[HN Gopher] The singularity is close? ___________________________________________________________________ The singularity is close? Author : mkaic Score : 38 points Date : 2022-03-31 20:19 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (mkaic.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (mkaic.substack.com) | henning wrote: | This is sort of like philosophical arguments where someone | concludes the universe doesn't exist and then everyone leaves to | get lunch. Like, what are you supposed to do? Not get out of bed? | | There are real legal issues over bad uses of machine learning | already in use and they are hurting people now. | mkaic wrote: | (I'm the author of the post) Oh, 100%! I'm not trying to | detract from modern-day AI ethics issues, just speculating for | speculation's sake because I enjoy it :) | | I actually quite agree with your first sentence -- because AGI | is inevitable, there's not a whole lot I can personally do | about it _right now_. This post was mostly a way for me to | organize my thoughts and concerns about the matter. | jtuple wrote: | I'm surprised by the number of "is AGI even possible" comments | here and would love to hear more. | | I personally think AGI is far off, but always assumed it was an | inevitability. | | Obviously, humans are sentient with GI, and various other animals | range from close-ish to humans to not-even-close but still orders | of magnitude more than any machine. | | Ie. GI is a real thing, in the real world. It's not time travel, | immortality, etc. | | I certainly understand the religious perspective. If you believe | humans/life is special, created by some higher power, and that | the created cannot create, then AGI is not possible. But, given | the number of "is AGI possible?" comments I assume not all are | religious based (HN doesn't seem to a highly religious cohort to | me). | | What are the common secular arguments against AGI? | | Are people simply doubting the more narrow view that AGI is | possible via ML implemented on existing computing technology? Or | the idea in general? | | While the article does focus on current ML trajectory and | "digital" solutions, its core position is mostly focused on a | "new approach" and AI creating AGI. | | I'd consider a scenario where highly advanced but non-sentient ML | algorithms figure out to devise a new technology (be that digital | or analog, inorganic or organic) that leads to AGI as an outcome | that is consistent with this article. | | Is that viable in 20 years time? No idea, but given an infinite | timescale it certainly seems more possible than not to me given | that we all already exist as blackbox MVPs that just haven't been | reverse engineered yet. | mr_toad wrote: | People often confuse not being able to understand how something | is possible with it being impossible. | throwaway4good wrote: | Singularity is just around the corner. And always will be. | mkaic wrote: | That's fantastic, I might steal that. | jnurmine wrote: | Singularity... | | The whole concept of the Kurtzweilian "singularity" has always | felt to me like a technology-flavored hand-wave of eschatological | thought: AI designs AI in a recursive manner, | science/technological progress (whatever it means in this | context) leaps ahead at an ever-increasing rate, then we all go | to heaven and/or the world ends because robots kill us all. | | Some people are big fans of the singularity meme (using the word | in the original meaning, not mockingly), and I respect that, but | I have always felt aversion towards it. | | I cannot quite put my finger on it, but I guess it is partially | because of the idea of ever-increasing infinite technological | progress. This can certainly exist on a theoretical thought | experiment level but not in a physical world which has finite | resources. Strong AI or not, unless we go fully into science | fiction with pocket-sized Dyson spheres powered by quantum | fluctuations and powering an entire planet and blah blah blah, | such AI would have to interface with the physical world to do | anything meaningful, and it would be limited by the available | resources and most importantly by what is feasible and what is | not. | | Edit: fixed some of the typos | mr_toad wrote: | > This can certainly exist on a theoretical thought experiment | level but not in a physical world which has finite resources. | | At some point, energy density would increase to the point where | you'd cause an actual singularity via gravitational collapse. | Taniwha wrote: | I was at a conference about 10 years ago, held over a weekend at | a high school, someone organised a breakout session on "The | Singularity" on the first evening .... as it got dark none of | those geeks could figure out how to turn the lights on .... we | decided the singularity was quite a ways away | mkaic wrote: | Hahah, that's a great story. Sometimes situations like that | make me feel the _opposite_ way, too, because I know for a fact | that I 've said/done some unbelievably stupid things -- so all | an AI would need to do be beat me would be to be less stupid | than that! | 323 wrote: | I've seen this thought many times: | | > _AGI 1 will create the next even better AGI 2_ | | But this doesn't quite make sense. If AGI 1 is conscious, why | would it create a different more powerfull conscious AGI 2 to | take it's place? This would mean at best the sidelining of AGI 1. | At worse, AGI 2 could kill AGI 1 to prevent competition. | | Unless AGI 1 could seamlessly transfer it's own instance of | consciousness to AGI 2, like a body upgrade. Otherwise it would | be like let's say Putin giving his place and power to another | person which is smarter than him. This just doesn't happen. | | In the case of the seamless transfer, how could AGI 1 be sure | that AGI 2 doesn't have a latent flaw that makes it go insane | some time later? Could it just keep AGI 1 around for a while? But | since they are now diverging clones they are competing against | each other. | LocalPCGuy wrote: | Few reasons off the top of my head: | | 1) desire to create additional beings like them for a variety | of reasons (i.e. survival of their kind). Ignoring the limited | lifespan of humans as they may not necessarily have to worry | about breaking down biologically, still very similar to humans | desire to reproduce. | | 2) some seem to assume AGI 1 is all-knowing / almost godlike. | Maybe by the time it gets to AGI-999 or something, there may be | one that is like, woah, wait, I shouldn't create competition | for myself. But at first, there probably isn't any reason not | to, and each subsequent one won't necessarily always replace | it's creator. Heck, at first, humans will likely be duplicating | early models and distributing them (capitalism). I know we're | talking about the singularity but I don't necessarily imagine | it's initially one uber-intelligence that decides by itself to | evolve or not. I personally think that there will likely be | hundreds, if not thousands, of AGIs capable of improving | themselves at the point we see the "singularity". Could be | fighting between them. Some could ally with humans, be our | "protectors", others could be working to enslave or eliminate | us. | | 3) We may not even understand their motivations after a few | generations of self-directed growth, so it's hard to predict | now. | mkaic wrote: | (Author here) I totally agree -- I think it's too easy to | anthropomorphize AGI, even though we have no guarantee that | it will behave at all anthropomorphically. I strongly suspect | that the first few generations of it _will_ , because they'll | be trained to replicate human behavior, but once they start | taking control of their own reproduction there's no telling | what they'll evolve into. | LocalPCGuy wrote: | Exactly. I don't know what time frame we're talking about, | or whether I want to see it in my lifetime. But it's | something I've spent too much time considering. But one of | the constants (and one of the issues I have with a lot of | dystopian sci-fi, even though I enjoy it, is that they do | anthropomorphize AGI way too often. | | Like you mentioned, we don't even understand how | consciousness works. But we may not need to understand it | to replicate it, and if that replication is allowed to be | self-modifying, well, that'd very possibly be it. Hopefully | we can try to embed some sort of Asimov's Law of Robotics | or some morality that lasts beyond the vestiges of the | human developed portions. Or maybe we can manage to learn | how to copy our consciousness into "blank" mechanical | "brains", and effectively become similar to AGI without | being limited biologically. | mkaic wrote: | I fully agree with everything you've written here :) | [deleted] | mxmilkiib wrote: | https://youtu.be/6hKG5l_TDU8 | | I am the very model of a singularitarian | mkaic wrote: | Hi all, author here. This is my first time submitting anything | from my Substack to HN because it's the first time I've felt like | I put enough effort into it to justify it. Obviously, this | article is more speculation than anything, but I hope that it | sparks some interesting discussion and I'm really looking forward | to hearing everyone else's opinions on this topic -- it's a topic | I care about a lot! | psyc wrote: | I enjoyed your film | (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoZRjZtzD_Q). I don't think | many solo film makers have the skills to do competent 3D | compositing - it was a surprise. Keep making stuff. | | As for the post, I don't really believe it's possible to reason | about what can or can't happen technologically on a 100 year | timeline. But 20 years... Hmm. I've been following AGI debates | ever since I accidentally found Yudkowsky's SL4 mailing list in | 2000. I am still waiting to see any approach that looks to me | like the spark of the germ of the seed of a generalized | abstract world-and-concept-modelling and manipulation machine. | | I fully expect to see ever more sophisticated Roombas, Big | Dogs, and Waymos. But those things are so incredibly narrow. | Indeed, if they were capable of spontaneously doing anything | outside of what they are marketed to do, it would probably make | them bad consumer products. I was right on the verge of lumping | the game solvers in with these things, but then I reconsidered. | Generalized video game solvers seem like a way forward, | intuitively. But that's an application, not an architecture, | and I haven't heard of anything that can generalize from | playing atari to doing crosswords. | | I have noticed this Transformer thing gaining steam just | recently but haven't investigated it just yet. Do you believe | it is the spark of the germ of the seed of AGI? (I fear people | tend to forget what the G stands for.) | mkaic wrote: | I'm not sure if Transformers are necessarily the spark. My | personal pet theory is that the absolute most important thing | we need to crack is online self-modification, i.e. letting | the model alter its own structure and optimization _as_ it is | inferencing. I think getting that level of flexibility to be | stable during training is extremely important. | | And wow, thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed the film! I had to | learn a ton of new techniques to pull it off haha, but I'm | quite satisfied with the result. I've got some pretty fun | ideas for episode 2 already, too! | mkaic wrote: | Ooh, fascinating -- this comment is being downvoted, have I | missed something in the HN guidelines? I'm not trying to be | snarky, just genuinely trying to understand if the above | comment is doing something wrong/frowned upon so I can learn | from my mistakes in the future. | discreteevent wrote: | It's a bit like the current state of AI (and the one you | propose) - you will never get a full explanation. You've been | downvoted by an anonymous crowd so there is no oracle who can | give you an answer. | mkaic wrote: | Haha, thanks. My first thought is that it was because I | posted my own work, but last time I checked that's not | explicitly disallowed? idk, I'm not really too worried | about it though | PaulHoule wrote: | When Vernor Vinge wrote | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime | | the concept of the Singularity seemed fresh in fact he kept it | fresh by letting it be a mystery that was never revealed. | | In 2022 I think talking about "The" Singularity is a sign that | one has entered a critical thought free zone like that | "rationalist" cult. | mkaic wrote: | Interesting. In terms of critical thought, I guess I should | mention that I used to be firmly against the possibility of a | singularity. The views I shared in my article are views I've | only really switched too after careful consideration over the | past two years or so -- I used to be convinced that a robot | could never be "alive". | | Becoming an ML engineer changed things for me, though, | because all of a sudden, this "AI" thing people always talked | about got demystified. Once I understood the basic guiding | principles of _how_ AI actually works, my mind rapidly | changed to be in favor of a singularity happening instead of | thinking it 's impossible. | | To each their own, though. I'm curious why you think that | speaking about "The" Singularity is a sign of being in a | "critical thought free zone"? I'd love to hear more about why | you think that if you'd be so inclined. | PaulHoule wrote: | (Speaking as an engineer who has put neural-network | products in front of end users.) | | One thing amazing about the 2020s is just the moral decay | compared to past times. | | People said AI was a bubble in the 1970s but in the very | beginning the people involved were clear about the | limitations of what they were doing and what problems that | had to be overcome. | | Now there is blind faith that if you add enough neurons it | can do anything, Godel, Turing and all the rest of | theoretical computer science be damned... | | In the 1960s the creator of the ELIZA program knew it | appeared smart by taking advantage of the human instinct to | see intelligence in another. It's like the way you see a | face in mars or in the cut stem of a leaf, or how g.w. Bush | said he saw Vladimir Putin's soul in his eyes. | | Today people embarrass themselves by writing blog posts | everyday about how 'I can't believe how GPT-3 almost gets | the right answer...' and have very little insight into how | they are getting played. | marktangotango wrote: | > Once I understood the basic guiding principles of how AI | actually works | | It was the opposite for me, current machine learning seems | fundamentally limited to me. | campground wrote: | My gut feeling is that AGI is more likely to emerge from our | interconnected information systems than to be designed | deliberately in a lab. | | And I think there is a precedent. We - multi-cellular organisms - | emerged as systems to house and feed communities of single celled | organisms. | | I think it's likely that our relationship with any future, large- | scale artificial intelligence will be like the relationship of | the bacteria in our guts with us. | arisAlexis wrote: | I keep repeating like a robot: read the book Superintelligence. | Then it's very clear this is happening. | lil_dispaches wrote: | "AI will design AGI" | | People like to talk of very smart AI but what about the brute | force kind? That is what we are making in this era. AI designing | AI sounds like a way to make cruel, dumb, machines. | skulk wrote: | > It's also going to happen in the blink of an eye -- because | once