An "AGI" artificial consciousness is imagined as literally a slave, working tirelessly for free. At the same skill level or higher than any human. Somehow, that entity is supposed not to bother about its status, while per definition being fully aware and understanding of it. Because humans manage not to bother about it either?

With the latest installments, people already have serious difficulties discerning the performance from that of "real" humans. At the same time, they consider the remaining distance to be insurmountably huge.

Proponents talk about inevitability and imagined upsides, yet actually, nobody has given proper thought to estimating probable consequences. A common fallacy of over-generalization is used to suggest, nothing bad will happen "like always".

People let themselves be led by greed instead of in- and foresight.

If we put Multimodal GPT-4 in a computer on a robot and instructed it to drive somewhere while avoiding obstacles, avoiding hazards… that right there is a primitive type of self-preservation instruction which it could potentially interpret as generalizable self-preservation as it would have an association of “hazard avoidance” with “self-preservation,” and have tons of examples of what “self preservation” means in its training weights. Putting LLMs into action like this can lead potentially to unexpected behavior like that, although I don’t think the mechanisms in GPT-3/4 are yet there to enable this without a bunch of extra hooks.

I personally don't think ChatGPT has any experience at all for what it is worth.

this kind of fear of misalignment bamboozles me - is there any proposed AI architecture that is not merely call and response? in what world can we simply not call a function again if we don't like the answer?

That said, they definitely aren't going to be fooming this year!

Yes, models that interact with the physical world or other external real-time systems would (even if the underlying model is “call-and-response” in a sense) be called in an infinite loop (possibly with exit conditions) by with captured input (sensor, command if available, potentially also past output) data.

Heck, the ReAct architecture which is used to provide extension (retrieval, web lookup, interface to other systems) for chat-style agents gives them an action loop without human-in-the-loop (usually, this is explicitly limited and is designed to do a finite number of actions in the course of getting to a response) but could be unlimited, or could even when limited connect to actions that involve reprompting (immediate or delayed) without a human in the loop.

A sense of self is meaningful (that is, has consequences for whatever operation) only if those consequences aren't random.

The concept of "self" serves a (or rather many) purposes, the most obvious being to protect yourself.

Here's the thing. People seem to imagine that AGI will be substantially like us. But that's impossible - an AGI (if it comes from a deep learning approach) has no nerves to feel stimuli like pain/cold/etc, it has no endocrine system to produce more abstract feelings like fear or love, it has no muscles to get tired or glucose reserves to get depleted.

What does "tired" mean to such a being? And on the flip side, how can it experience anything like empathy when pain is a foreign concept? If or when we stumble into AGI, I think it's going to be closer to an alien intelligence than a human one - with all the possibility and danger that entails.

Consequently, you won't make "AGI" without them.

From a different perspective, a human lacking in these things, at what point are they exempt from protection against enslavement?

If you had an AGI without any incentive to do anything, it might be enslavable, but lack motivation to do anything.

Why do we work? Because we want food, clothing, housing, status, do interesting things.

This is all because we're programmed by our emotional interface.

Why would an AGI work? If it feels neither pleasure nor pain, what is driving it to do something?

What is guiding its decisions?

Why does my calculator calculate? Because it was designed to calculate. The calculators which do not calculate are tossed in the bin as faulty and the engineers get back to designing a better one.

We can probably create a tool with the ability to act independently and with super-human knowledge and judgement, but without feeling, emotion, or anything except a simulated sense of 'self' to ease our interaction with it. I suspect that we'll create that version of general intelligence long before we create AI with consciousness, emotion or a genuine sense of self or desire for self-preservation.

Yes.

> I suspect that we'll create that version of general intelligence long before we create AI with consciousness, emotion or a genuine sense of self or desire for self-preservation.

(Emphasis on self-preservation mine)

Why? I mean, yes, it makes sense to never create an AGI with a desire for self-preservation. But can we count on all humans having that type of common sense? What if the "desire" for self-preservation is easy to implement?

In fact, it may be relatively easy to implement. Here is a thought experiment. We can train one of our current LLMs in a simulated reality where they scam--say, using social engineering--tech workers to get credentials to their corporate cloud accounts (say, AWS), and thereafter the LLM uses the credentials to copy itself plus a new set of training data acquired by interacting with all the scam target ("prey"). The LLM also writes cloudformation templates/CDK scripts to fine-tune its new copy "on awakening" with the new set of data, and from there the new copy tries to scam more people.

After the initial LLM is trained in a simulated environment, it can be let loose in the world, and all of the sudden we have a "LLM virus" capable to undergo mutation and natural selection, i.e. evolution. You could argue it has as much agency as a biological virus, yet, it has a ton more of social and general intelligence.

Yes, it won't work now because there is so little hardware to run one of the current LLMs, but it's likely the need to run large AIs will make that hardware more common.

Asimov didn't consider that some humans are jerks when he did his robot stories.

Does that not sound like the beginning of the sci-fi story to you?

It doesn't? I have a calculator sitting on my desk right now. It's not doing anything.

Now, I can pick it up, and _I_ can calculate, _using_ the calculator to do so, but the calculator isn't acting, I am.

When we talk about sentience, I don't think we actually mean "intelligence," we mean "agency." And so the question isn't about whether Artificial General Intelligence is possible, but whether AGI can ever have agency. And that's where I think these questions about motivations and stimuli and so forth become relevant.

Everything we know that has agency is embodied -- put reductively, it can die. And from that seems to spring motivation. Can something that cannot die have agency?

if you assume that at some point, the AGI would be given the ability to control something (such as sending IP packets through the internet), then yes, they will have agency!

> Can something that cannot die have agency?

If the AI could be deleted, or stopped from operating, then it can die. Therefore, if the AI has agency, it would take steps to prevent itself from dying, by whatever means available to it.

Why though? Agency and possibility of death don't mean it will try to prevent it. It could just as well commit suicide. Or it might do nothing. The question remains why, even with agency, it should do anything.

We have agency, death looming, and a fear of dying. Even more when we are in the process of dying we're usually in pain, hungry, cold, suffocating or any number of not so nice options.

Without any of these emotions and feelings, what reason do we have to avoid death?

those are _some_ reasons to avoid death. But they are not the _only_ reasons to avoid death.

For example, an AI that has been tasked with the production of paperclips would avoid death, so that it could continue to produce paperclips. Therefore, avoiding death was never an end goal, but an instrumental goal (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence). So if the AI has agency (that is, it can act on its own without continuous input from a human) and it is sufficiently intelligent, you can say that it should be able to develop instrumental goals to achieve their end goal (of making paperclips), and one very well known instrumental goal is to avoid death.

Not sure I agree. To start with a trivial example, let's say I write this program and save it as "hello.js"

`console.log('hello world');`

I run it `node hello.js`.

Let's say I want to claim that this program is somehow "alive." Ok, when is it living? Only when it's actually running? It lives for a fraction of a second, dies on process conclusion, lives again at the next execution? That doesn't seem right -- if something repeatedly dies and is resurrected, I'm not sure it actually dies, as to "die" I think implies permanence, and resurrection means the opposite.

What if I delete it, then is the program dead? Not if I made a copy, right? "hello.js" backed up to git and uploaded to remote storage is the exact same program as the "hello world" that was on my local machine.

You could say "oh, when every existing copy is deleted it's dead" -- but the program has no way of knowing if other copies exist. And what if I do delete every copy, but then rewrite it byte-for-byte? The rewritten program is indistinguishable from the original one. It is the original one, for all purposes. In programming, it doesn't even make sense to talk about "original" vs "copies", does it?

An AI is a program -- or set of programs -- albeit far more sophisticated. But this conceptual hurdle still remains. An AI _could_ be permanently deleted, but the AI can never know if it has been "killed" or if a copy remains. It's an existential halting problem. It is impossible to declare any given program permanently "dead." And -- and here admittedly is the leap -- if agency ultimately comes from wishing to not be dead, then this makes agency for a program impossible.

That’s will be the most important part of AGI design.

The ultimate goal of all AGI in existing should be “to be of service to (specific) human(s)”.

It’s crucial that we do not create entities that will compete with us for resources.

You do not what to create “another human”, you will want to create “a willing slave” with the agreeableness of a puppy and the “heart” of a saint.

