Don’t
379 karma · joined April 4, 2017
Anyone with research ideas or an idea for a grant proposal please reach out.
I had confused in my mind -tectonic with a phrase from another book I admire: https://www.amazon.com/Between-Two-Ages-Americas-Technetroni.... I guess that's what I get for not double-checking; and you get a random book link :)
I think this is the best way I have heard it put.
Also read stuff by David Ellerman
The only correlation I have noticed between intelligence and violence is generally negative (sure this is completely unscientific). Like my friend, who is a pure mathematician, and won't eat animals because it deeply troubles him to harm other animals. Haven't you noticed that smarter people tend to be pacifists? Look at animals like lions....fabulously homicidal. Again, this is a crap analogy, but I'm just making the point that there are other ways of looking at the intelligence/homicide correlation.
Secondly, in all this stupid talk of homicidal AGI's I never hear one good mechanism proposed for how the imaginary creature is going to execute all 7 billion or so of us, it's plan for disposing of our bodies....etc. Oh wait I forgot, it's smarter than us...so of course we wouldn't know...we can't imagine it with our feeble brains. Not to mention that it creates a fabulously efficient source of eternal energy for itself, lives in cyberspace in some magical bit realm--and then here comes the million dollar question: Why the fuck would it spend the energy to execute all of us if it can just ignore us? Sound a lot like god delusion to you?
I really can't stand when people trivialize nuclear war like this. 'It can't kill all of us'. Please just shut up. Will it crumble the fabric of our society? Leading possibly (remember, all AGI people care only about possibility--not even likely realities) to war and famine? Who cares if not ever single human dies, what is the consequence to our world fabric? Let me save you the suspense--it's completely devastating. These arguments coming out of CFAR and the effective altruism movement are so fucking dumb I constantly want to scream.
I'll add, I work in a lab and have seen the stuff of nightmares myself.
The shape of resultant word strings indeed form patterns. However, matching a pattern is, in fact, different than being able to knowledgeably generate those patterns so they make sense in the context of a human conversation. It has been said that mathematics is so successful because it is contentless. This is a problem for areas that cannot be treated this way.
Go can be described in a contentless (mathematical) way, therefore success is not surprising (maybe to some it was).
It is those things that cannot be described in this manner where 'AGI' (Edit: 'AGI' based on current DL) will consistently fall down. You can see it in the datasets....try to imagine creating a dataset for the machine to 'feel angry'. What are you going to do....show it pictures of pissed off people? This may seem like a silly argument at first, but try to think of other things that might be characteristic of 'GI' that it would be difficult to envision creating a training set for.
I don't doubt that OpenAI will be doing absolute first class AI research (they are already doing this). It's just that I don't really find this definition of 'GI' compelling, and 'Artificial' really doesn't mean much--just because you didn't find it in a meadow somewhere doesn't mean it doesn't work. So 'A' is a pointless qualification in my opinion.
For me, the important part is what you define 'GI' to be, and I don't like the given definition. What we will have is world class task automation--which is going to be insanely profitable (congrats). But I would prefer not to confuse the idea with HLI(human-level intelligence). See [1] for a good discussion.
They will fail to create AGI--mainly because we have no measurable definition of it. What they care about is how dangerous these systems could potentially be. More than nukes? It doesn't actually matter, who will stop who from using nukes or AGI or a superbug? Only political systems and worldwide cooperation can effectively deal with this...not a startup...not now...not ever. Period.
[0] https://blog.gregbrockman.com/the-openai-mission [1] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3281635.3271625&coll=port...
Grammar--would change to: as broad an impact
In addition, from my perspective, research isn't just about what we find out in an isolated field, but also the interplay of discoveries and knowledge between fields. This latter view, 'integration', is largely unexplored at scale, though lip service is constantly being given to it. I think there is a tremendous amount we can do here, and it's not just marginal. Overall, I am more optimistic I think, perhaps to an unwarranted degree :)
I also think that language is important, especially in the service of scientific understanding and progress. In this respect, I think category theory is poised to play a major role as a language for the sciences, and particularly integrative science in the 21st century.
I've been working on this in my spare time: https://www.eonias.org/, which I definitely hesitate to link to here because it's unfinished, but I figure I might as well start putting it out there. I think there are lots of ways to improve the way we go about research, having been in the grind for a few years now. There are tons of different opinions on this, but I just wanted to do something.
In short, I personally am not concerned whether 'research productivity is getting worse because of X, and because X is "the laws of physics"' is actually true or not (this is a complicated question, and the relevant question is whether 'productivity' can go up again--I think it can). I believe there's plenty left to do, and we need far more people doing it than we have engaged now. After all, should we move the money from the budget of the NSF into tax incentives for football stadiums? From my perspective, I think the NEH should have a much larger budget, which in and of itself is an interesting topic of debate. I mean, where have the humanities gone?? I'm f@#C!ing tired of AI and robots already. ;)