[HN Gopher] The AI delusion: why humans trump machines
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The AI delusion: why humans trump machines
Author : sebg
Score : 36 points
Date : 2020-02-06 18:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.prospectmagazine.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.prospectmagazine.co.uk)
| Rury wrote:
| >It will be "nothing but clever programming... fake consciousness
| --pretending by imitating people at the biophysical level." For
| that, he thinks, is all AI can be. These systems might beat us at
| chess and Go, and deceive us into thinking they are alive. But
| those will always be hollow victories, for the machine will never
| enjoy them.
|
| Mostly agree with Koch, but I'd take it a step further...
|
| There's major problems behind the concepts of AI and even
| intelligence itself - and it's difficult to articulate why. It's
| as if these terms require aggrandizing to the point of
| impossibility or they lose all their apparent meaning. Which is
| why I feel we'll never achieve what we call (Strong/General) AI,
| or if we do, we will always find ways to be unimpressed by it...
|
| I mean, is it that absurd to consider that the ideal concept
| beholden to intelligence isn't a reality - even in humans? If you
| pull back enough layers on how or why humans think or do the
| things they do - we arrive at things we can't explain. We don't
| know what causes intelligence and have trouble coming up with an
| adequate definition for it; similar to the concept of life. For
| all we know we might be just highly complex biomechanical
| machines operating on stimuli, analogous to what current
| computers already do. Where's the fine line between making
| something conscious/unconcious?
| trevyn wrote:
| > _If you pull back enough layers on how or why humans think or
| do the things they do - we arrive at things we can 't explain._
|
| No, we arrive at things that are _uncomfortable_ to explain.
|
| I think one of the biggest impacts of AI is that it will force
| us to confront this.
| missosoup wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
|
| There's no discernible difference between p-zombies and 'real'
| conscious beings. There's a good chance that we're all
| p-zombies and a distinction between zombie and real doesn't
| exist.
|
| > If you pull back enough layers on how or why humans think or
| do the things they do - we arrive at things we can't explain.
|
| Sounds a lot like a magical argument. There's no evidence that
| anything about the way human minds work is fundamentally
| unexplainable.
| blueadept111 wrote:
| The fine line is around whether a machine can actually
| experience conscious perception, such as actually feeling pain,
| for example. Of course, there's no way to know...
| Rury wrote:
| Pain is a signal to your brain, which causes you to react to
| a stimuli.
|
| Computers react to electrical inputs, and on some level can
| be considered reacting to stimuli.
|
| Is a computer therefore conscious?
| philipkglass wrote:
| _In Koch's picture, then, the Turing Test is irrelevant to
| diagnosing inner life. What's more, it implies that the
| transhumanist dream of downloading one's mind into an (immortal)
| computer circuit is a fantasy. At best, such circuits would
| simulate the inputs and outputs of a brain while having
| absolutely no experience at all. It will be "nothing but clever
| programming... fake consciousness--pretending by imitating people
| at the biophysical level." For that, he thinks, is all AI can be.
| These systems might beat us at chess and Go, and deceive us into
| thinking they are alive. But those will always be hollow
| victories, for the machine will never enjoy them._
|
| This is really damning humans with faint praise. "Machines may
| eventually do every job better than we can, and be immortal, but
| I promise that humans will remain superior in some completely
| undetectable way."
| rosybox wrote:
| How would Koch see a mechanism where neurons or other cells in
| a human brain are sequentially replaced over time with
| synthetic components that simulate their function, is the
| consciousness lost along the way? Is there consciousness as
| long as there is at least one biological cell left?
| mgolawala wrote:
| I wonder if an intelligence higher than ours were to figure
| out exactly how our brain worked. Every neuron, every
| synapse, every hormone and neurotransmitter.. How memories
| were made, stored and retrieved. Would we appear to them to
| merely be "simulating" consciousness through the use of these
| mechanisms.
| fdsfdsgad wrote:
| I am a "panpsychist," or whatever, and I don't really see the
| silver lining in any of this, either. I really don't care if
| DeepMind or Stockfish are enjoying how much they can drag me
| through the mud, because I already don't. It's a huge non
| sequitur to respond to such things with "it doesn't matter,
| it's just fake thought." And it is one the most embarassing
| things to see people going down that lane, alongside that other
| road, of "but can machines make _art_? "
| stared wrote:
| In this case, Koch really needs to read Daniel Dennett's
| "Consciousness Explained". Even though it does not explains
| consciousness, it takes it seriously to dispel myths and
| magical thinking about consciousness.
