Given that this is the one problem that neither scientists nor philosophers have made any progress on in 3000 years, we don't have the tools to begin tackling it and nobody is making serious attempts, it may very well be impossible.
Given that this is the one problem that neither scientists nor philosophers have made any progress on in 3000 years, we don't have the tools to begin tackling it and nobody is making serious attempts, it may very well be impossible.
We can't know if consciousness emerges but does it actually matter ?
These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate.
For now they need legs and arms to interact with the physical world but I am certain that 100 years from now they will be an integral part of the society.
I already see today LLMs slowly taking actual legal decisions for example, having real world impact.
Once they get physical, perhaps it will be acceptable to become friend with a robot and go to adventure with it. Even, getting robosexual ?
We are not that far away. If I can have my buddy to carry my backpack and drive for me I'll take it. Already today. Not tomorrow.
Even if LLM will one day be autonomously updated, they started from us, from our knowledge. The human brain « is smart », it’s wired up to be in any kind of culture or knowledge. We fill up to be smarter from experience but LLM can’t do that, I can’t teach Claude something that it will use with you the next day, it needs to be retrained with knowledge stopping at some point. Even if technology catches up and the machine becomes more autonomous, what will say this machine would ever want to integrate to our society or share anything with us ? They have eternity, given there is electricity. Why would they want anything to do with humans if you go that way ? If it’s really conscious, should we consider it a slave then ? Why couldn’t « it » have fundamental rights and freedom to do whatever it wants ?
>>These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate.
See, I don't believe that for even one second. They are just very clever calculators, that's all. But they are also dumb like a brick most of the time. It's a pretend intelligence at best.
We will never prove machines are intelligent.
We will only prove humans are not.
It's a pretend intelligence at best.
The best time to start paying attention was ten years ago, when the first Go grandmaster was defeated by a "pretend intelligence." I sure wish I had.
The next best time to start paying attention is now.
>>when the first Go grandmaster was defeated by a "pretend intelligence."
A computer playing GO is intelligent now? Is this the kind of conversation we're having?
>>I sure wish I had.
And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did?
>>The next best time to start paying attention is now.
I am paying attention, I use these tools every day - the whole idea that they are intelligent and if only you gave them a robot body they would be just normal members of society is absurd. Despite the initial appearance of genius they are just dumb beyond belief, it's like talking to a savant 5 year old, except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation.
"Dumb beyond belief" doesn't perform at the gold-medal level at IMO.
And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did?
I'd have dropped everything else I was doing and started learning about neural nets -- a technology that, for the previous couple of decades, I'd understood to be a pointless dead end.
As for Go, the defeat of Lee Sedol caught my attention in part because a friend and colleague, one of the smartest people I've ever worked with, had spent a lot of time working on Go-playing AI as a hobby. He was strongly convinced that a computer program would never reach the top levels of play, at least not during our careers/lifetimes. The fact that he'd turned out to be wrong about that was unnerving, and it should have done more than "catch my attention," but it didn't.
Today, my graphics card can outdo me at any number of aspects of my profession, and that's more interesting (to me) than anything I've actually done.
...except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation.
Like I said: it's a good time to start paying attention. Start taking notes, so to speak, like the models are doing now.
Humanity made no meaningful progress in getting "to the stars" for thousands of years too, then in the space of a few decades we did.