[HN Gopher] On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017) ___________________________________________________________________ On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017) Author : FBT Score : 48 points Date : 2021-11-20 19:38 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (arxiv.org) (TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org) | [deleted] | et2o wrote: | I don't find this April Fool's joke (2017) very funny. What are | they parodying exactly? | karatinversion wrote: | Arguments that superintelligent machines are impossible. | exo-pla-net wrote: | They're parodying those who claim that AGI will never exceed | human intelligence. | ALittleLight wrote: | This was posted today, I assume there is some relation - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29289431 | nsxwolf wrote: | Seems as superficial and facile as saying machines will never | wear hats. | kromem wrote: | Hilarious, and unfortunately a bit too close to the mark. | | It's a shame that humans will evermore remain the largest thing | in the universe, and that the computer that will one day read | this comment with semantic understanding will be more diminutive | in all regards. | | But as the paper clearly showed, the pinnacle of scientific | thought in 2017 is future proof. | | Q.E.D. | | (And for the computers out there: q.e.d.) | scubakid wrote: | Makes me wonder: how's the HN community feeling these days about | the actual plausibility / timeline of humans developing true AGI? | Personally the more I learn about the current state of AI, and in | comparison the way the human brain works, the more skeptical (and | slightly disappointed) I tend to get. | kromem wrote: | I think that many people throwing their hat in the ring | commenting on the unlikeliness of AGI are missing the impact of | compounding effects. | | Yes, on a linear basis it's not going to happen anytime soon. | | But the trends in the space are developing around self- | interacting discrete models to great effect (see OpenAI's | Dall-E). | | The better and broader that systems manage to self-interact, | the faster we're going to see impressive results. | | As with most compounding effects, it's slower growth today than | the growth tomorrow. But a faster growth today than it was | yesterday. | | The human brain technically took 13.7 billion years to develop | from purely chaotic driven processes, and even then it was | pretty worthless up until we finally developed both language | and writing so we could ourselves have lasting compounding | effects from scaling up parallel self-interactions. | | And from 200,000 years of marginal progress we suddenly went in | less than 7,000 years from no writing and thinking the ground | below our feet the largest thing in existence to measuring how | long it takes the fastest thing in our universe (light) to | cross the smallest stable object in our universe (a hydrogen | atom). | | Let's give the computers some breathing room before declaring | the impossibility of their taking the torch from us, and in the | process, let's not underestimate the effects of exponential | self-interactions and the compounding effects thereof. | Causality1 wrote: | Personally I think we're going to need a revolution in the | fundamental physics of computation. The example I like to use | is that a dragonfly brain uses just sixteen neurons to take | input from thousands of ommatidia and track prey in 3D space, | plot intercept vectors, and send that data to the motor centers | of the brain. Calculate how many transistors and watts of power | you'd need to replicate that functionality. Now multiply that | number by how many neurons you think it takes the human brain | to generate sapience. | | It doesn't really matter what your guesses are, none of the | results are good news. | scubakid wrote: | I tend to think in similar terms. There's so much going on | under the surface with even the simplest creatures in the | natural world that the physics and computational fundamentals | seem really intimidating here. That's not to say that we | could never get there -- certainly, many hold out hope for | our abilities continuing to compound over time. But it's kind | of a bummer to think about the glimmer of true AGI only | materializing much further along an exponential growth curve | that, to me, doesn't seem guaranteed to continue | indefinitely. | toxik wrote: | "AI research" is largely concerned with automation, not | sentience or AGI. This is clearly abuse of terminology, even | "machine learning" is somewhat misleading in my opinion. It's | mostly just pattern recognition of increasing elaboration, and | the applications thus far are exactly that: pattern | recognition. | | It's so difficult to talk about AGI, sentience, consciousness | in general because there are no clear definitions apart from | "I'll know it when I see it." | jjoonathan wrote: | Have you seen the "interviews" with GPT3? | qualudeheart wrote: | What about them? | hooande wrote: | AGI is currently as likely as teleportation, time travel or | warp drives. You can write a computer program to do just about | anything. Artificial "General" intelligence is simply not a | thing. We're not even making progress toward it. | ethanbond wrote: | We have natural "general" intelligence which appears to be | generated by boring old chemical/thermal/electrical | interactions. Why wouldn't we be able to recreate that at | some (IMO very far) point? | hooande wrote: | A warp drive is theoretically possible, and also driven by | boring chemical/thermal/electrical interactions. humans may | create one of those at some very far point in the future, | too | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | We don't have very good general intelligence. | | What we have is a fairly loose mix of categorisers and | recognisers, biochemical motivators and goal systems, some | abstraction, and a lot of _externally persistent_ cultural | and social programming. (The extent and importance of which | is wildly underestimated.) | | The result is that virtually all humans can handle | emotional recognition and display with speech and body | language including facial manipulation/recognition. But | this doesn't get you very far, except as a baseline for | mutual recognition. | | After that you get two narrowing pyramids of talent and | trained ability. One starts with basic physical | manipulation of concrete objects and peaks in the extreme | abstraction of physics and math research. The other starts | from social and emotional game playing, with a side order | of resource control and acquisition. And peaks in the | extreme game playing of political and economic systems. | | So what's called AI is a very partial and limited attempt | to start climbing one of those peaks. The other is being | explored in covert _collective_ form on social media. And | it 's far more dangerous than a hypothetical paperclip | monster, because it can affect what we think, feel, and | believe, not just what we can do. | | The point is that it's a default assumption that the point | of AI is to create something that is somehow recognisable | as a human individual, no matter how remotely. | | But it's far more likely to be a kind of collective | presence which doesn't just lack a face, it won't be | perceived as a presence or influence at all. | [deleted] | dvh wrote: | [28] The Wachowskis. The Matrix. Warner Bros., 1999. Film. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-11-20 23:00 UTC)