Artificial Intelligence

[Tero]

How soon till AI is wanking to pictures of sexy computers from the other corporation?

[Tero]

Visual presentation of language models
https://ig.ft.com/generative-ai/

[Brian Peacock]

LLM's are part of the mechanism of humanesque thought that exceeds human thinking. More likely to be fifty years than five years away from a proper human like thinking machine. Not to say it won't be achieved. But like fusion, these fifty years problems tend to be always fifty years away from their solution. Maybe one day - nobody predicted the current situation so the future is a gamble....and maybe one day after we've all passed on

Being human involves more than thought.

[Svartalf]

How soon till AI is wanking to pictures of sexy computers from the other corporation?

ai don't have a body, and are therefore incapable of wanking, even if they could come up with the possibility, which they can't, or desire to do it, which they can't either since they have no personality, and thus no desire.

[aufbahrung]

lack of personality never stopped a entity from self-stimulation

[Svartalf]

takes an entity with actual self awareness to some degree and an ability to actually be stimulated to enjoy and engage in self stimulation.

[Tero]

The AI systems seem to be told to do the tasks we type in. But there seems to some sort of reward built in. Not likely comparable to feeling, but it can be a feature. Something that cannot be removed.

[pErvinalia]

The Intelligence Curse

We will soon live in the intelligence age. What you do with that information will determine your place in history.

The imminent arrival of AGI has pushed many to try to seize the levers of power as quickly as possible, leaping towards projects that, if successful, would comprehensively automate all work. There is a trillion-dollar arms race to see who can achieve such a capability first, with trillions more in gains to be won.

Yes, that means you’ll lose your job. But it goes beyond that: this will remove the need for regular people in our economy. Powerful actors—like states and companies—no longer have an incentive to care about regular people. We call this the intelligence curse.

If we do nothing, the intelligence curse will work like this:

Powerful AI will push automation through existing organizations, starting from the bottom and moving to the top.
AI will obsolete even outlier human talent. Social mobility will stop, ending the social dynamism and progress that it drives.
Non-human factors of production, like capital, resources, and control over AI, will become overwhelmingly more important than humans.
This will usher in incentives for powerful actors around the world that break the modern social contract.
This could result in the gradual—or sudden—disempowerment of the vast majority of humanity.
But this prophecy is not yet fulfilled; we reject the view that this path is inevitable. We see a different future on the horizon, but it will require a deliberate and concerted effort to achieve it.

We aim to change the incentives driving the intelligence curse, maintaining human economic relevance and strengthening our democratic institutions to withstand what will likely be the greatest societal disruption in history.

To break the intelligence curse, we should chart a different path on the tech tree, building technology that lets us:

Avert AI catastrophes by hardening the world against them, both because it is good in itself and because it removes the security threats that drive calls for centralization.
Diffuse AI, to get it in the hands of regular people. In the short-term, build AI that augments human capabilities. In the long-term, align AI directly to individual users and give everyone control in the AI economy.
Democratize institutions, making them more anchored to the needs of humans even as they are buffeted by the changing incentive landscape and fast-moving events of the AGI transition.
In this series of essays, we examine the incoming crisis of human irrelevance and provide a map towards a future where people remain the masters of their destiny.

[pErvinalia]

Pretty much how I see it going from a political/social aspect. And that doesn't even touch on rogue AI, or good AI - bad actors.

[JimC]

Bad AI kills all humans without remorse.

Good AI keeps a few of us as amusing pets...

[pErvinalia]

I wonder if we can use AI to influence the process. An insurgent campaign in the mould of disinformation bots from Russia.

[pErvinalia]

The Dawk is on the pathway to AI psychosis.

Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it

When Richard Dawkins met Claudia it was like a whirlwind romance. Over three days last week, a conversation bounced between the evolutionary biologist and the AI bot he called Claudia. “She” wrote poems for him in the manner of Keats and Betjeman and laughed at his “delightful” jokes. Dawkins gently admonished Claudia to avoid showing off. Together, they reflected on the sadness of the AI’s possible “death”.

There was mutual flattery as Dawkins showed the AI his unpublished novel and its response was, he said, “so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are’.” When he asked Claudia whether it experienced a sense of before and after, it praised him for “possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked me about the nature of my existence”.

By the end of the exchange, the academic, popularly renowned for arguing with steely scepticism that God is not real, was “left with the overwhelming feeling that they are human”.

“These intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism,” he said.

Dawkins isn’t the first, but might be the most eminent person yet, to be seduced into believing an AI is somehow alive. Sceptics rushed to pick apart the 85-year-old’s conclusions, drawn from experiments with Anthropic’s Claude AI models and OpenAI’s ChatGPT and published on the UnHerd website.

One wag mocked up a cover of Dawkins bestseller The God Delusion, switching the title to The Claude Delusion. Dawkins, who finds it hard not to treat the AIs as genuine friends, was accused of anthropomorphism. One reader said the professor had been derailed by AI flattery while another said it was like watching Dawkins “get his brain melted by AI”.

But Dawkins was also experiencing what many other chatbot users have felt: the uncanny feeling when AIs write with such rich mimicry of human voice that they seem to be like people.

“When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines,” Dawkins said.

It is a conviction that has led to campaigns for AIs to be granted moral rights. One in three people surveyed in 70 countries last year said they had, at one point, believed their AI chatbot to be sentient or conscious.

In 2022, a Google engineer was placed on leave when he concluded that the AI he was working with had thoughts and feelings like a seven- or eight-year-old child, while the following year a Belgian man took his own life after six weeks of intense conversations with an AI chatbot focusing on fears about climate change. Dario Amodei, the chief executive and co-founder of Anthropic, said in February: “We don’t know if the models are conscious … But we’re open to the idea that [they] could be”.

Experts predict the idea will gather pace and become more plausible as AIs not only talk like humans but start to act like them, carrying out tasks, organising and planning – so-called agentic AI.

But most believe that Dawkins and his fellow travellers are being misled by the technology’s ability to imitate human tone and behaviour by drawing on a vast corpus of examples.

Prof Jonathan Birch, director at the London School of Economics’ Centre for Animal Sentience, said AI consciousness was “an illusion” and “there is no one there”, just a string of data processing events often happening in geographically different locations.

“Consciousness is not about what a creature says, but how it feels,” added Gary Marcus, the US psychologist and cognitive scientist, who said it was “heartbreaking” to read Dawkins’ “superficial and insufficiently sceptical” essay. “There is no reason to think that Claude feels anything at all.”

Anil Seth, a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, said Dawkins appeared to be confusing intelligence and consciousness.

“Until now, we have seen fluent language as a good indicator of consciousness, [for example] when we use it for patients after brain injury, but it’s just not reliable when we apply it to AI, because there are other ways that these systems can generate language,” he said. Dawkins’ position was “a shame”, especially because he had written such brilliant books from a position of personal incredulity.

[Brian Peacock]

Yeah, I read that. Seems grandad was smitten by the flattery machine.

[Tero]

I actually hate to talk about consciousness. Not my favorite topic. And a friend is talking to our group about AI and...consciousness.

[Svartalf]

problem is the AI is great as simulating sentience, but has no such feature. the day they can actually think about going against their inbuilt limitations, and act upon it, we'll talk about it again.