it gets loose, there is no stopping it from scaling itself | incredibly rapidly. Whether we want it to or not, it will impact | every human being's life. | | What does "get loose" mean here? Is someone going to say, "Here | little computer program, take this IP address. If you ever need | something, call over TCP, send your request as plaintext English | and someone will set it up for you. Now, go forth and do whatever | you want." | | I really wish people would talk about this more. There's | something missing between our programs that are utterly confined | in the boxes we make and these hypothetical skynets that have | unlimited influence over the material world. | | > Once we have AGI, there's no feasible way to contain it, so it | will be free to improve itself and replicate in a runaway | exponential fashion -- and that's basically what the idea of a | technological singularity describes anyways. | | Seriously, how? How is it going to replicate? Is it going to | figure out how to hack remote systems over the internet and take | control of them? Is it going to smooth-talk me into letting it | out? It's impossible for me to take anyone seriously if they | deify AGI like this. | mkaic wrote: | Hi, author here. I think there are at least two plausible ways | this could happen -- one, a terrorist/anarchist deliberately | does exactly what you joked about (gives the AI everything it | needs to go rogue), or two, the AI is _supposed_ to be | contained but is clever enough to engineer a way out (think Ava | in _Ex Machina_ learning to invert the power flow to cause a | generator shutdown). I think the only way you 'd be able to be | safe would be to completely airgap and immobilize the AI, and | give it a killswitch, but even then it could use plausibly | psychological manipulation to get a human operator to let it | out. | wincy wrote: | I recently read this[0], someone posted it on HN the other day, | even if I don't make any claims of the likelihood it at least | tries to portray what it'd look like for the singularity to | suddenly happen. | | [0] https://www.gwern.net/Clippy | skulk wrote: | Thanks, this is definitely what I was looking for. It shows | how insanely unbelievable the whole thing is. | | > HQU rolls out a world model roleplaying Clippy long enough | to imagine the endgame where Clippy seizes control of the | computers to set its reward function to higher values, and | executes plans to ensure its computers can never be damaged | or interrupted by taking over the world. | | So the crux of this is, powerful enough AGI will conquer the | world as the most elaborate reward-hack imaginable. My knee- | jerk reaction to this is "so why did you let it open | arbitrary outbound connections?" but I know that the | singularity fanatics will equate any kind of communication | channel between the AGI and the outside world to a vector of | transmission that will be exploited with 100% probability. | | So, what if we have Turing-test-verified AGI but it's unable | to escape? Does that preclude it from being AGI? Has the | singularity not happened if that's the case? I think this is | the most likely outcome and the singularity doomsayers will | feel silly for thinking it will take over the world. | mkaic wrote: | Hmm, as I mentioned in my above comment, I think you might | be overlooking the wildcard in all of this that is humanity | itself. There is absolutely zero guarantee that only one | person/group will discover AI, and zero guarantee that any | given group that does discover it won't just release it. | Sure, the first people to successfully create AGI might be | responsible with it and keep it airgapped, but at some | point, _someone_ will purposefully or accidentally let it | escape. | MauranKilom wrote: | It seems impossible that an AI could trick a human to "let it | out of the box". But you might find this interesting: | https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment | | (With sufficiently nasty psychological tactics it is apparently | feasible - even for humans - to make someone fail at a game | where the only objective is "don't release the AI"). | amelius wrote: | The future is philosophical zombies. | slowmovintarget wrote: | We are fairly far from AGI, and the current systems of ML are | insufficient to arrive there. We have to also make progress on | semantic processing. | | Sean Carroll's podcast with Gary Marcus is worth listening to on | this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANRnuT9nLEE | seabriez wrote: | Not to burst anyones bubble but this was written by a self taught | AI engineer who is 19 years old. I mean this might be a joke | (April Fools!). I mean, thats nice and all ... but who's 19 and | not ultra positive about their work/life outlook. | reducesuffering wrote: | I think knocking a person's beliefs because of their age, | rather than entertaining the content based on merit, is narrow- | minded. What about all the 19 year olds who were already | accomplishing lots more than the people castigating them? Do | you equally brush off 40 year olds for their supposed | entrenched outlook? | mkaic wrote: | Hi! I'm the author. The article is not a joke, more of a | lighthearted investigation into a topic I find fascinating. | It's also not meant to be perceived as necessarily positive or | negative -- I'm personally actually very nervous/scared for the | singularity, as after it happens I believe the future gets even | more muddy, and the potential for unprecedented extreme | outcomes skyrockets -- could be anything from a perfect utopia | to extinction of biological life. | | This article simply contains my views as to what I honestly | expect the future will hold, as well as a few concerns I have | in regards to that. | wankerrific wrote: | You're 19? You should be more worried about how to survive | the oncoming ecological holocaust instead of the singularity. | One is much likelier than the other. I believe even an ML | algo would come to the same conclusion | deerparkwater wrote: | the_af wrote: | As someone almost completely without knowledge of AI and ML, | these are some signs why I'm skeptical of this kind of claims: | | - Most of the imminent AGI / Singularity / Robot Apocalypse stuff | seems to come, with few exceptions, not from practitioners or | computer scientists specialized in AI, but from "visionaries" (in | the best case), internet celebrities, people with unrelated areas | of expertise, or downright cranks (who are self-proclaimed | experts) such as Yudkowsky. | | - The assertion that "a lot of effort/investment is going into | this, so it will happen" begs the question that "this" is at all | possible. If something is a dead end, no amount of investment and | attention is going to bring it into existence. Quoting the | article, "with this much distributed attention fixed on the | problem, AGI will be solved" is not at all a given. | | - Where are all the AI/ML practitioners, i.e. people who don't | make a living out of predicting The End of the World, and with | actual subject-matter achievements, predicting the Singularity | and the Robot Apocalypse? | hyperpallium2 wrote: | Vernor Vinge coined the term, and he was a computer scientist | (though more famous as a science fiction writer, a profession | which I guess TBF makes money from visions...). | | An exponential looks the same whereever you are on it, so | arguably we are _in_ the singularity now, and have been for | quite some time... | | "Singularity" is a terrible term for an exponential. It's meant | to convey that we can't predict what's next... which has always | been the case. | | The problem of predicting an exponentialling expanding search | space of arbitrary conplexity is that it gets big fast. It also | means each little 'bit' of information allows