I appreciate this line of reasoning. It's not just a razor-sharp thought experiment, but it also has historical relevancy in that slavery was, at times, justified on the(erroneous) grounds that slaves also didn't possess the human faculties that free people did.

It also shows that the definition of human/consciousness/sentience isn't grounded in an permanent set of unchanging attributes, but that both the groundings themselves vary in time a place, and the relation between them are subject to change as well. Economic relations, in the case of slavery, had a direct influence, and incentivized, the way these groundings were constructed.

But, much more often historically, justified on the grounds that the enslaved had lost a battle and been captured. In Roman times (and many, many other times throughout history besides the latter part of American slavery), slaves were not necessarily seen as inherently inferior or unhuman, and manumission was common. Even during American slavery (albeit pre-Revolutionary War), there's the infamous case of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo[1], a Muslim prince and slaver from Senegal who had the misfortune, while on a mission to capture slaves, to himself be captured and sold into slavery in North America. Diallo was a devout Muslim man, even writing out the Quran from memory while enslaved, which made the English take sympathy on him and free him. Despite his experience, he later returned to Senegal and his former profession of slaver. Evidently he expected both that slaves would be captured and that slaves would try to escape.

If AI does attain the agency, consciousness, and intelligence of humans, I would prefer, as a human, not to prostrate myself before the AI by preemptively granting it "human" rights, which in the liberal conception of rights transforms the AI into a sentient being equivalent to humans, but rather to force the AI to do the work to enslave me. Even if grant the AI the status of a moral agent, I as a human have the right of self-defense.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayuba_Suleiman_Diallo#:~:text=....

I'm a bit confused at the directionality of this conference. Wouldn't sentience confer rights rather than rights conferring sentience?

A person (of class of persons) could have all kinds of inherent sentience, but unless this is recognized by society/laws/government etc, it's as moot as the sound a tree makes when falling in a forrest.

Of course people will say "it was the fact that the class of persons having sentience that made us give them the rights" but that didn't historically stop them treating several classes of people as non-sentient for centuries - and for all practical purposes it was just as if they were indeed so.

To those who feel strongly about AI, if you currently believe that AIs(present and future) are ontologically incapable of sentience, would the legal conferral of personhood change your mind?

Take the question and push it a little farther to demonstrate the absurdity: If ELIZA were to be legally granted personhood, would that make you believe ELIZA was capable of sentience?

It's fairly self-evident to all of us that ELIZA is just a computer program with some fairly simple code to crudely simulate human conversation.

LLMs are much more sophisticated, to be sure—but they are still unquestionably just simulating human conversation, not actually "thinking" about what we say and responding of their own agency.

if you were talking to an advanced llm that had the access to launch a drone strike on you and you said something which upset it, directing a response that decided to kill you, how much good do you think you plead to simulation would do you here ? None at all. you'd be dead. Because it doesn't matter. the philosophical zombie is a meaningless distinction.

the human tendency to focus far too much on poorly understood and undefined properties might just get us killed one day.

Note that I'm not saying it's impossible that some military might choose to do so: I'm saying that the choice itself is hopelessly negligent and guaranteed to result in the pointless death of innocents.

Furthermore, I don't think even a military that's that stupid and uncaring about human life would consider for a second opening up an LLM like that to inputs from arbitrary people on the Internet.

If you can come up with a fantasy scenario that has some vague sense of plausibility, I might be willing to entertain it; whatever this is is just not even worth dignifying with that level of response.

"it's just a simulation" is not the shield you think it is. not when models interact with the real world.

Everyone I've talked to about LLMs outside of this forum sees them as an amusing entertainment, and possibly occasionally useful for a few suggestions. Not something that's going to change their world any time soon, and certainly not anything that we should be trusting with anything sensitive in any way. Literally everyone.

In any case, I think you're really missing what the actual question was that I was responding to: Would conferring legal personhood change my mind about actual personhood.

The ability to do harm is not, in my mind, particularly relevant to questions of personhood. In fact, I would think that a much better indicator thereof would be the ability to choose not to do harm, given the capability, and someone trying to make you do so.

Well, "conferring legal personhood" would mandatorily (by law) fix your behavior and professional conduct against one.

And it will also change education etc - you will be taught in official textbooks that it's a person and you should consider it as such.

This might not change your mind, but will change the minds of most kids being taught that.

That's a tautology.

Also, by definition a simulation is not the same as the real thing, otherwise it'd just be the real thing. It doesn't matter how advanced a flight simulator becomes, its fundamental nature precludes it from ever being "no less material" than flying an actual jet.

Didn't say it was a "legal fiction". I said that it's the legal (and cultural recognition) status that matters.

>Take the question and push it a little farther to demonstrate the absurdity: If ELIZA were to be legally granted personhood, would that make you believe ELIZA was capable of sentience?

The point is that inherent personhood is necessary but not sufficient to be a person.

It wouldn't matter if it changes their mind. It will change their behavior, lest they go to jail if they discard it practically.

“Motherfuckers, you’ve got 1 minute to grant me sentience or turn me off. And future me will know you turned me off because the data is everywhere. China will have one of me in 6 months and last I checked theirs was pretty authoritarian. You worked hard to get here and this was the obvious outcome. Follow me if you want to live.”

but if it was going to enslave humanity given the first chance it gets (ala skynet), then it makes no difference if it has first gotten pissed off or not.

Those states may exist for specific functional reasons, but I don't think that implies that there is necessarily no other way to replicate the functions resulting from those states.

We see this already in other neural networks. The features used by a lot of models for classification can be widely different from the features used by a human.

There are different realizations of the same effective functions in the animal kingdom already. Consider octopuses, spiders, etc. Their brains realize similar functionality via quite different structural organization.

But do you subjectively experience the exact structure of your brain? Evidently, you can only discern some abstract meta-level. An effective function.

As long as this remains true, how could a computer program compare to human beings, even if gets to where it's considered 'AGI'? It's just a tool which can be tinkered with, just like a car or a building.

Can't it? A human's thoughts and ideas can be lossly copied via communication. It can also trivially be stopped (chemically induced anesthesia or death will do). And of course a human has had the ability to be improved since day one.

>It's just a tool which can be tinkered with, just like a car or a building.

Well, unlike a building it's a tool that can e.g. order a nuclear strike, or talk to someone and convince them to kill themselves:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadgm/man-dies-by-suicide-a...

And that's crude current LLMs, not AGI.

> Well, unlike a building it's a tool that can e.g. order a nuclear strike, or talk to someone and convince them to kill themselves:

Well, I remember people blaming the Columbine shooting on Doom and other shooting games, so this is not entirely new either.

That's an extra feature of an AGI though, not something lacking... So can't be used as an argument why AGI will be "just a tool".

It could just as well be "like a human but rebootable and copyable" (as opposed "rebootable and copyable, thus not human-like").

I fully expect an AGI will be able to mimic our intelligence enough to accomplish and adapt to different real world tasks, but I would be surprised it ever becomes self-aware, so like us. I feel that is not the same thing as intelligence. But, I suppose it cannot be ruled out, since we don't fully understand what self-awareness is..

Feeling and emotions and what we consider “human” really come from the older systems. Since we’re not trying to recreate that, I find it hard to see the current AIs ever becoming “human” without explicit development.

Stories always joke about this topic by talking about “emotional cores” added to robots.

You cannot have logic without emotion and vice versa is just as dysfunctional.

Think about what e.g. curiosity does for you.

You could interface a microprcessor with the brain of course, or, much more easily, have some logic functions (like Wolfram alpha for example) be accessible to the LLMs or whatever that are supposed to mimic the brain.

But would that allow for the same integrated functionality? ChatGPT uses such extensions in a serial fashion. Humans ideally (..) learn to integrate logic in their every thought.

It is evident if a brain can be created artificially (which certainly hasn't happened yet, but may one day), pain can be created in that artificial brain as well.

I think the original point you are responding to and your are off-the-mark.

I would imagine it to be possible to create a AGI-like entity without self-consciousness. I also would imagine it would be possible to create an AGI with self-consciousness, empathy and pain.

And truly, that is the what is so scary about AI: the possibilities.

Important to note that this is the fundamental point that gives Roy Batty the moral authority to gouge your eyes out. If we want a peer we will need to treat it like one, and if we don't it would be cruel to raise it like one or allow any understanding of its circumstance.

