129/
"the working class and the employing class have nothing in common." --preamble to the constitution of the IWW
@timnitGebru "(there’s a joke that [nuclear fusion has] been 30 years away for the past 60 years)"
I tried studying physics back in the early 2000s and attended a talk about the ITER project. I recall the speaker was joking that nuclear fusion had been thirty years away for more than forty years at that point, but if we'd get this project off the ground in the next decade then maybe by 2025...
Well, it's 2025 and the ITER project is STILL STUCK IN THE PLANNING STAGE.
@timnitGebru @RollingStone @TeenVogue
Teen vogue has had some really good pieces.
@Asbestos
I know and that's cool. But it should complement the reporting and not have to step into the breach
@timnitGebru @RollingStone @TeenVogue
for sure. Who would have thought we get to the place where Conde Nast was in the upper tier of journalism
@timnitGebru ⬆️⬆️
"hard data to back up what intuition and millennia of wisdom (from Aristotle to Edith Wharton) would have us believe:
..Wealth tends to make people act like assholes, and the more wealth they have, the more of a jerk they tend to be."
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