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We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent

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  • Philosophers are so desperate for humans to be special.
    How is outputting things based on things it has learned any different to what humans do?

    We observe things, we learn things and when required we do or say things based on the things we observed and learned. That's exactly what the AI is doing.

    I don't think we have achieved "AGI" but I do think this argument is stupid.

    Most people, evidently including you, can only ever recycle old ideas. Like modern "AI". Some of us can concieve new ideas.

  • Philosophers are so desperate for humans to be special.
    How is outputting things based on things it has learned any different to what humans do?

    We observe things, we learn things and when required we do or say things based on the things we observed and learned. That's exactly what the AI is doing.

    I don't think we have achieved "AGI" but I do think this argument is stupid.

    Yes, the first step to determining that AI has no capability for cognition is apparently to admit that neither you nor anyone else has any real understanding of what cognition* is or how it can possibly arise from purely mechanistic computation (either with carbon or with silicon).

    Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”

    Given? Given by what? Fiction in which robots can't comprehend the human concept called "love"?

    *Or "sentience" or whatever other term is used to describe the same concept.

  • AS - artificial stupidity

    ASS - artificial super stupidity

    Both are good 👍

  • ChatGPT 2 was literally an Excel spreadsheet.

    I guesstimate that it's effectively a supermassive autocomplete algo that uses some TOTP-like factor to help it produce "unique" output every time.

    And they're running into issues due to increasingly ingesting AI-generated data.

    Get your popcorn out! 🍿

    And they’re running into issues due to increasingly ingesting AI-generated data.

    There we go. Who coulda seen that coming! While that's going to be a fun ride, at the same time companies all but mandate AS* to their employees.

  • We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

    But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

    This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

    So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

    Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

    Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

    Steve Gibson on his podcast, Security Now!, recently suggested that we should call it "Simulated Intelligence". I tend to agree.

  • We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

    But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

    This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

    So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

    Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

    Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

    Good luck. Even David Attenborrough can't help but anthropomorphize. People will feel sorry for a picture of a dot separated from a cluster of other dots.
    The play by AI companies is that it's human nature for us to want to give just about every damn thing human qualities.
    I'd explain more but as I write this my smoke alarm is beeping a low battery warning, and I need to go put the poor dear out of its misery.

  • Philosophers are so desperate for humans to be special.
    How is outputting things based on things it has learned any different to what humans do?

    We observe things, we learn things and when required we do or say things based on the things we observed and learned. That's exactly what the AI is doing.

    I don't think we have achieved "AGI" but I do think this argument is stupid.

    No it’s really not at all the same. Humans don’t think according to the probabilities of what is the likely best next word.

  • ChatGPT 2 was literally an Excel spreadsheet.

    I guesstimate that it's effectively a supermassive autocomplete algo that uses some TOTP-like factor to help it produce "unique" output every time.

    And they're running into issues due to increasingly ingesting AI-generated data.

    Get your popcorn out! 🍿

    I really hate the current AI bubble but that article you linked about "chatgpt 2 was literally an Excel spreadsheet" isn't what the article is saying at all.

  • Artificial Intelligent is supposed to be intelligent.

    For the record, AI is not supposed to be intelligent.

    It just has to appear intelligent. It can be all smoke-and-mirrors, giving the impression that it's smart enough - provided it can perform the task at hand.

    That's why it's termed artificial intelligence.

    The subfield of Artificial General Intelligence is another story.

    The field of artificial intelligence has also made incredible strides in the last decade, and the decade before that. The field of artificial general intelligence has been around for something like 70 years, and has made a really modest amount of progress in that time, on the scale of what they're trying to do.

  • Philosophers are so desperate for humans to be special.
    How is outputting things based on things it has learned any different to what humans do?

    We observe things, we learn things and when required we do or say things based on the things we observed and learned. That's exactly what the AI is doing.

    I don't think we have achieved "AGI" but I do think this argument is stupid.

    How is outputting things based on things it has learned any different to what humans do?