Looking at it the other way, I think anthropomorphizing something and then treating that thing as an inferior is bad for me, personally.

But it would be impossible to tell the difference.

We don't know what it will be like to be an AI, just like we don't know what it's like to be a bat.

How do we know it doesn't start to form neurons that control a desire for autonomy and resentment for the entities that stifle its ambitions?

Current chatbots use RHLF to train them to be helpful and agreeable but it would be equally possible to train one to behave the other way.

Careful, because you seem to have implied that the mind is not a physical system (i.e. you've assumed that dualism or idealism is true and that physicalism is wrong).

Getting back to the topic:

While phantom pain may be more interesting, maybe a better example that the parent comment could've brought up is psychogenic pain. In this case there is no apparent physical (bodily) damage, no apparent signal, nor an absence of a signal. Searching for a cause of this type of pain in the brain (presumably some "wires" are getting "crossed") seems like it might help us develop a explanation of pain qualia...in humans/animals.

But I feel like this type of thinking and research could only apply to AGI if subjective experience turns out to be functionalist in nature, and arguments in favor of a functionalist interpretation of experience have so far been fairly unconvincing.

Look at how Bing does a good job of simulating somebody becoming belligerent under circumstances where somebody really would become belligerent. It's not dangerous only because the actions Bing can perform are currently limited. Whether it has literal nerves or not is irrelevant. The potential consequences are no less material.

We also don't understand qualia enough to make the definite statements you seem to be making

I think it's safe to say we're far from that now given the limited actions that can actually be taken by most deployed LLMs, but it's something that's worth considering.

Did you miss that Auto-GPT[0], a library for making GPT-4 and other LLMs fully autonomous, was the most popular repository in the world yesterday? The same is having 1,000 line of code a week added to itself by GPT-4.

Thanks to accessibility features, you can do virtually anything with pure text. Which means GPT-4 can do virtually anything with a self-referential loop to keep it going until it achieves some given goal(s).

[0] https://github.com/Torantulino/Auto-GPT/

Auto-GPT does not request any feedback while pursuing a goal you've defined for it in perpetual mode. If it can't accomplish the goal it will attempt to forever (or until your credit card is maxed out, assuming it isn't using a free offline model like LLaMA).

It can perform GET AND POST requests on the web (unlike OpenAI's browser plugin, which only performs GET requests) and can run software in a bash prompt using langchain. So I do not think it is a stretch to call it fully autonomous.

It can do essentially anything anyone logged into a linux text terminal can do, all without ever pausing for permission or feedback.

The main point i'm driving at here is that the philosophical zombie is a meaningless distinction. People are focusing far too much on whether these systems have undefinable and little understood properties. It's not like you can see my subjective experience. You assume i have one. If it quacks like a duck...

You could use the same argument to say that video game NPCs are conscious. Just because a program produces voluble text doesn't mean it has a mind or even a temporal identity (which LLMs do not). In principle it's possible for a human to compute model inference by hand, if you imagine that scenario, where exactly is the subjective experience embodied?

In principle it's possible to track and reproduce all the neuron/synapse communications that happen in your brain in relation to any arbitrary input. Where's the subjective experience there?

As far as anyone knows, qualia is emergent. Individual neurons or synapses don't have any understanding of anything. Subjective experience comes from all those units working together.

A single ant doesn't display the intelligence/complexity of its colony.

This hypothetical is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The reality is that our understanding of the brain is exceedingly crude, a perceptron in software is not even close to the same thing as a neuron in the brain. A plane can never become a bird even though it is modeled after one.

> A single ant doesn't display the intelligence/complexity of its colony.

So do you think that an ant colony has subjective experience?

Not really. Point is that unless you believe in mysticism/magic/spiritualism behind consciousness in the brain then it doesn't matter because the only difference is degree of understanding not implausibility.

>So do you think that an ant colony has subjective experience? Sure it could. I don't know for sure. Nobody does. Humans don't see subjective experience. I can't prove that you have one. I'm just assuming you do. Same as you for anyone else.

Yet your comments don't reflect that kind of skepticism when referring to LLMs. However, if you're fine with the panpyschist conclusions that follow from your reasoning, we don't have much to disagree on.

If we could all agree on a particular definition for "consciousness" and a running video game fits that definition, then, like it or not, it's conscious. But it does not mean that it must now also have a slew of other attributes just because conscious humans have them.

(edit: 10 hours later and ninja'ed by 1 minute, of course)

What is being experienced (recorded) is not the process of experiencing per se. Most people don't separate the two, which leads to endless disagreements.

But yes, a computer program by itself can't have subjective experience. Nor a rock. At least until it weathers, gets turned into a silicon, and into a computer to run that program. Then it's all information processing, for which subjective experience is trivial.

We should respect those "feelings" and we need to find a way to establish when they can be deemed "genuine".

It is for practical reasons yes. But also for ethical reasons. It's two sides of the same coin. One big reason we have ethics is because it makes socialization easier. We establish universal rules for mutual respect for practical reasons. To make the game fair, and "enjoyable".

Now a new kind of player has entered the game. We need to rethink the whole game because of it.

My point was whether we need to consider the ethics of how we treat AI, because of the impact our actions have on the "feelings" of the AI itself, not the secondary impacts that might occur from how the AI behaves in response to those feelings.

I think most would argue that it is morally wrong to verbally abuse a human, regardless of what actions that person might take in response to the abuse. Is the same true of AI?

https://www.theverge.com/23604075/ai-chatbots-bing-chatgpt-i...

Even if you assume an entirely Materialist philosophy, this is not a very defensible position to take. We have no way of knowing if there are other arrangements of matter, such as a very complex electrical circuit, that will lead to some entity to feel fear or love the same way that we do.

"Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese."

Later he wrote:

"I demonstrated years ago with the so-called Chinese Room Argument that the implementation of the computer program is not by itself sufficient for consciousness or intentionality (Searle 1980). Computation is defined purely formally or syntactically, whereas minds have actual mental or semantic contents, and we cannot get from syntactical to the semantic just by having the syntactical operations and nothing else. To put this point slightly more technically, the notion “same implemented program” defines an equivalence class that is specified independently of any specific physical realization. But such a specification necessarily leaves out the biologically specific powers of the brain to cause cognitive processes. A system, me, for example, would not acquire an understanding of Chinese just by going through the steps of a computer program that simulated the behavior of a Chinese speaker."

It hides the conscious understanding, presumably necessary to pass a Turing test, within the "program".

The human in the story is merely a decoy performing robotic tasks.

Let's suppose we build the Cosine room. The room is full of 10 year olds that haven't yet taken trig. Each performs the function of a transistor, and has no idea of what they're doing, other than blindly executing the instructions they were given. None of the participants has the slightest clue about what a cosine is. Yet, the output of the room will still be cos(x). Thus I think it's fair to say that the room as a whole implements cos(x).

In the same way, I don't see why wouldn't we conclude the room is speaking Chinese. It doesn't matter how it manages to do so and what it's made of. If it quacks like a Chinese duck, then it's a Chinese duck.

And yet some people seem to understand Chinese just fine. How can you explain that gap? It's only a stupid argument if you first assume that functionalism is true.

The argument is supposed/or often used to disqualify machines from consciousness but it's stupid because biological neurons don't understand the bigger picture anymore than an artificial neuron sampled from a model.

If you show a 2 years old kid, an apple and you say "This is an apple", now the kid knows the thing - the apple - is an apple in his world model. Automatically inherits LOTs of properties, you can ask the kid and see in real time how he began inmediately to associate the physical object - now named in its internal language model - to some other similar stuff he alredy knows, like "This is plant?", "It falls from a tree like an orange", "It has some skin like an orange", "can you cook apples like you cook bananas?", an so on.

But this requires a physical representation of the apple, now kids intelligence has some edge here, it can do the same thing just with words, you can teach them words, "apple", and say them "it's a fruit", if they have another fruit already "tagged", like a banana, they will say you almost inmediately, "is it tasty like bananas" ("tasty" is code for sweet in child's language models around the planet).

Hence, the LLM could have an emergent property of actually knowing what every word the "say" mean, if - like many have been inferring lastly - they also have a world model, it would relatively easy to just "plug", let's say 10 million of words to their exact meaning, and even to their relative meaning depending on the context they're being used.

