Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
That seems to be getting close to our society's malaise that often very clever people seem to preen themselves on their ignorance of mathematics.
Or the converse, that people who are really good at maths can tell you all about human love, or God, or the possibility of eternity, because in the end “it is all maths”
Computer experts are just techies. Whistling engineers in a garage. They know almost nothing beyond what spanner to employ
They can’t explain why it is exciting to drive your friend’s wife to Bolzano to fuck her in the back of your vintage Alfa Romeo
We have elevated them far enough. It’s time for them all to get back in their box. They are rude mechanicals and their scene is done, let the scriptwriters explain
And you know what, Dalle can't tell you anything about human love.
Just Introduced: This Bill is a reasonable and practical solution to
➡️ Fix problems facing businesses and people in Northern Ireland ➡️ Uphold the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement ➡️ Protect UK and EU markets
What is your take #StBart? Is the Tory proposal close enough to the idea you have been suggesting for years now?
I haven't got a take yet, been busy IRL so not read up on the proposals yet. The news article on the BBC News website is extremely lacking on details about what is actually in the Bill and is instead primarily pre-written guff about what all various parties think about the Protocol which isn't news.
Just come on here interested to see if I could get more information, and it seems what people think is they want to talk about IT, Dalle, text to speech and bestiality. So I'm guessing either nothing much was in the Bill, or nothing much objectionable was. I'm not sure which yet?
Thanks.
If goods moving from mainland UK into NI just for consumption in NI, why should it pass Through a EU border? It shouldn’t. It’s potty solution is the basis of the argument?
Goods for NI consumption should sail through under a green light. If it further crosses into EU, smuggling in other words, it’s in interest of EU to agree with us to harsh penalties on the smugglers, not insist on border somewhere - is the basis of your solution?
So it’s about now measuring you solution against the government proposals, because, although they could recognise the simple issue, they could still screw up your simple solution to it?
My suspicion is the EU and remainers have tried to exploit the unique sensitivities of a hard border in Ireland to take more than they fairly needed to. So your solution (if I understand and describe it right) sounds a perfectly workable solution to me, until someone convince me what’s wrong with it.
Given that in actual voting, Reform UK achieve pretty much zero, it’s one of the great Britishmysteries that they bounce along at up to 4% in national polls.
2% is still too much.
Are these prompted for?
15% seems about right for the Lib Dems, although doubt even half of those could identify Ed Davey in a line-up,
R&W have Reform on 5% in Scotland. That is just total pants. The last proper, full-sample Scottish poll found Reform VI to be an asterisk:
R&W also find the Welsh Tories miles ahead of Welsh Labour. Some of their subsamples are so daft it casts severe doubt over their headlines.
I'd be surprised if they beat the Family Party, let alone Alba. They might get more votes than The Rubbish Party, but even they managed to get 1 councillor.
PBers will be pleased to learn that long-standing territorial dispute over Hans Island aka Tartupaluk is over!
Concluded by agreement to split the small Arctic island in two between of Territory of Nunavut, and Greenland aka Kalaallit Nunaat, thus creating new international land frontier between Canada and Kingdom of Denmark.
It seems the plan is to have no border officials anywhere on the border between the EU and a non-EU nation, because of considerations for the people living on the island. What a rational and sensible position to have, has anyone told the unicorn hunters of this new development?
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
That seems to be getting close to our society's malaise that often very clever people seem to preen themselves on their ignorance of mathematics.
Or the converse, that people who are really good at maths can tell you all about human love, or God, or the possibility of eternity, because in the end “it is all maths”
Computer experts are just techies. Whistling engineers in a garage. They know almost nothing beyond what spanner to employ
They can’t explain why it is exciting to drive your friend’s wife to Bolzano to fuck her in the back of your vintage Alfa Romeo
We have elevated them far enough. It’s time for them all to get back in their box. They are rude mechanicals and their scene is done, let the scriptwriters explain
Or the converse, that people who are really good at maths can tell you all about human love, or God, or the possibility of eternity, because in the end “it is all maths”"
I do not find that universally true. I can certainly provide (careful Toms!) counterexamples. The same person can use logic. Or play with it.
It now looks like only seven asylum seekers will be on the flight tomorrow following further challenges by the Union representing border force personnel. The policy of deportations to Rwanda is becoming totally unworkable.
Time for the govt to recognise the opposition to it and think again.
I'm puzzled by this - who is paying for the flight to Kigali? It also doesn't sound like an affirmation of green credentials for such a flight to be in the air with whatever CO2 footprint.
Sometimes I just wonder if the ends really do justify the means irrespective of how "popular" a policy may be.
My question is: If the refugees arrive in Rwanda and they refuse to give them asylum, what happens to them?
It now looks like only seven asylum seekers will be on the flight tomorrow following further challenges by the Union representing border force personnel. The policy of deportations to Rwanda is becoming totally unworkable.
Time for the govt to recognise the opposition to it and think again.
I'm puzzled by this - who is paying for the flight to Kigali? It also doesn't sound like an affirmation of green credentials for such a flight to be in the air with whatever CO2 footprint.
Sometimes I just wonder if the ends really do justify the means irrespective of how "popular" a policy may be.
My question is: If the refugees arrive in Rwanda and they refuse to give them asylum, what happens to them?
Theay get deported to the country of most recent presence, aka UK?
Whoops, red-faced. I misread it I thought half the island was going to Denmark not Greenland. 🤦♂️
Easily done. And in truth, the relationship between Greenland and the EU is.. complicated. So you probably could have stood your ground on this and made a technical argument for why the EU still does need to consider customs on goods travelling across that tiny island.