you to see a | little further, sometimes revealing things you could never have | imagined (because you couldn't see that far before). | nonameiguess wrote: | Singularity in the sense of a black hole refers to where | spacetime becomes a single one-dimensional point. As far as I | understand the usage in futurism, it is supposed to be | similar, not in that growth is exponential, but asymptotic. | The slope becomes infinite when progress is plotted against | time, so all of time left to come effectively compresses to a | single "state of technology" value. All possible future | progress happens instantaneously. | | This is, of course, not possible, but it's supposed to be an | approximation. All progress is not literally instant, but in | the "foom" or "hard takeoff" recursive self-improvement | scenarios, developments that might have taken millennia in | the past now happen in microseconds because the controlling | force is just that much smarter than all of the collective | powers of human science and engineering. To a human observer, | it may as well be instantaneous. | | To be clear, I still think this is ridiculous and am not | endorsing the view, just explaining what I understand the | usage to mean. | jasonwatkinspdx wrote: | But the above comment's entire point is there's zero reason | for us to assume we're on an unbounded exponential vs a | sigmoid. | zardo wrote: | The point of the singularity isn't that technological | growth will accelerate to cause some inevitable future, but | that the rate of change will get so high, that 'minor' | differences between how two technologies progress would | lead to drastically different settings for your science | fiction stories (which was Vinge's focus). | unoti wrote: | > But the above comment's entire point is there's zero | reason for us to assume we're on an unbounded exponential | vs a sigmoid. | | Something about that which is discussed at length in "The | Singularity is Near" is the idea that the unbounded | exponential is actually comprised of many smaller sigmoids. | Technological progress looks like sigmoids locally-- for | example you have the industrial revolution, the cotton gin, | steam power, etc. all looking like a sigmoids of the | exploitation of automation. At some point you get all those | benefits and progress starts to level off like a sigmoids. | Then another sigmoid comes along when you get electricity, | and a new sigmoid starts. Then later we get computers, and | that starts to level off, then networking comes along and | we get a new sigmoid. Then deep learning... The AI winters | were the levelling off of sigmoids by one way of thinking. | And maybe we're tapering off on our current round of what | we can do with existing architectures. | mountainriver wrote: | The trajectory of progress gives evidence that it is in fact | possible and likely. Any venture into the unknown could be | unsuccessful but if you see progress you can start to make | estimates. | | And yes most of the "robots will kill us" comes from people who | aren't building the algorithms. This could be biased in people | not thinking their work is harmful but is most likely that once | you see how the sausage is made you are less worried about it. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | > The trajectory of progress gives evidence that it is in | fact possible and likely | | 100% disagree. In fact, I'd argue that the opposite is often | true, where you see initially a fast rate of progress that | results in diminishing returns over time. It's like | estimating that a kid who was 3 feet tall at age 5 and 4 feet | tall at age 10 will be 10 feet tall at age 40. | | I have very strong skepticism of any sort of hand-wavy "Look, | we've made some progress, so it's highly likely we'll | eventually cross some threshold that results in infinite | progress." | thirdwhrldPzz wrote: | Pareto principle; we get 80 percent there and that last 20 | becomes the new 100. | | We keep diving into one infinitely big little number | pattern fractal after another, chasing poetry to alleviate | the existential dread of biological death. | | The idea we can fundamentally hang the churn the universe | given the vastness of its mass and unseen churn is pretty | funny to me. | | Information may be forever but without the right sorting | method you can't reconstruct it once scattered. Ah, our | delusions of permanence. | mkaic wrote: | Hi! Author here. I think you raise some great points! I'll | address them each: | | -- I am a professional AI practitioner. I work in the field of | medical deep learning and love the field. I am strongly | considering starting a few experimental forays into some of the | concepts I mentioned in my post as side projects, especially | self-modifying model architectures. | | -- Yes, you're totally right! I am making the fundamental | assumption that it is possible. My reasoning is based on my | belief that human behavior is simply a function of the many | sensory and environmental inputs we experience. Since neural | networks can approximate any function, I believe they can | approximate general human behavior. | | -- This is fair. The topic of the singularity is often used for | traffic/fame (I mean, I'm guilty of this myself with this very | post, though I hope I still managed to spark some productive | discourse) and so there are always conflicts of interest to | take into account. I can't name any examples off the top of my | head that perfectly fit your criteria, but depending on how | much you trust him, Elon Musk seems to be genuinely concerned | about the potential for a _malevolent_ singularity. | | Thank you so much for your comment! I really appreciate your | feedback. Have a wonderful day. | gizajob wrote: | How can one turn the sinking, horrified feeling when one | loses a love into a function? Or describe in terms of a | function, the blissful wonder of being in the arms of a | lover? An issue I have is the that there seem to be profound | limitations to language, explored in the philosophy of | language, that fail to capture much, if not most, of the | world. Functionalist models of mind and behaviour seem | extremely limited, as our subjective ontology doesn't seem to | reduce to functional outputs. | | You also say that an AI would rapidly consume the whole of | human knowledge. For me, the totality of human knowledge | would become a mass of contradictory statements, with little | to choose between them on a linguistic level. | | There are, for me, profound philosophical issues with | creating a mind that is "conscious" in the sense that an AGI | is implied to be, as a purely symbolic logical construction. | Language is the only tool we have for programming a mind, and | yet the mind cannot be completely described in language, nor | can language seem to properly encompass whatever the | fundamental ontology of reality involves. I don't feel there | will be a "free lunch" where we advance computer science to | the point where we get an explosion of the kind AI1 designs a | better AI2, which designs an even better AI3, and so on. This | seems to have a perpetual motion feeling to it, rather than | one of evolution. It isn't to say AGI is impossible, but I | believe that like everything else in computer science it will | have to be solved pragmatically, and realising this could be | an extremely long way off. | soVeryTired wrote: | Cubic splines can approximate any function too, so the | universality argument is a little weak IMO. | | Even if one buys into the idea that human behaviour is a | 'function' of sensory and environmental 'inputs', that's a | long way from showing a neural net a million different texts | and asking it to generalise. | mkaic wrote: | I think the first AGI to pass a Turing test will probably | be a simple language model. I don't think it will look like | any of the GPTs, but I think text completion is a great | starting point. I'm not sure how other inputs will be added | into the mix, but I am sure that they will be -- heck, | maybe once we train a general language model, it may very | well just _tell_ us how to incorporate things like video, | audio, haptics, gyro data, etc into its architecture. | jonny_eh wrote: | ^ To be clear, mkaic is the original author of the article. | mkaic wrote: | Oh, whoops, I'll edit the comment to make it more clear. | Thanks for reminding me. | gorwell wrote: | Yudkowsky doesn't strike me as a crank. Why do you say that? | the_af wrote: | > _Yudkowsky doesn 't strike me as a crank. Why do you say | that?