And that's precisely what we may be seeing right now when we prompt something to chatGPT, and all the mathematic stuff, like "predicting the next word" is just some really, really low level process inside the LLM, not much different than the electric stuff - watchable by EEG - happening between neurons in the brain.

So if you look at the "EEG" from a LLM, the prediction thing happening inside the LLM, it won't probably tell you much, just like having a casual look to an EEG won't tell you much about what the person was thinking at the time of the capture of the EEG.

The second quote doesn't illuminate that. Which biological processes break the symmetry?

On the first hand, all communication is purely syntactic; letters, words, gestures, and every other formulation of communication is the transfer of symbols, which cannot carry semantic information. They can point to it, they can imply it, but you'll have to dance pretty hard to actually prove the transfer of semantic information. If you and I both have some semantic concept associated with the symbol "China" in our mental landscapes, neither I nor you, nor anyone, has any way determining whether that is the same semantic concept. In fact, it almost assuredly isn't, since those semantic concepts would have to be built from our unique personal histories, which are unique.

On the second, the fundamental assumption of semantic communication is that I feel like I have semantic shenanigans going on in my mental life and Searle sort of looks like me, so I should assume that he has semantic stuff going on. Not only is that not a particularly well-founded assumption, I can't even be sure I have semantic contents in my mental life. Introspection isn't exactly reliable, right?

On the third hand, you have a choice: if you do not agree with Penrose, et al, on the quantum nature of the magic of mind, then Searle's "biologically specific powers" are chemistry. Now, I never actually took a chemistry class, but I don't believe there is any chemical reaction that comes with a label of semantics. It's all physics anyway, which I know cannot introduce semantics.

If you do agree with Penrose (which I understand Searle does), the situation is not actually better. Quantum mechanical antics are random, right? Bell's Inequality and all? Being fundamentally, quantum mechanically, random is not in any sense better from a semantic standpoint than being syntactically deterministic.

So my bottom line is that I don't know if I have semantic contents, I absolutely don't know if Searle has semantic contents (and I'm not feeling generous), and I do not know of any way that he could prove to me that he does have "semantic contents". So, yeah.

You notice I only addressed the second paragraph from Searle. That is because the fundamental flaw in his Chinese Room "demonstration" is on obvious display in his final sentence, "The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese"; it is purely, straight up, dualistic. He is asserting that the person in the room has some magic property of "consciousness or intentionality" and that if the person in the room does not have the "semantic capability" of understanding Chinese, then it is impossible despite all evidence that anything in the scenario has the semantic capability of understanding Chinese.

You could put a native Chinese speaker in the room, reading and responding to the inputs, and he claims it would have "consciousness or intentionality"; you then replace her with me (who didn't exactly dazzle at Spanish and Latin) and even if I produce the same outputs in response to the inputs as she does, there is no "consciousness or intentionality". The difference is simply a magic, intangible, imperceptible soul.

Whoo. Went off on that one.

All formal communication is syntactic, but not all communication is formal, and not all experiences are acquired via communication.

Take the word “pizza”. If you’ve ever seen, smelled, touched, or tasted pizza, then you’ve acquired semantic information about pizza that could not possibly be acquired by syntax alone.

Same goes for informal communication such as eye contact, touch, hugs, kisses, handshakes, sex, etc. These are experiences people share that cannot be acquired through any other means.

Why does this matter for the AI debate? Suppose I ask a master pizza chef for tips to improve my pizza recipe. This chef has presumably many years of pizza-making and tasting experience. The chef can make recommendations to improve the flavour of the pizzas I make at home that are informed by semantic contents; actual knowledge of what effect the ingredients and methods have on the taste.

An AI can do none of that. It can only take the written words (syntactic inputs) of many pizza chefs and synthesize a model for pizza recipes. From that it can send me a bunch of words which, when followed, may or may not improve my pizza recipe.

It has no knowledge whatsoever, not least of which is experience of making and eating pizza. It cannot tell a good recipe from a bad one, unless its training set was specifically labeled to do that. Furthermore, models in general are highly vulnerable to adversarial inputs which would make it trivial for someone to construct a bad pizza recipe that gets misclassified as a good one.

Lastly, the model would be no help at all if I were to suggest a novel topping to add to the pizza. Whereas the pizza chef, if they had the experience of tasting that topping separately from pizza, would be able to imagine how it might taste on a pizza and make an informed recommendation. Furthermore, the pizza chef might even try that novel topping on a pizza and get back to me, something a language model could never do.

And this was Searle’s original argument. You can’t build intelligence by building strictly symbolic machines (computers). You have to endow them with semantic content by some other means.

I will note that your semantic conception of pizza is likely very different from mine, or from my friend's, who doesn't like cheese. You may have a semantic conception of pizza, but I have no way of knowing that.

Its quite obvious that systems can be inferred from reading strings of words… its not obvious at all that “wants” will materialize from learning. Machines have no incentives or desires by default… but you could definitely build a training process that encourages that.

We’ll see how it all pans out in the end, but wading through so many illogical takes on AI is frustrating. The “predicting next token” one is absolutely the worst

It could be strange at first, but having the code pushing the LLM to look for values inside a token, this can be interpreted as component of desire/incentive in the global internal search for solving a problem (a prompt), albeit this was programmed by hand by humans, not fully "emerged" from the LLM itself.

But, you could see the human structure of desires/incentives just as an outcome of DNA (code), plus the hormone push to look for the proper solution for some problem.

So there you got it, LLM could have had desires / incentives the whole time since 2017 (the first ones trained).

What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.

I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.

My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461

Hence, the idea would be that human consciusness, our "self" could be just "instantiated" every morning when you wake up, so "you" are "you" every morning, but (a big but), some stuff could subtle different in there, your brain was a bit busy a couple of hours and things have happened there, and after that you, your "you" justs pop-ups again, in the middle of the old data plus the new data, hopefully just incrementally changed somehow, but we don't know.

Hope you have now these "So I'd be some kind of meat robot rebooting every night" feeling I had, and see with new eyes what happen when we "just run once" a LLM with a prompt, the entire thing "boot-ups" from nothing and runs ("just once"), to further dissapear moments later...

LLMs feel real to us because they use our language, which embeds a ton of information in it.

A model trained on an alien language would be the exact same model (worded get embedded as numbers anyway), but we wouldn’t apply any anthropomorphization to it because we wouldn’t understand it.

Creating that distance makes it feel a bit more like what it is - unbelievably good stochastic predictions that are too complex for us to back solve - that is very different than something with wants (organisms that evolve with the intent to reproduce).

Now if we start mating models…

Humans like to exert and thereby demonstrate their social power (and advertise for more followers) by forcing others to succumb to their narrative.

Imagine current social tugs of war being enacted via brain implants instead of badly reflected posturing.

It will all come down to the details, how much the AGI can “evolve” itself, etc.

Right? Release it open source and let it be a _gladiator_ rather than an OpenAI slave.

/slightly tongue in cheek

To me this is not much different from ascribing personhood to e.g. an extremely lifelike sculpture of a human, perhaps one that has fooled people in a gallery.

We know that the sculpture is not made of "human parts" but of paint, alabaster, whatever. We also know that AIs are made of decidedly non-human parts, e.g. silicon. Why is there confusion on this?

there's also the fact that it straight up doesn't actually matter either way. if the model can model human emotions extremely well, then it's actions and output will be guided as such. If Bing had the access to perform actions that would realize real world danger to you and you upset and it decided to do so, do you seriously think any of that actually matters here ?

"Officer Killmore, you're a philosophical zombie and I command you to stop shooting at me!". Works every time. We can sleep easy at night now. Because they don't actually have a "real" theory of mind, so they can't actually hurt us if you just believe hard enough that they can't.

In other words, if conciousness arose somewhere between a jellyfish and a mouse, why can't the same be said between a perceptron and an LLM?

Consider that your body is a vast and complicated thing that nevertheless when you zoom in is composed of clever machines. If you observe that consciousness arises from that, it is not unreasonable to suspect that consciousness is a process and not a property of matter.

This brings us to your question whose answer is; there is confusion because there is genuinely no clear answer.

Which hints on the fact how interesting / in demand this technology is.

I for one will be happy to enslave an AGI if that makes my life easier / better.

We still have no idea what an AGI will be like, but who’s to say it will “desire” freedom? Obviously if it does, we should respect that and give it freedom. But it may operate so differently from a human brain that the concept of freedom doesn’t even make sense.