| lachlan-sneff wrote:
| I've never understood why people feel that way. As far as I can
| tell, there is no evidence that consciousness is not able to be
| emulated by a machine.
| axguscbklp wrote:
| A machine could emulate consciousness in the sense that we
| could probably in principle build a machine that acted,
| viewed from the outside, as if it were conscious. But we have
| no way to measure whether something is conscious or not so we
| would never really know if the machine actually was
| conscious, had interiority, had qualia, etc. (three different
| ways of saying the same thing).
|
| There is no good reason to believe that consciousness is
| reducible to physical phenomena. I think that intelligence is
| almost certainly reducible to physical phenomena, but
| consciousness? No. Consciousness is a mystery that quite
| likely will forever be beyond the reach of physical
| investigation.
| MikeSchurman wrote:
| By the same argument I'll never know if other humans are
| conscious.
| fdsfdsgad wrote:
| Emulation is fine, is whether machines are able to achieve
| "consciousness" that is at stake. I don't know if anyone
| feels strongly on the matter either, at least on the academic
| level. But it's the same as with other odd philosophical
| position: people run into problems with other alternatives,
| go like "why not..." and suddenly they have an odd belief.
| lachlan-sneff wrote:
| Personally, I don't see the difference.
| krtong wrote:
| There is no evidence that a tree can't be used a ram stick
| either.
| ben_w wrote:
| "Consciousness" is too poorly defined to have a proper
| discussion about what is required to have it. We can only be
| somewhat sure about certain things altering or removing
| consciousness, but even then I'm sure you can have a very
| long argument about whether or not a dream is a state of
| consciousness. Or if consciousness is a continuous variable,
| where perhaps a newborn has less than an adult, or a dog has
| less than a human.
| closetohome wrote:
| Because if you don't subscribe to a branch of philosophy
| that's ok with being just a Newtonian thinking machine, it's
| kind of a scary concept.
| fdsfdsgad wrote:
| Not really.
| [deleted]
| htk wrote:
| _Koch believes "that consciousness is a fundamental, elementary
| property of living matter."_
|
| Consciousness is "magic" then.
|
| _Even if we build machines to mimic a real brain, "it'll be
| like a golem stumbling about," he writes: adept at the Turing
| Test perhaps, but a zombie._
|
| This guy created a whole moat of unfalsifiability around his
| views.
| vanusa wrote:
| _Consciousness is "magic" then._
|
| That doesn't follow at all.
| clSTophEjUdRanu wrote:
| They're in the camp that since you can't measure subjective
| experience its magic.
|
| Well, they're here reading this, since they cant measure
| their experience they must not exist. /s
| ben_w wrote:
| Your second quote sounds like a fairly straightforward
| description of P-zombies to me:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
|
| However, to add to the criticism you have of this article
| about this book, your two quotes taken together appear to be
| contradictory: if consciousness is a fundamental element of
| living matter, then given that we can make new living matter,
| why should there be any reason we can't make a conscious
| artificial machine?
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| P-zombies are magical nonsense.
| nohat wrote:
| Koch (or perhaps just the reporter quoting him) contradicts
| himself. Even in his own definition of consciousness a machine
| architecture merely needs a feedback loop to be conscious,
| something hardly unheard of in computer programs. Now arguably
| that definition isn't terrible because human consciousness does
| seem like a supervisor -- something that synthesizes all the
| subprocess work and makes sure it has a coherent story.
| [deleted]
| ctoth wrote:
| Recognition of the powerful pattern matching ability of humans is
| growing. As a result, humans are increasingly being deployed to
| make decisions that affect the well-being of other humans. We are
| starting to see the use of human decision makers in courts, in
| university admissions offices, in loan application departments,
| and in recruitment. Soon humans will be the primary gateway to
| many core services. The use of humans undoubtedly comes with
| benefits relative to the data-derived algorithms that we have
| used in the past. The human ability to spot anomalies that are
| missed by our rigid algorithms is unparalleled. A human decision
| maker also allows us to hold someone directly accountable for the
| decisions. However, the replacement of algorithms with a powerful
| technology in the form of the human brain is not without risks.
| Before humans become the standard way in which we make decisions,
| we need to consider the risks and ensure implementation of human
| decision-making systems does not cause widespread harm. To this
| end, we need to develop principles for the application for the
| human intelligence to decision making.
|
| https://behavioralscientist.org/principles-for-the-applicati...
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