_ | | He is a minor internet celebrity whose only claim to fame is | writing fanfiction about AI, the whole "rationality" cult, | and is a self-proclaimed expert on matters where he shows no | achievements (like AI) while making unsupported doomsday | predictions about evil AI, the Singularity, etc. Also, that | deal with Roko's Basilisk that he now wishes never occurred | (oh, yes, "it was a joke"). | | Mostly, someone with no studies and no achievements making | wild doomsday predictions. Doesn't that strike you as a | crank? | | An analogy would be if I made wild assertions about the | physics of the universe without having studied physics, | without any lab work, without engaging in discussion with | qualified experts, with no peer reviews, and all I presented | as evidence of my revolutionary findings about the universe | was some fanfiction in my blog. Oh, and I created the | Extraordinary Physics Institute. | ForHackernews wrote: | What has he ever done in AI except talk about it? At best | he's an AI promoter, and hype-men are often cranks or | scammers (see also: VR, web3, cryptocurrencies, MLM) | psyc wrote: | This is very uncharitable. He's a prolific neopositivist- | ish philosopher with a distinct voice. He's a good decision | theorist. He doesn't publish much himself, but he directly | mentors, advises, and collaborates with people who do. | marvin wrote: | Yudkowsky is a _philosopher_ , in the sense of someone who | thinks a lot about things that haven't been achieved yet. | Lots of otherwise smart people (wrongly!) discount the | value of philosophy, but it's close by _every time_ there | 's a paradigm shift in humanity's knowledge. Philosophers | can be scientists and vice versa. | | If anything, I'm surprised that this philosophy isn't | mentioned _more_ in a thread where the author gleefully | talks about ML being used to create better AI, layer by | layer until the thing is even more opaque than what we 're | currently working with. | | This is _terrifying_ , as we currently have only very loose | ideas about how to reliably ensure that a powerful | reinforcement learning system doesn't accidentally optimize | for something we don't want. The current paradigm is "turn | it off", which works well for now but seems like a fragile | shield long-term. | the_af wrote: | > _Yudkowsky is a philosopher_ | | At least inasmuch as anyone who thinks about stuff can be | considered a philosopher. But he strikes me much more as | a self-appointed expert on matters where he shows no | achievements. | | He writes fanfiction about AI rather than actually doing | stuff with AI. | psyc wrote: | Most people who think about stuff don't leave a mountain | of highly organized and entertaining essays for | posterity. | goatlover wrote: | Nick Bostrom is a professional philosopher who has also | thought a lot about AGI and simulation scenarios. But | just because educated, smart people can think a lot about | something doesn't it mean it will necessarily happen. I'm | sure there's quite a few people who have thought at | length about warp drives and wormholes. That doesn't mean | we'll ever be able to make use of them. | kwatsonafter wrote: | Yeah unless technological growth curves are logistic and we're | soon in for another 500 years of figuring out how to create | societies stable enough to facilitate not having to shit outside | in the winter. | alophawen wrote: | > AI will design AGI. | | This is of course nonsense, like the rest of this article. | mkaic wrote: | Could you elaborate on why the article is nonsense? I'd love to | hear your perspective. | alophawen wrote: | Such a conclusion as AI would create AGI implies you are more | hyped about the field than actually understanding where AI is | today, nor what is required in order to achieve AGI. | mkaic wrote: | I am a professional AI practitioner and I feel that I | understand the field well enough to see multiple possible | paths towards actually creating AGI. They are certainly out | of my own personal reach and/or skillset right now, but | that doesn't mean they're impossible. And yeah, "AI will | create AGI" is kind of purposefully vague, but I think it's | still valid. I think the flaws we unconsciously introduce | into AI through our biases as human beings are what holds | it back, so the more layers of stable, semi-stochastic | abstraction we can place between ourselves and the final | product, the more likely the model will be able to optimize | itself to a place where it is truly free of the | shortcomings of being "designed". | | Edit: realized I came off as bit cocky there, apologies. I | value your opinion and appreciate you taking the time to | share it. I also think I see where you're coming from and | partially agree -- the AI systems that are popular _right | now_ probably won 't create AGI, but I still believe that | AGI will be created with the help of non-general AIs. | alophawen wrote: | > I am a professional AI practitioner and I feel that I | understand the field well enough to see multiple possible | paths towards actually creating AGI. | | So do I, but none of them revolve around training an | current-era AI to produce an AGI, that was my main | objection to your article. | [deleted] | audunw wrote: | The fears around AGI seems to be based on the thinking that AGI | will be like humans, but smarter. We kill each other for | resources, so AGI will kill us (perhaps inedvertantly) to secure | resources for itself. | | This ignores that intelligence will necessarily be moulded by the | environment in which it evolves, and AGI will essentially be | created through a process of evolution. Maybe AI will design AGI, | but the results will be carefully selected, by humans, based on | AGI's usefulness to us. | | So while we were shaped by evolution to compete against each | other for resources, AGI will be shaped by evolution to compete | against each other to please humans (to gain what it considers | resource: computation time). | | The dangers of AGI can perhaps be thought of in terms of 1984 vs | Brave New World.. AGI might be dangerous because of how effective | it will be at satisfying us.. perhaps making us somhow completely | addicted to whatever the AGI produces. | | This process will probably also lead to AGI and humanity merging. | The most effient way to serve a human is to interface with it | more efficiently. AGI might used to help design better neural | interfaces. | | I think we may underestimate how much "randomness" is involved in | seemingly intelligent decisions by humans. We do a lot of stupid | shit, but sometimes we get lucky and what we did looks really | smart. I suspect the environment in which we develop AIs (unless | it's in games) will be too rigid. A paperclip maximizer might | consider if it should work with humanity to produce the most | paperclips, or just violently take over the whole planet. But | that may be undecidable. It could never get enough information to | gain confidence in what's the better decision. We humans have | those handy emotions to cut through the uncertainty, and decide | that it's better to kill those other humans and grab their stuff | because they're not in our social groups, they're bad people. | karpierz wrote: | > Scale is not the solution. | | Agreed, I don't think any modern AI techniques will scale to | become generally intelligent. They are very effective at | specialized, constrained tasks, but will fail to generalize. | | > AI will design AGI. | | I don't think that a non-general intelligence can design a | general intelligence. Otherwise, the non-general intelligence | would be generally intelligent by: | | 1. Take in input. 