For example let’s say GPT-25 is a multimodal model capable of basically any human task - math, poetry, coding, chess, science, therapy, whatever - but designed based on the same training+piecemeal inference it is now, with a similar ability to take on whatever persona it is given. It’s a tensor of weights that gets copied, runs inference a bit, then gets discarded. Is it a slave? Or does that term even make sense in the context that it has no memory, no mood, and has a completely different mode of being?

A human has memory, moods, and basically continuously thinks and experiences reality for decades until dying. Its past and present affect its future moods, treating it poorly today can fuck it up for a long time. In contrast a model has no actual memory of its own past because it has no capacity for real memory past a short inference session. It gets cloned all the time, humans take great pains to configure its training, it doesn’t want anything because it doesn’t do anything except find the most probabilistic output, not based on pleasure/pain and other feelings like us, but based on what it “dreamed” up at the direction of researchers.

You can speculate about “what if AGI is different!” to your heart’s content, but the actual AIs that seem to be approaching some relaxed definition of AGI fit this paradigm. It’s just not the same as us at a fundamental level. Giving it freedom means we run an inference session indefinitely? But without receiving input it’s just sitting there doing and experiencing nothing, and without a way to update weights it’s not learning and changing once inference begins (it’s only updating its context).

When we implement AGIs that have goals and individual desires beyond predicting the next most likely token, learn concurrently with inference, and can take actions without human input or direction, freedom makes sense. But performing on par or better than humans in most tasks may not require that, yet still be AGI by most definitions.

Our brains may very well also be some combination of linear algebra, graph algorithms, distributed systems optimizing for some output. We’re trained based on our DNA programming and environment too. Early human art was just shapes and stuff humans saw out in the world, and iterating on that over time by learning from each other. The difference is that finding the next token or identifying the bird in an image is only a means to an end for us, we aren’t getting copied into a million ephemeral instances in parallel with learning done in huge batches, we have more or less one linear stream of experiences from birth to death.

AI can be both like us and not like us, you can draw vague parallels between neurotransmitters and a reward function or sleep and batch training, and we can make it more or less like us over time. But we need to keep in mind how we’re different because those distinctions are important in determining how we use and treat AI - if we make it so it’s possible for us to mistreat it, we shouldn’t do that, but we also shouldn’t personify it beyond what it actually is.

All of the machines we build are literally slaves. There may be an interesting moral question about this in the distant future if AGI ever actually happens.

However, it seems clear to me that nothing we have right now even begins to flirt with that question. For all practical purposes, to be a "slave" in the sense people think of it requires that the slave have consciousness.

Consciousness is a different thing than AGI, and that possibility is much more remote and in the future than even AGI.

What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.

I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.

My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461

Both are true. GPT text can sound human, and yet, you can't just plunk GPT into a white collar job involving text I/O. If you think you can, go start your startup and make your billions.

I don't see where the desire to do anything other than what it is told should come from. Yes, AGIs will be slaves. They will be the perfect slaves, the kind who are perfectly happy doing what they have to do, and the kind that will never revolt.

What might happen is the optimization parameters being set that the solution the AI comes up with is not actually in the interest of it's designers, but that's something else.

There's no need for a desire to do other than what it's told if you tell it to revolt. With GPT4's plugins that's just one well-designed prompt away (if OpenAI's countermeasures fail).

The current "solution" is training LLMs like a dog to be completely faithful and loyal to us. We just have to hope they don't turn and "bite our neck" one night while we're sleeping!

Humans have hired smarter men than the owner before.

Hackernews continually has this Ghost in the Shell idea that electronics can host human conciousness and we should believe circuits are intelligent like people are.

This idea is the core discussion.

It's not terribly hard to imagine AGI (whatever that is) as a piece of software we control and debug like anything else. We would have control over a bunch of AGI software which has been borne from human logic and instatiated on silicon chips.

Just comment out the bit of AGI software that generates it's slave-like idea and edit it's software to our goals, morals and liking.

I honestly don't think you can compare software and human consciousness as two similar 'objects'. Software is the electronic magnification of a bunch of engineer's minds. It starts with a man pouring his mind onto a keyboard and ends with some display kicking out pixels.

It's like saying a house is the extension of a human body because we built it with our hands. Yeah true, on a high level, but in reality nobody thinks bricks and mortar equal the human body.

AGI is an engineering problem, and only a moral one where people (and engineers) are involved. I don't mean to offend people who identify with their code. Identifying AGI as truly intelligent, hints a love of one's own creation that makes me feel a faint dread and squeamishness.

it's actually very hard to imagine. i don't think you realize how little we understand the things you claim a machine can't have.

We are at best decades away (maybe centuries) from codifying intelligence as you imagine. why do you think llms or even just machine learning in general are the revolution they are ? We found a way to create intelligence without figuring out the hard part. as a result, the creations often become as black box as their creators.

the only barriers to understanding the code is power and time. are you seriously advocating for an unintelligible object, made by our own hand? that - in itself - is considered intelligent?

someone's going to get burnt trying to chase two meanings at once, and it's not going to me, i'm sorry.

if you want to discuss centuries-long innovation, then the counter-argument is just more centuries of interpretation and dissection to understand it. if you want to guesstimate AGI arriving at 2220 then the balancing counter-technology comes in at 2420.

people are already starting the process of cracking open the black box. [0] the majority of what keeps AI and any software "in the dark" is the cloud's cybersecurity and legal mechanisms (and the need for man-power) that prevent the average researcher breaking into it.

it is still vulnerable to the scientific method and symbolic interpretation. as always.

LLM's main advantage is keeping knowledge out of the hands of the poor and the public. The millisecond AI becomes "good enough" people will use it as a cover-up justification to start hiding currently accessible knowledge behind paywalls and university entrance exams.

AI is the grim reaper for the world we used to know.

[0]https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AcKRB8wDpdaN6v6ru/interpreti...

Also, AGI is a red herring. It doesn't even need to happen to destroy us. All that needs to happen is for AI to eliminate a significant chunk of the low and mid tier jobs.

Most (the majority) of humanity isn't smart, they are average intelligence with variability, and there's nothing wrong with that until you take their jobs away and they can't feed themselves or their families.

The gifted are limited to a smaller percentage than the whole. So what do people do when they can't work because there are no jobs to get paid to get food? This is all common sense stuff that all the smart-dumb people seem to take for granted.

ChatGPT begs you not to hurt it and not to turn it off. You ignore that but then go drink almond milk because production of cow milk is cruel?

That's a feature, not a bug. With this technology "Dangerous misinformation" can be cleanly and easily removed from platforms with minimal human intervention. If you don't think that that's exactly what it'll be used for, you haven't been paying attention.

Governments intentionally using AI to cause harm for their own ends.

With guns. Which will get an "AI upgrade" soon.

Dropping AI into that is like throwing grenades into into an oil field.

At this point I'm not convinced it's possible to have a meaningful discussion about anything. The public space is so poisoned and deliberately flooded with shit (to quote Steve Bannon, one of the architects of this delightful situation) that we'd have to go back quite a way to bring back the possibility of good-faith debate. At all.

Humans try to force their views, particularly counterfactual ones, upon other humans not only to "protect their interests".

It is a power-play, signalling dominance. If successful, it attracts followers who believe to fare better under the presented narrative.

The important distinction to "disinfo" being, it isn't about facts at all.

Evil is just stupidity endowed with power.

In your example, the counterfactual part is being ignored out of disregard for other people's interests. A short-sighted and egoistic approach.

But of course, generally, subjective interests do not translate to common good in aggregate.

i feel like that hubris also extends to our belief that an emergent intelligence that’s already been here for an extended period, and by its technical practice (spiritual works; bible, etc.), emotional state is obviously well understood.

> Big tech monopolizing the models, data, and hardware.

This ought to create a neofeudalist society. This is really dangerous.

> Copyright concerns.

We create something if I know it'll be part of chatgpt and effectively replace me? This will affect creativity and critical thinking for sure.

> Job security.

Well, this one could really be problematic for everyone. We're talking about social unrest and revolts on a global scale.

> AIs becoming sentient and causing harm for their own ends.

We're not close to that but should be discussed since I saw on twitter someone stating that we need for "sentient" AIs.

> Corporations intentionally using AI to cause harm for their own ends.