    Humans are not probabilistic, predictive chat models. If you think reasoning is taking a series of inputs, and then echoing the most common of those as output then you mustn't reason well or often.

    If you were born during the first industrial revolution, then you'd think the mind was a complicated machine. People seem to always anthropomorphize inventions of the era.

  • I really hate the current AI bubble but that article you linked about "chatgpt 2 was literally an Excel spreadsheet" isn't what the article is saying at all.

    Fine, *could literally be.

  • The field of artificial intelligence has also made incredible strides in the last decade, and the decade before that. The field of artificial general intelligence has been around for something like 70 years, and has made a really modest amount of progress in that time, on the scale of what they're trying to do.

    The field of artificial general intelligence has been around for something like 70 years, and has made a really modest amount of progress in that time, on the scale of what they're trying to do.

    I daresay it would stay this way until we figure out what intelligence is.

  • Thank You! Yes!

    So ... A-not-I? AD? What do we call it? LLM seems too specialised?

    Word guessing machine.

  • We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

    But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

    This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

    So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

    Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

    Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

    Super duper shortsighted article.

    I mean, sure, some points are valid. But there's not just programmers involved, other professions such as psychologists and Philosophers and artists, doctors etc. too.

    And I agree AGI probably won't emerge from binary systems. However... There's quantum computing on the rise. Latest theories of the mind and consciousness discuss how consciousness and our minds in general also appear to work with quantum states.

    Finally, if biofeedback would be the deciding factor.. That can be simulated, modeled after a sample of humans.

    The article is just doomsday hoo ha, unbalanced.

    Show both sides of the coin...

  • Good luck. Even David Attenborrough can't help but anthropomorphize. People will feel sorry for a picture of a dot separated from a cluster of other dots.
    The play by AI companies is that it's human nature for us to want to give just about every damn thing human qualities.
    I'd explain more but as I write this my smoke alarm is beeping a low battery warning, and I need to go put the poor dear out of its misery.

    I’m still sad about that dot. 😥

  • We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

    But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

    This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

    So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

    Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

    Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

    I think most people tend to overlook the most obvious advantages and are overly focused on what is supposed to be and marketed as.

    No need to think how to feed a thing into google to get a decent starting point for reading. No finding the correct terminology before finding the thing you are looking for. Just ask like you would ask a knowledgeable individual and you get an overview of what you wanted to ask in the first place.

    Discuss a little to get the options and then start reading and researching the everliving shit out of them to confirm all the details.

  • We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

    But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

    This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

    So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

    Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

    Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

    People who don't like "AI" should check out the newsletter and / or podcast of Ed Zitron. He goes hard on the topic.

  • I think most people tend to overlook the most obvious advantages and are overly focused on what is supposed to be and marketed as.

    No need to think how to feed a thing into google to get a decent starting point for reading. No finding the correct terminology before finding the thing you are looking for. Just ask like you would ask a knowledgeable individual and you get an overview of what you wanted to ask in the first place.

    Discuss a little to get the options and then start reading and researching the everliving shit out of them to confirm all the details.

    Agreed.

    When I was a kid we went to the library. If a card catalog didn't yield the book you needed, you asked the librarian. They often helped. No one sat around after the library wondering if the librarian was "truly intelligent".

    These are tools. Tools slowly get better. Is a tool make life easier or your work better, you'll eventually use it.

    Yes, there are woodworkers that eschew power tools but they are not typical. They have a niche market, and that's great, but it's a choice for the maker and user of their work.

  • Steve Gibson on his podcast, Security Now!, recently suggested that we should call it "Simulated Intelligence". I tend to agree.

    I’ve taken to calling it Automated Inference

  • Good luck. Even David Attenborrough can't help but anthropomorphize. People will feel sorry for a picture of a dot separated from a cluster of other dots.
    The play by AI companies is that it's human nature for us to want to give just about every damn thing human qualities.
    I'd explain more but as I write this my smoke alarm is beeping a low battery warning, and I need to go put the poor dear out of its misery.