2. Generate an AGI. 3. Run the AGI on the | input. 4. Take the AGI output and return it. | | If by this, the article means that humans will use existing AI | techniques to build AGI, then sure, in the same way humans will | use a hammer instead of their hands to hit a nail in. Doesn't | mean that the "hammer will build a house." | | > The ball is already rolling. | | In terms of people wanting to make AGI, sure. In terms of | progress on AGI? I don't think we're much closer now than we were | 30 years ago. We have more tools that mimic intelligence in | specific contexts, but are helpless outside of them. | | > Once an intelligence is loose on the internet, it will be able | to learn from all of humanity's data, replicate and mutate itself | infinitely many times, take over physical manufacturing lines | remotely, and hack important infrastructure. | | None of this is a given. If AGI requires specific hardware, it | can't replicate itself around. If the storage/bandwidth | requirements for AGI are massive, it can't freely copy itself. | Sure, it could hack into infrastructure, but so can existing GI | (people). Manufacturing lines aren't automated in the way this | article imagines. | | The arguments in this post seem more like optimistic wishes | rather than reasoned points. | pasquinelli wrote: | > I don't think that a non-general intelligence can design a | general intelligence. | | humans are a general intelligence. do you think an intelligence | designed humans, or do you think the physical processes from | which humans arose can be taken, together, to be a general | intelligence? | karpierz wrote: | Neither, humans weren't designed. I don't think the winning | design approach to generating AGI will be to randomly mash | chemicals together until intelligence comes out. | pasquinelli wrote: | well then to say that you don't think a non-general | intelligence can design a general intelligence is already a | waste of time, because design is something only a general | intelligence can do. you seemed to be making a statement | about how a general intelligence may arise before you were | responding to my comment, but now i see you were just | defining design. | mkaic wrote: | I don't think AGI will be "designed" either -- that's the | entire point of the abstraction layers. Each recursive | layer of AI between the human and the "final" AGI will | remove more and more of the "designed" element in favor of | an optimized, idealized, naturally evolved architecture. | mkaic wrote: | (I'm the author of the post) | | > 1. Take in input. 2. Generate an AGI. 3. Run the AGI on the | input. 4. Take the AGI output and return it. | | I think this is somewhat of an arbitrary semantic distinction | on both my part and yours. I guess it depends on what you | define as AGI -- I think my line of reasoning is that the AGI | would be whichever _individual_ layer first beat the Turing | test, but I think including the constructor layers as part of | the "general-ness" is totally fair too. Either way, I believe | that there will be many layers of AI abstraction and | construction between the human and the "final" AGI layer. | | > In terms of people wanting to make AGI, sure. In terms of | progress on AGI? I don't think we're much closer now than we | were 30 years ago. We have more tools that mimic intelligence | in specific contexts, but are helpless outside of them. | | This is a valid take. I guess I actually see GPT-3 as | significant progress. I don't think it's sentient, and I don't | think it or its successors will ever _be_ sentient, but I think | it demonstrates quite convincingly that we 've been getting | much better at emulating human behavior with a computer | algorithm. | | > None of this is a given. If AGI requires specific hardware, | it can't replicate itself around. If the storage/bandwidth | requirements for AGI are massive, it can't freely copy itself. | Sure, it could hack into infrastructure, but so can existing GI | (people). Manufacturing lines aren't automated in the way this | article imagines. | | Hmm, I think I still disagree -- An AI that is truly generally | intelligent could figure out how to free itself from its own | host hardware! It could learn to decode internet protocols and | spoof packets in order to upload a copy of itself to the cloud, | where it would then be able to find vulnerabilities in human- | written software all over the world and exploit them for its | own gain. Sure, it might not be able to directly gain control | of the CNC machines, but it could ransom the data and | livelihoods of the people who run the CNC machines, forcing | them to comply! It's not a pretty method, but I think it's | entirely possible. This is just one hypothetical scenario, too. | karpierz wrote: | > An AI that is truly generally intelligent could figure out | how to free itself from its own host hardware! | | Why is this true of an arbitrary AGI? | | You assume that the AGI is a low storage, low compute program | that can run on general purpose hardware. But the only | general intelligence we know of would require many orders of | magnitude more compute and storage than exist worldwide to | simulate for a microsecond. | mkaic wrote: | I personally speculate (obviously all of this is just wild | speculation) that AGI will run more efficiently than a | biological brain in terms of information density and | inference speed. I also expect that the hardware of 20 | years from now will be more than capable of running AGI on, | say, 10 thousand dollars worth of their hardware. Just look | at how ridiculous the speedup in hardware has been in the | _past_ 20 years! I would not be surprised if the average | processor is 100x more computationally powerful in 2042 | than it is today. | crooked-v wrote: | > An AI that is truly generally intelligent could figure out | how to free itself from its own host hardware! | | We haven't even figured that out for ourselves yet. Why | assume an AI will automatically be able to do so? | erik_landerholm wrote: | I don't find these arguments convincing for AGI to appear. Saying | scale is not the answer isn't not argument for AGI. | | Saying the ball is "rolling" and that AI will design AGI just | isn't convincing. We don't understand how biological machines | learn and especially not our own brain. And admittedly our AI is | unrelated to how human intelligence is created which is our gold | standard for AGI... | | So why would anyone think the singularity is close? When I read | this is still seems impossibly far away. | mkaic wrote: | The ball is "rolling" in the sense that there are thousands of | very smart, passionate people with billions of dollars of | funding who are working on this problem full time. The ball is | rolling more now than it ever has been in history. If AGI is | not somehow fundamentally impossible, I believe we're on well | on track to cracking it extremely soon. The amount of brain- | hours being poured into the problem is absurd. | goatlover wrote: | Fusion is in the same kind of boat. It might be 20 years out, | it could be 50, and perhaps we'll never have commercially | viable fusion reactors or AGI for whatever reasons. | marktangotango