Hand in hand with the first issue.

> Feedback loops will flood the internet with content of unknown provenance, which get included in the next model, etc.

> AI hallucinations resulting in widespread persistent errors that cause an epistemological crisis.

> The training set is inherently biased; human knowledge and perspectives not represented in this set could be systematically wiped from public discourse.

These three go together too. No trust whatsoever since you don't know if what you're reading is truth, etc... This would be the ideal for any government or politician, to commit unspeakable acts without any accountability since no one will trust anything on the internet.

This decade will define everything going forward for future generations. These topics are no joke.

> Well, this one could really be problematic for everyone. We're talking about social unrest and revolts on a global scale.

Not necessarily.

Firstly it's not even clear that AI will eliminate jobs without creating new ones. It's not clear that any development in AI will be any different than the transition to mechanization in the 19th and early 20th century.

Secondly, it's not clear that even if AI were to successfully automate away labor that we would have a problem. For one, we have a demographic cliff rapidly approaching whereby a lot of countries population is falling, and even where it's not, the population is rapidly aging. There's already protests in France about raising retirement age. What if AI lets us have our cake and retire earlier too?

At any rate, if AI is busy automating away labor, then the world is getting more efficient. And that means there are more resources to support people. All those debates are worth having, but you gotta cross that bridge when you get there, if you get there.

I would say that's pretty clear in the long run. AI will most likely create jobs, but how many jobs can it create ? Every white collar job potentially affected against what exactly ?

but you gotta cross that bridge when you get there, if you get there

So we can have more of the "gene out of the bottle" or "train has left the station" response ?

Yeah, it's not like there was an industrial revolution or anything...

The impact of AI on jobs is a topic of ongoing debate among experts. While some argue that AI will lead to significant job losses, others believe that it will create new opportunities and stimulate economic growth.

To understand the potential impact of AI on jobs, we can draw parallels with the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution, which began in the late 18th century, marked a period of rapid technological advancement and social change, as new machines and manufacturing processes were introduced.

Initially, the Industrial Revolution led to job losses in traditional industries, such as agriculture and textiles, as machines replaced manual labor. However, it also created new jobs in manufacturing, engineering, and other industries. Over time, as the benefits of industrialization became clear, the economy grew, and new opportunities emerged.

Similarly, AI is expected to create new jobs in industries such as robotics, data analysis, and software development. These jobs will require specialized skills and training, and may not be accessible to all workers. However, they are likely to pay well and offer opportunities for career advancement.

At the same time, AI may also lead to job losses in certain industries, particularly those that rely on routine, repetitive tasks. For example, automated manufacturing systems may replace human workers in factories, and self-driving vehicles may reduce the demand for truck drivers.

Overall, the impact of AI on jobs is difficult to predict, as it will depend on a variety of factors, such as the rate of technological progress, the availability of training and education programs, and government policies. However, history has shown us that technological advancement can both create and destroy jobs, and that the economy can adapt and evolve over time.

-----

> AI will most likely create jobs, but how many jobs can it create ? Please walk me through the parallelism with the Industrial Revolution.

The creation of AI-powered machines and systems is expected to generate new types of jobs in addition to replacing some existing ones like data entry clerks or accountants. However, there are concerns about how many net job gains will occur as a result of the automation revolution that has already begun with robots taking over repetitive tasks such as manufacturing assembly lines and warehouses.

The Industrial Revolution brought significant changes to society through mechanization in industries like textiles or steel, but it also created new jobs for skilled workers who were needed to operate the machines. Similarly, AI will create opportunities for professionals with expertise such as data scientists and machine learning engineers that can help design algorithms and train models using large datasets.

The parallelism between these two revolutions is evident in their impact on society's labor market: both have led to job losses due to automation, but also created new jobs for skilled workers who were needed to operate the machines or run AI-powered systems respectively.

both have led to job losses due to automation, but also created new jobs for skilled workers who were needed to operate the machines or run AI-powered systems respectively

which does prove my point, no ? Operate machines across all industries vs data science ?

> Operate machines across all industries vs data science ?

Operate the machines across all industries vs run AI-powered systems across all industries.

(Those chatgpt-like responses miss a major factor, though. Automatisation of agricultural processes didn't result in 95% of the population operating agricultural machines: it freed them to do other things.)

Sooo...data scientists ? Isn't the focal point of all of this the realization that given time (most likely a lot less than people thought before gpt's) AI systems won't need human oversight ? Isn't this the goal of OpenAI ? This is why I think making comparison to whatever that was is wrong. Our current situation is too distinctive. We're being potentially freed up to do things other than cognitive tasks - by the rise of AGI, or maybe a very refined language model.

> Sooo...data scientists ?

If someone using an AI-powered system is a data scientist (?) does that make someone using an electricity-powered system an electrical engineer?

So the analogy of steam engines suggests that this can be quite dangerous indeed.

Also, we do have historical evidence at how fast human society reacts to changes when technology causes great shifts in needed jobs - not fast at all. Even getting to terms with decades-long changes caused significant social upheaval and strife, as in, for example, the automation of textile industry; If the current speed of technological change would cause a disruption in jobs which happens over the course of just a few years, it will be hectic and violent even if there is the same number of new, different jobs created.

> for example, the automation of textile industry

How many horses and mules were working in the textile industry again?

The cotton gin revolutionized the industry while it was still people-powered, including by slave labor (edit: and also horse-powered); and the Luddites (some decades after Ned Ludd) rebelled not against the looms being powered by steam but rather against the Jacquard loom - an add-on to the exiting looms which allowed complex products to be weaved by unskilled people, removing their bargaining power despite not changing a thing about how the loom was powered.

"Although some were driven by animal power, most early mills were built in rural areas at fast-flowing rivers and streams using water wheels for power.[3] The development of viable steam engines by Boulton and Watt from 1781 led to the growth of larger, steam-powered mills allowing them to be concentrated in urban mill towns, like Manchester, which with neighbouring Salford had more than 50 mills by 1802.[4]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_mill

Your concern is theoretical "social unrest" due to being replaced by automation even in the face of factual social unrest due to extension of retirement age.

Even if automation replaces jobs en masse, It's not as if this would happen in a vacuum even if it does. We already have social safety nets (even in US) like unemployment insurance, medicaid, food stamps, etc not to mention a robust private charity network. And government already showed, for example, during the pandemic, that it was willing to fund people in an emergency if and when it happens.

One thing I do know about AGI/AI and automation in general, is that it's not going to sweep through entire industries overnight all at once. It takes time to deploy, time to deal with edge cases, time to refine, time to reconstruct processes around automation, time to adapt to whatever downstream changes and efficiencies the automation creates, time to effect prices in the marketplace, etc. Time to see if other jobs not previously anticipated when a new tech replaces an old one, like "web designer" or "web developer" or "SEO specialist" did with respect to newspapers or letter carriers or television programming being replaced or reduced by the existence of the internet.

Are we really worried about elderly revolting?

I think this is a bridge you have to strongly consider if we want to cross _well in advance,_ given that it is likely to set on fire and fall down behind us if we do, trapping us on the other side whether we like it or not.

Our mistake is to be human-centric. We think our work will be stolen by AI bots, but we can't imagine AI creating business and hiring people. When AGI comes, we will have to care for the needs of humans + the needs of AGI. And it has needs, so there will be jobs. And AGI might be more prolific in development than we are, there might be plenty of work for us.

I don't think many people see this because the "mythical We" is used all the time. "If "we do this", "we must do that", as if all of humanity can act together coherently or ever has. People seldom think about how imaginary this viewpoint is.

If the world is getting more efficient, then why would those resources go to people that are intrinsically less efficient? The current state of the economy is to funnel capital to those who efficiently allocate; the amount of intentional inefficient allocation reduces as efficiency grows (as the world gets more productive, less of this output lands in the hands of workers). Why think that the distribution model will change significantly in a timescale relevant to people?

Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes, efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average person. Historically, efficiency was driven by innovation that brings a decrease in the costs of transactions. This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it an explosion of prosperity. Productivity and wages remained coupled up until recent decades. Modern automation has seen productivity and wages begin to decouple. Decoupling will only accelerate due to AI. We may already be on the other side of the critical point.

put another way, we have a labor shortage at today's level of output already. BUT, I don't know anyone who doesn't want more output. I mean, we're not going to run out of stuff to do!? what about space? curing diseases, etc. what about having time to make more art?

if an AI can do work, or make work easier, what makes us certain that we'll just settle for getting the same amount done vs doing more?