    This is the current problem with "misalignment". It's a real issue, but it's not "AI lying to prevent itself from being shut off" as a lot of articles tend to anthropomorphize it. The issue is (generally speaking) it's trying to maximize a numerical reward by providing responses to people that they find satisfactory. A legion of tech CEOs are flogging the algorithm to do just that, and as we all know, most people don't actually want to hear the truth. They want to hear what they want to hear.

    LLMs are a poor stand in for actual AI, but they are at least proficient at the actual thing they are doing. Which leads us to things like this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKCynxiV_8I

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    Pretty cool stuff, thanks for sharing!
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    You don't even need a VPN. Only the legit sites will play ball. Porn will still be there.
  • Honda successfully launched and landed its own reusable rocket

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    gerryflap@feddit.nlG
    Call me an optimist, but I still hold the hope that we can one day do better as humanity than we do now. Humanity has become a "better" species throughout its existence overall. Even a hundred years ago we were much more horrible and brutal than we are now. The current trend is not great, with climate change and far-right grifters taking control. But I hold hope that in the end this is but a blip on the radar. Horrible for us now, but in the grand scheme of things not something that will end humanity. It might in the worst case set us back a few hundred years.
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    I thought we were going to get our share of the damages
  • Why doesn't Nvidia have more competition?

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    B
    It’s funny how the article asks the question, but completely fails to answer it. About 15 years ago, Nvidia discovered there was a demand for compute in datacenters that could be met with powerful GPU’s, and they were quick to respond to it, and they had the resources to focus on it strongly, because of their huge success and high profitability in the GPU market. AMD also saw the market, and wanted to pursue it, but just over a decade ago where it began to clearly show the high potential for profitability, AMD was near bankrupt, and was very hard pressed to finance developments on GPU and compute in datacenters. AMD really tried the best they could, and was moderately successful from a technology perspective, but Nvidia already had a head start, and the proprietary development system CUDA was already an established standard that was very hard to penetrate. Intel simply fumbled the ball from start to finish. After a decade of trying to push ARM down from having the mobile crown by far, investing billions or actually the equivalent of ARM’s total revenue. They never managed to catch up to ARM despite they had the better production process at the time. This was the main focus of Intel, and Intel believed that GPU would never be more than a niche product. So when intel tried to compete on compute for datacenters, they tried to do it with X86 chips, One of their most bold efforts was to build a monstrosity of a cluster of Celeron chips, which of course performed laughably bad compared to Nvidia! Because as it turns out, the way forward at least for now, is indeed the massively parralel compute capability of a GPU, which Nvidia has refined for decades, only with (inferior) competition from AMD. But despite the lack of competition, Nvidia did not slow down, in fact with increased profits, they only grew bolder in their efforts. Making it even harder to catch up. Now AMD has had more money to compete for a while, and they do have some decent compute units, but Nvidia remains ahead and the CUDA problem is still there, so for AMD to really compete with Nvidia, they have to be better to attract customers. That’s a very tall order against Nvidia that simply seems to never stop progressing. So the only other option for AMD is to sell a bit cheaper. Which I suppose they have to. AMD and Intel were the obvious competitors, everybody else is coming from even further behind. But if I had to make a bet, it would be on Huawei. Huawei has some crazy good developers, and Trump is basically forcing them to figure it out themselves, because he is blocking Huawei and China in general from using both AMD and Nvidia AI chips. And the chips will probably be made by Chinese SMIC, because they are also prevented from using advanced production in the west, most notably TSMC. China will prevail, because it’s become a national project, of both prestige and necessity, and they have a massive talent mass and resources, so nothing can stop it now. IMO USA would clearly have been better off allowing China to use American chips. Now China will soon compete directly on both production and design too.
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    you don’t need to worry about trying to enforce it ( By the simple expedient of there being essentially nothing you can enforce.
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    halcyon@discuss.tchncs.deH
    Though babble fish is a funny term, Douglas Adams named the creature "Babel fish", after the biblical story of the tower of Babel.
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    Welcome