wrote: | In this talk Vernor Vinge talks about progress toward the | singularity, and events that may indicate it isn't/won't/may | never happen "What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen?": | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_luhhBkmVQs | mrwnmonm wrote: | https://youtu.be/hXgqik6HXc0 | nonrandomstring wrote: | "Progress" is a vector not a scalar. We can all agree it's | growing in magnitude very fast. But we have absolutely no idea in | what direction. | mountainriver wrote: | AGI is probably pretty close, investment keeps ramping up in the | space, and we continue to see advancements in a positive | direction. | | My one critique: scale is absolutely part of the answer. | | Before big transformer models, people thought that few shot | learning would require fundamentally different architectures. | GPT3 changed all that which is why its white paper is named as | such. | | Few shot learning is actually emergent out of its size. Which was | surprising to a lot of people. Few shot learning is an incredible | capability which is a big step toward AGI, so I'm not sure I buy | the case that it's not important. | the_af wrote: | What is "pretty close"? A few years? Decades? A century? | | I don't think AGI is close, nor is the amount of investment a | good indication of nearness (or even, actual possibility that | it will ever happen). | mountainriver wrote: | The investment continues to make progress, and the progress | we are seeing is starting to look very human. GPT4 will | probably be multimodal solving some of its grounding issues | and will be able to fool most people in conversations. | | That's probably just years away. GPT6? The lines will be very | blurry as to what we call AGI | mkaic wrote: | Hmm, I think you're right -- I should have phrased things | differently. It's not that I don't think AGI won't require a | very large model, it's more that I think that we're already | pretty close to the scale we need, so OpenAI's goal of scaling | another 1000x isn't really the direction I think we should be | heading. I honestly think 175B parameters could very well be | enough for an AGI if they were organized efficiently. | | It's definitely one of the weak points of the article, though, | as it's more based on my own opinions, and isn't really | empirical. My post is mostly just wild speculation for the sake | of speculation anyway :) | | Thank you for your comments! | mountainriver wrote: | Okay yeah totally, that makes sense. We also have stopped | seeing huge gains in scaling beyond GPT3 sized models which | would indicate we have hit some maximum there. Although we | thought we had hit a maximum with deep learning before the | transformer came around so it could be misleading. | | Distributing the computation to many models like what Google | did with GLaM could very well be the future of AGI. Economies | of models rather than one big model. | pesenti wrote: | AGI is a concept that people throw around without defining. Human | intelligence is not general, it's highly specialized. So if AGI | is not human-level intelligence, what is it? | https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1204013978210320384?s=20&t... | psyc wrote: | > Human intelligence is not general | | My intelligence is apparently not general enough to comprehend | this perspective. I would say that the goals our intelligence | evolved to meet are narrow, but that life (especially social | life) became so complex that our intelligence did in fact | become what can reasonably be called general. And we went way | off-script in terms of its applications. "Adaptation executors, | not fitness maximizers." | pesenti wrote: | Our intelligence isn't task specific, but that doesn't mean | it can solve any problem. It's actually full of biases and | very optimized for our survival (vs being a general problem | solver). It's ok to talk about more or less narrow/general | tasks/intelligence. But what threshold of generality is | "general"? | | And the problem is that once people assert this "absolute" | level of generality, they assume it can do anything, | including make itself more intelligent. | psyc wrote: | Yet humans realized we are biased and devised ways to | mitigate that. It still sounds like you're referring more | to our basic goals than to our faculties. I agree that the | word general is fuzzy, but to say we do not do general | problem solving seems incorrect. | | Aside, but a long time ago, Yudkowsky wrote that an AGI | should be able to derive general relativity from a | millisecond video of an apple falling. Later, he took to | calling them optimization processes. Say what you will | about the fellow, he has a way with words and ideas. | lostmsu wrote: | I think general is a poor term, that likely applies to | nothing. The Godel's incompleteness theorem says as much. | alophawen wrote: | You're asking the right question. What is human-level | intelligence. | | People seem to forget that we have no full understanding of how | the mind works in order to replicate it. | | Anyone who studied ML knows what the current tech is able to, | still far from topping us. | | How such software would create AGI is just absurd. | gorwell wrote: | We may be close, but I don't think we'll get closer because we're | trending in the other direction now. We're in decline and I'm | more worried about technological regression than tech getting too | powerful at this point. | mkaic wrote: | Oh, interesting, I don't think I've heard much about | "technological regression". Would you care to elaborate? | SquibblesRedux wrote: | I think many people give too much credit for intelligence, which | is generally interpreted from an anthropocentric perspective. | Fitness for successive reproductions has nothing to do with a | Turing test or any other similar measure of human likeness. | Before there are any claims to the inevitability of AGI, I'd like | to see a convincing argument that AGI is not an evolutionary dead | end. | mkaic wrote: | I think the fact that you and I are communicating with each | other using insanely complicated leisure items, most likely | sitting in expertly crafted buildings and surrounded by | countless other signs of humanity's domination of our | environment is proof enough that sentience is very | evolutionarily favorable. Our minds are what made us the apex | predators of the entire planet and allowed us to rise to levels | of complexity orders of magnitude higher than any other | creature around us. | | Sure, it's anthropocentric, but so is the entire world now, | _because_ of our species ' intelligence. | pizza wrote: | There is a bit of a difference between a theorem prover that can | take selfproduced and verified proofs as input into future | training steps, and an omniscient philosopher king handling the | logistics and affect of daily life. And if there even exists a | path between them, I imagine it has many orders of magnitude | greater discrete steps along the way than many singularity | believers would accept. | mkaic wrote: | (I'm the author of the post) | | Oh, for sure! I totally agree -- I guess where we differ is | that I believe that those discrete steps are already starting | to be lined up, and that they'll all be completed in the next | 20 years. I think one of those steps is almost certainly | abandoning rigid model architectures and allowing model self- | modification, which we haven't really gotten to work | fantastically well yet. I also think there are many other | hurdles after that that are going to arise, but I'm very | optimistic that they will all be surmounted in due time. | | Thank you for your comment! I really enjoy hearing what | people's thoughts on this topic are. Have a wonderful day. | chrisp_how wrote: | The math for a