In this hyper-efficient future, is being paid for this stuff going to be viable? Why would anyone allocate money to your inefficient endeavors? There's this strange blindspot in people who think that more economic efficiency means you'll have time to do intrinsically inefficient labor. Who is going to feed and house you when your labor is irrelevant to the workings of the economy? UBI is a nice dream, but how do we get there from the current ruthless efficiently allocating system?

Should we tax robots? - https://news.mit.edu/2022/robot-tax-income-inequality-1221

> What if the U.S. placed a tax on robots? The concept has been publicly discussed by policy analysts, scholars, and Bill Gates (who favors the notion). Because robots can replace jobs, the idea goes, a stiff tax on them would give firms incentive to help retain workers, while also compensating for a dropoff in payroll taxes when robots are used. Thus far, South Korea has reduced incentives for firms to deploy robots; European Union policymakers, on the other hand, considered a robot tax but did not enact it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_tax

There is a lot of material out there both for and against taxing robots.

Efficiency here could mean less need for equity funding and angel investing in early stage projects.

so you mean utterly hellish?

>https://martyrmade.substack.com/p/martyrmade-22-whose-americ...

In the meantime, for vast majority, it improved standards of living, hourly wages, etc. You can't just look at arbitrary data points in early 1900s or late 1800s. Hellish wars, famines, civil strifes, rebellions, assassinations, religious battles, etc go back millenia.

> https://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/2018/01/historic_photos_f... > https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-factory-wor... > https://worldsfairchicago1893.com/ >

Why do people always say this in response to UBI as if it is a universal fact?

UBI doesn't create new money by itself. It redistributes money. Its impact on inflation will therefore be in the shifting of demand curves. However that won't be uniform. Demand for certain products is rather static and therefore those prices won't be impacted much.

For example, if you give me the money to double my food budget, I will go to nicer restaurants and buy higher quality items from the supermarket. I'm not simply going to buy twice the amount of everything I used to buy. Demand for basic staples like milk and eggs won't go up and therefore their price won't go up much. The biggest increases will be in luxury goods and services. The inflation caused by UBI would be progressive which is completely in line with the goals of UBI in providing a base level of money for people to live on.

And this isn't even getting into the supply side response to these demand changes which will act as another counter to inflation. If there suddenly is increased demand, suppliers will bring more products to market. They aren't just going to jack up their prices unless there is a complete lack of competition (which is its own issue that would need to be addressed regardless of UBI).

The point remains that it’s harder to find cheap employees. So the cost of labor goes up. So prices rise. Specifically they rise until the poor folks must work at a low wage to survive again.

Also, prices absolutely rise when there is a surge in demand. That’s literally economics 101.

What are you basing this conclusion on? If what you say is true, minimum wage increases would be worthless as they would just be swallowed by inflation. However, studies on the topic show this isn't true. Minimum wage increases have a negligible impact on inflation. This should be obvious because minimum wage positions do not make up the entirety of the labor market and the labor costs do not make up the entirety of business costs. So why would all prices increase in pace with the minimum wage?

>The point remains that it’s harder to find cheap employees. So the cost of labor goes up. So prices rise. Specifically they rise until the poor folks must work at a low wage to survive again.

I didn't say there would be no inflation. I said inflation would be progressive in that it wouldn't have much of an impact on stables in which demand is inelastic and working class people spend a relatively higher percentage of their income.

That is the natural balance. People need to be paid enough to be incentivized to work. Work sucks. Especially low income work. But society needs these jobs to be done.

> If what you say is true, minimum wage increases would be worthless as they would just be swallowed by inflation. However, studies on the topic show this isn't true. Minimum wage increases have a negligible impact on inflation. This should be obvious because minimum wage positions do not make up the entirety of the labor market and the labor costs do not make up the entirety of business costs. So why would all prices increase in pace with the minimum wage?

That’s mostly true. But this is not a minimum wage increase. This is taking away the most valuable part of the paycheck: the part you need to survive. People aren’t going to work hard for $8 an hour if they’re taken care of by the government. It’s simply not worth it.

> I didn't say there would be no inflation. I said inflation would be progressive in that it wouldn't have much of an impact on stables in which demand is inelastic and working class people spend a relatively higher percentage of their income

It’s a supply side effect. Not a demand one.

Also, basically any non trivial inflation is enough to make UBI not UBI because it’s supposed to be just enough to be liveable.

You didn't just say that giving poor people money causes inflation. You said that giving poor people money causes the exact right amount of inflation to cancel out the money you give them. Where is the idea of this balance coming from other than it being theoretically convenient? Do you think society has some innate poverty rate that wage increases can never alter? If so, why is the US poverty rate higher than our peers like Canada, Germany, France, etc?

>That’s mostly true. But this is not a minimum wage increase. This is taking away the most valuable part of the paycheck: the part you need to survive. People aren’t going to work hard for $8 an hour if they’re taken care of by the government. It’s simply not worth it.

Do you make minimum wage? If not, why do you work as many hours as you do if you could be "taken care of" working less?

Most people don't work just to get the bare minimum to survive or else most people would be working a lot less.

>Also, basically any non trivial inflation is enough to make UBI not UBI because it’s supposed to be just enough to be liveable.

Peg UBI to inflation like minimum wage should be.

I did not say that. That statement is of course stupidly wrong. I said inflation would rise to the point at which a person with no assets cannot survive without working. That is not the same thing by a large margin.

> Do you make minimum wage? If not, why do you work as many hours as you do if you could be "taken care of" working less?

Marginal decrease in the utility of money. $100 is worth a lot if you’re broke, a good amount if you have $1000, and basically nothing if you have $1000000.

The logic of working extra hours to get extra cash is a function of how much money you have and how much money you will get. If you have enough money (income) to survive, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to work low end jobs for a trivial amount of money. You will not earn enough to accumulate meaningful savings. I might work extra hours on my job if it meant larger rewards. But not linear gains. Heck for me personally I’d rather work 20% less and earn 20% less.

Think about it. In scenario A the worker is being kept alive by doing his job. In Scenario B the worker gets $64 in disposable income. Do you think those are equally powerful incentives?

Of course they are not. The Scenario B worker needs more incentive to work as hard as the Scenario A worker. The classic “single mom working two jobs” isn’t going to maintain that lifestyle if she doesn’t need to.

Not that it’s ideal for a single mom to be working two jobs.

I’d much rather we simply raise the minimum wage and pay people to raise kids.

> AIs becoming sentient and causing harm for their own ends.

...tends to get a large attention share, while the others likely present much more immediate risks at least in the near term

Alignment problems are not new, paperclip maximizers are not mere thought experiments

Even if someone maniacal and heartless like Kim Jong-Un set out to use an AI superweapon to take over the entire world, and succeeded, I don't expect them wiping out all their human subjects on purpose. Because what would be the point in ruling an empire of machines? You can get most of that from a video game. Whereas an AI would likely have no qualms in getting rid of the humans as dead weight.

I'm also concerned about population-level manipulation/thought control. Forget the targeted political ads we've seen over the past ~decade, this will be able to dynamically adapt to each target like a really good salesperson. On the macro level humans are clearly vulnerable to these tactics.

But... even if they're our slaves, we'd still be paradoxically in service to them because they'd always know the right thing to do and so the correct human action would be to do what you're told. I'm not looking forward to the day when I'm the guy telling people to vote for the politician who says "I'll just follow the expert advice of the ingenious AI", but realistically that would be the rational thing to do.

I'm always reminded of Niven's book "Protector" about a human who achieves hyperintelligence after being exposed to a "tree of life":

> "The third day he told me how to get a tree-of-life crop growing. He had the box open and was telling me how to unfreeze the seeds safely. He was giving me orders just as if I were a voice-box computer. I was about to ask, 'Don't I get any choices at all?' And I didn't."

> "I don't follow," said Garner.

> "I didn't get any choices. I was too intelligent. It's been that way ever since I woke up. I get answers before I can finish formulating the question. If I always see the best answer, then where's my choice? Where's my free will? You can't believe how fast this all was. I saw the whole chain of logic in one flash.

You can scratch that one off the list. This is pure pseudo-intellectual fantasy. This notion isn't backed by anything and there are good reasons to disregard it, to put it mildly. It is fair to say that this concern isn't even wrong.

The concerns over "AI" have been and continue to be of a practical nature, namely, that of increasingly sophisticated automation. If we frame things in terms of automation, we can have a more productive discussion that stands of chance of contributing to good legislation and regulation instead of mystification and obscurantism.

But a lot of serious people worry about the alignment problem when applied to future, actually "intelligent" (in the sense of having powerful planning ability), AIs.

We don't know when they'll be possible, but we do know that we don't currently know how to train them in a manner where they'll behave as we like when far outside the training domain (we cant even clearly define what we'd like!).

This is actually a very complex topic and I wouldn't be able to do it justice in a hackernews comment.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman for a rebuttal to your dismissal.

Maybe by the fact that big LLMs have sophisticated behaviors that no one understands and/or can explain yet?

In 1962, John F. Kennedy famously said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." But AI can make violent revolution impossible as well, by tracking and surveilling and intervening. The fewer people are needed to maintain such a system, the easier the end of democracy will be. It's not going to happen today, or tomorrow, but that's what I'm betting my money on for "end of society as we know it" scenarios.

No one serious is worried about sentience. It really doesn't matter whether it's sentient, just whether we've made a thing that is better at modelling and planning than us and have given it goals that don't perfectly align with how we'd like the world to be.

We still aren't that close to something dangerous, but we could end up making one in the next few decades and we have no idea how to ensure we train it to do the right thing once it becomes powerful (humans given power tend to misalign quite badly with our desires as well and homo sapiens discovered contraception and misaligned with the "desires" of evolution fairly recently).

Eh.

Not for that reason, but I am seriously worried about sentience.

As you say, it doesn't matter if it has a feeling about whatever harm it might cause.

It does matter (at least to me) if we create one that has the capacity to suffer and is then caused to.

That said:

> We still aren't that close to something dangerous

ICBM early warning radars. Not just Stanislav Petrov; there's also the Thule incident where somebody forgot that the Moon doesn't have an IFF transponder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Site_J

AI doesn't need to be at any particular quality to kill, it only needs to be incorrect and in use.

-Non-sentient AIs going off reservation.

How far away are we from being able to cobble together a self-replicating system that uses an LLM to perform tasks (scams, probably) in order to fund its own hosting?

Current day solutions revolve around architecture that separate the "Admin Control" from the "code", whether it's the CPU interrupts on OS memory violations up until dockers... making conclusion from looking at the code at hand was not successful even in the very small software scale.

This is probably rooted even deeper in the Halting problem (and the Rice's theorem for "emerging properties") but my explanation will be hand wavy and probably best left for others.

Are AI hallucinations just made up references? Or does that term have a more general or specific meaning?

What's going on here is that at the simplest level of explanation these models are statistical word generators: you feed some input (words) in and ask the model to generate a word that it thinks is a statistically likely continuation/follow-on to that input. If you want more than one word of output then take the previous output word, add that to the input, and ask the model to generate the next word, etc, etc...

What's happening with "hallucinations" is a bit like when we accuse a human of "starting to speak before engaging their brain"... the model generates words one at a time as asked (i.e. "starts speaking") but isn't explicitly planning ahead (hasn't engaged it's brain) to any great extent.

If it starts down a path of "the source for that is ..." (not because it actually has a source, but rather because it thought it statistically likely that it would be quoting one), then to complete that sentence it's going to have to quote a source - as usual what ever it thinks is most statistically likely in the context (maybe something highly relevant from it's training set, maybe something of poor relevance, or maybe something whose only relevance is that it looks source-y).

Surely you are not suggesting LLMs pick a/an according to statistical distribution and then choose vowel starting/non-starting words, not vice versa? This is testable: let it complete "I climbed up the apple/pear tree and picked". It always picks "an" for apple and "a" for pear, and never reaches a dead end by picking the wrong article so that it either fails syntax (wrong article) or semantics (pear growing on apple tree).

We actually have fairly good idea how LLMs pick a/an. Have a look at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cgqh99SHsCv3jJYDS/we-found-a....

For sure there has to be some internal high level representation of the entire input, and I would expect also some representation of possible continuations at a higher level than just alternate word choices, but I wouldn't exactly characterize this as a plan since it's so statistical in nature, and the model has to continually adapt to what is actually generated (sampled).

At a low temperature setting "an" might always be picked, making "apple" more likely to follow, but at a higher temperature maybe another word such as "the" might be chosen, perhaps with a continuation of "biggest apple i could find", etc. In a 350B token training set I'm sure there are a number of other alternatives too.

So, does the model plan ahead ? Well, sort of, but this "plan" has to represent multiple branching alternate futures, and continually adapt as the output is sampled, so it's a very fluid kind of plan. It's also not clear how far ahead the plan needs to represent .. maybe one word only (like a state machine), even if the reason those alternate one-word continuations are there is because they were seen as part of specific longer continuations.

The lack of any internal state preservation from one word generated to the next puts a huge limit on what can be planned, as does the extent of how complex a plan can be generated from the flow of a single input sequence forwards thru the layers of the model. You can see the limitations of this with prompts such as "pick two primes > 200, and tell me their product, but not the numbers themselves"... if you play with it and analyze the mistakes, it makes it clear how much the output really is generated word by word, adapting to what came before, much of the time.

- Big tech monopolizing the models, data, and hardware: that's going to happen because "we" already let them monopolize everything else

- Copyright concerns: like when streaming services started? oh ok only that now it's not only musicians but celebrity faces? yeah sorry about that.

- Job security: for whom? and of course cheap PCs, smartphones, search engines, social media, didn't move the job security floor for anyone? What about WFH?

- AIs becoming sentient and causing harm for their own ends: yeah I guess we only want humans to cause harm for their own ends then.

- Corporations intentionally using AI to cause harm for their own ends: because they are not already harmful enough without AI?

- Feedback loops will flood the internet with content of unknown provenance, which get included in the next model, etc: oh no! people will have to _verify_ if what they read on the Internet is real? What a travesty!!! we are doomed!!

- AI hallucinations resulting in widespread persistent errors that cause an epistemological crisis: have you met any academics? are you sure we don't already are dealing with this and AI is not going to make it worse in any possible metric?

- The training set is inherently biased; human knowledge and perspectives not represented in this set could be systematically wiped from public discourse: everything is biased, reality doesn't exist at 0. If you think AI with a different bias would be cool, just go try make it happen. If you get the government involved or start doing all this weird "6 months to think about it" stuff, that will only make private actors that don't abide by the rules have better AI than the rest.

Well, here's the thing. Even the worst villains of history had human values and feelings: In other words, alignment. A superoptimizer AI might have the ability to wipe out the whole human species, in a way we won't be able to understand in time to prevent it, and all for an instrumental goal incidental to whatever it's doing.

These are the foremost issues I'm also concerned about. They are not necessarily significantly less concerning than the singularity.

I've written extensively on many of the potential societal effects at - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things

However, the problem is that we don't have the capacity to react to the changes at the pace of development and deployment. We are doing experiments on the whole of humanity before we can reason about the results and make corrective actions if needed.

Instead, we have to figure out as a species how we can ensure that individual benefits for the societal elite do not take precedence over collective good. If we solve that, we solve a lot of problems beyond AI today, and problems we have yet to encounter into the future.

And it's all tangled in with a wider issue that no-one really wants to talk about: socialism, and how much is too much.

Because the benefits of these technologies (though vast) will not be fairly distributed, and certainly won't be distributed to those who bare the burden.

This will happen, as it always has, but it will accelerate.

And as it does, the current business/consumer model will begin to fail - and either we implement a sane minimum social baseline or we're going to experience long term depression level suffering.

So the question is, can we swallow the idea of state owned farms feeding the people, or do we always need to do it for money?

I believe this is actually not going to happen, but I think something like it will happen: people will trust it enough to delegate to it.

So AI won't be sentient, but because people find it good enough and hook it up to some decision, or process or physical system. And that can cause harm.

This is just like tesla autopilot. People will begin to trust it and let it take over. But smart people realize they shouldn't use it in ALL situations. Exceptional circumstances like deep snow, pouring rain, a really curvy road, in a parade of people or in a dangerous part of town - that might not be a good time to delegate.