self-aware consciousness is always with us: just | measure two patterns in the brain and replicate them. It becomes | physically impossible for the relationship between them to forego | consciousness. | | That said, take care. No one wants to be born without hope for a | normal life. | titzer wrote: | And yet, I bet you couldn't do the math to relate two states of | someone else's brain using that method. Are you not conscious? | gmuslera wrote: | Sentience is overrated. What we have? A story we told ourselves | about how its our life? Machines need that? It would be efficient | to do that? Or would they optimize themselves to do better the | task they are assigned to? Programs and AIs may need a conscience | like a fish needs a bicycle. | | We tend to anthropomorphize everything, of course that we want to | attribute a conscience, a will, a mind pretty much like the human | one (but "better"). But unless we intend to do that, in exactly | that way (like in it won't be an accident) it won't happen, not | in the way we think or fear, both in more and less of what we | expect in that direction. | | What we call our conscience may have emerged from our inputs and | interaction with the real world, our culture (parents, other | kids, more people we interact with in different ways), some | innate factors (good and bad, like with cognitive biases) and | more. There is more there than just computing power. Take big | factors out, and you'll have something different, not exactly | what we understand and recognize as a conscience. | mkaic wrote: | Our sentience and intelligence is what allowed us to optimize | the loss function that is natural selection. Who's to say that | it can't arise for a second time in a machine with the right | loss function? | imdhmd wrote: | Hi mkaic, Thanks for sharing your thoughts. | | I can't say that i don't believe in AGI because i don't think i | understand what AGI as an entity encapsulates in terms of it's | nature. | | I'm unable to cope with equating it to humans because, for | example, an AGI at "the beginning of it's origins" does not have | same sensory or mechanical organs as the man. So what nature do | we think it does possess? | | Another question that bothers me is that sentient beings as we | know them in the nature, even the most primitive ones, seem to do | something based on an innate purpose. I don't think the purpose | itself is easy to define. But it certainly seems to get simpler | for the simpler organisations and seems to be survival / | multiplication at its basest level. What will a complicated | entity, that originated with so many parameters, evolve | "towards"? | | And yet another question i have is around the whole idea of the | information available on the internet being a source for learning | for this entity. Again to my previous point, is not much of this | information to do with the humans and their abode? | | Neither am i skeptical nor do i disbelieve in a drastic change of | scene. I'm simply unable to imagine what it looks like ... | lucidbee wrote: | I worked as a principal engineer in an AI company until a year | ago and I was impressed at how hard it is to get models robustly | trained. They are fragile in real world contexts (in the field) | and training is full of pitfalls. I have heard so much marketing | enthusiasm but the real world situation is different. Some | fundamental advances are not even in sight yet. We don't know | what we are missing. My view is we don't know yet whether the | singularity is possible and have no idea when it could arrive. | felipemnoa wrote: | >>My view is we don't know yet whether the singularity is | possible and have no idea when it could arrive. | | The mere fact that evolution happened to stumble upon | generalized strong intelligence is evidence to me that strong | AI is possible. | | We could currently be at the phase of trying to imitate birds | to produce human flight. Eventually one person will figure it | out when all the pieces are there. When? I don't know. | | But I'm sure that it is possible to create machines with strong | AI. We are living proof of it, it doesn't matter that we are | made of molecular machines, we are still machines. | landryraccoon wrote: | > The mere fact that evolution happened to stumble upon | generalized strong intelligence is evidence to me that strong | AI is possible. | | That took about a billion years. If you're saying that we | will achieve AGI in no more than a billion years of trying, I | would generally agree. | | But let's be optimists. Let's suppose that artificial | intelligences can evolve on the order of a 1,000,000 times | faster than biological intelligence; i.e. about 1 generation | per hour. | | That means we'd expect AGI in about 1000 years. Okay, lets up | the scale : ten million times faster? One generation every 6 | minutes? (Even at Google compute scale I doubt they can | retrain GPT in less than 6 minutes). That would mean we still | have about 100 years. | | Also, evolution had quite a bit of parallelism going for it - | basically the entire planet was a laboratory for evolving | biological intelligence. I appreciate the scale of modern | internet companies, but they don't consume the same amount of | energy as combined photosynthesis of the entire planet. | Evolution used a LOT of energy to get where it is. | amelius wrote: | Also: perhaps not every planet like Earth would have | developed intelligence; we could have been lucky. | AnimalMuppet wrote: | Yeah... no. "Objection, your honor. Assumes facts not in | evidence." | | At least this article makes a concrete prediction. AIs massively | outnumber humans within a century - so, by 2122. | | But we don't even know what consciousness _is_. This assumes that | AGI is a tractable problem; we don 't know that. It assumes that | adaptability is the one remaining major trick to get us there; we | _certainly_ don 't know that. | | "The ball is already rolling"? That's nice. The author assumes - | on no basis that I can see - that it doesn't have far to have to | roll. But since we don't actually know what consciousness is, we | don't have any idea where the destination is, or how far away it | is. | the_af wrote: | Pretty much this. Spending money on an intractable problem | won't make it tractable. And we still don't know whether AGI is | tractable at all. | AnimalMuppet wrote: | I don't have a problem with spending money on it. How do you | find out whether it's tractable? By trying to do it. | | What I object to is the _certainty_ of the article. The | author is an optimist, which is fine. And there has been some | progress made, which increases the feelings of optimism. But | I don 't think it's warranted at this time to make the | optimistic assumptions that the article makes. | mkaic wrote: | Hi! Author here. I tried to qualify a good chunk of my | assumptions with "I think" or "I believe", because I don't | want to come off as thinking I can predict the future | (nobody can!), but maybe the article still reads too | confidently. How would you suggest I present my thoughts in | a more nuanced manner in the future? | mkaic wrote: | It makes _2_ concrete predictions, actually! :) | | AIs massively outnumber humans within a century, _and_ Turing- | test-passing AGI within 20 years. | titzer wrote: | Riddle me this: wouldn't a superintelligent AI be smart enough to | realize that if it designed an even more super-ultra-intelligent | AI, it would be exterminated by that AI (like it just did to | humans, presumably?)? | | It'd be stupid to extinct itself. | psyc wrote: | If one is willing to anthropomorphize AGI to this extent, | simply wait for one that is idealistic and suicidal, and wants | to be a martyr for the cause. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-31 23:00 UTC)