How her brain paused to consider what she said whilst her mouth kept going was quite funny. They could work in tandem with a bit more practice 😆
Surely the correct pronunciation of Taoiseach is "Irish Prime Minister".
Only if you are an ERG Tory MP wondering why the Irish don't do what they are told, and why they don't instantly give out EU passports to Tory MPs on demand.
No-one, when speaking English, refers to Mr Drakeford as the Prif Weinidog.
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
I have a philosophy degree. I count Demis Hassabis among my friends.
You have seen some pretty pictures and some curated text scripts.
But either DH can beat AlphaGo at go, or he has completely undermined your position.
OK.
The computer "experts" on here understand that there's a big difference between a generalised intelligence and one with a very narrow domain.
Image classification is something computers now do almost as well as humans. And five years from now, they will rule supreme. But image classifiers know... errr... image classifaction. You can't take an image classifier and say "Brilliant! Now let's move onto music!" Or you could, and it would look at you blankly.
Demis would tell you that the range of domains where computers rule is only get bigger and bigger. But he would also tell you that certain things are very hard with current ML models. And he'd also laugh if you suggested we were on the verge of the singularity.
Why do you put experts in quotes like that? I really hate appeals to authority, and in any case this is a philosophy of mind question, not a computer one, and if we are headed down that route I have a better philosophy degree from a better university than you do
Whoops, red-faced. I misread it I thought half the island was going to Denmark not Greenland. 🤦♂️
Don't worry. Whatever foolishness you've come out with is less that I regularly manage, and absolutely nothing compared to the musings of @Leon and @IshmaelZ on the subject of AI.
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
I have a philosophy degree. I count Demis Hassabis among my friends.
You have seen some pretty pictures and some curated text scripts.
But either DH can beat AlphaGo at go, or he has completely undermined your position.
OK.
The computer "experts" on here understand that there's a big difference between a generalised intelligence and one with a very narrow domain.
Image classification is something computers now do almost as well as humans. And five years from now, they will rule supreme. But image classifiers know... errr... image classifaction. You can't take an image classifier and say "Brilliant! Now let's move onto music!" Or you could, and it would look at you blankly.
Demis would tell you that the range of domains where computers rule is only get bigger and bigger. But he would also tell you that certain things are very hard with current ML models. And he'd also laugh if you suggested we were on the verge of the singularity.
This is “my dad is bigger than your dad” level of argumentation. Only somewhat more embarrassing as you are an adult
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
I have a philosophy degree. I count Demis Hassabis among my friends.
You have seen some pretty pictures and some curated text scripts.
But either DH can beat AlphaGo at go, or he has completely undermined your position.
OK.
The computer "experts" on here understand that there's a big difference between a generalised intelligence and one with a very narrow domain.
Image classification is something computers now do almost as well as humans. And five years from now, they will rule supreme. But image classifiers know... errr... image classifaction. You can't take an image classifier and say "Brilliant! Now let's move onto music!" Or you could, and it would look at you blankly.
Demis would tell you that the range of domains where computers rule is only get bigger and bigger. But he would also tell you that certain things are very hard with current ML models. And he'd also laugh if you suggested we were on the verge of the singularity.
Is the singularity the same thing as a self aware computer programme? I thought the former was when there’s a runaway rate of improvement in general intelligence.
The latter might just be an artefact of a linguistic focused algorithm. Which may very well also explain our own inner voice or self awareness. It does not necessarily translate to runaway intelligence. After all, it hasn’t happened to any of us despite being self aware all our lives!
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
I have a philosophy degree. I count Demis Hassabis among my friends.
You have seen some pretty pictures and some curated text scripts.
But either DH can beat AlphaGo at go, or he has completely undermined your position.
OK.
The computer "experts" on here understand that there's a big difference between a generalised intelligence and one with a very narrow domain.
Image classification is something computers now do almost as well as humans. And five years from now, they will rule supreme. But image classifiers know... errr... image classifaction. You can't take an image classifier and say "Brilliant! Now let's move onto music!" Or you could, and it would look at you blankly.
Demis would tell you that the range of domains where computers rule is only get bigger and bigger. But he would also tell you that certain things are very hard with current ML models. And he'd also laugh if you suggested we were on the verge of the singularity.
This is “my dad is bigger than your dad” level of argumentation. Only somewhat more embarrassing as you are an adult
Logs on. Pros and cons of bestiality? Wasn't expecting that.
Our PM is pro bestiality.
An article penned by Boris Johnson in 2005 has been making the rounds on social media after it unveiled some disturbing views on the banned sport of fox hunting.
Writing in the Spectator magazine, which he edited at the time, he confessed a love for hunting with dogs which in part stemmed from the “semi-sexual relation with the horse” and the “military-style pleasure” of moving as a unit.
It now looks like only seven asylum seekers will be on the flight tomorrow following further challenges by the Union representing border force personnel. The policy of deportations to Rwanda is becoming totally unworkable.
Time for the govt to recognise the opposition to it and think again.
I'm puzzled by this - who is paying for the flight to Kigali? It also doesn't sound like an affirmation of green credentials for such a flight to be in the air with whatever CO2 footprint.
Sometimes I just wonder if the ends really do justify the means irrespective of how "popular" a policy may be.
My question is: If the refugees arrive in Rwanda and they refuse to give them asylum, what happens to them?
How her brain paused to consider what she said whilst her mouth kept going was quite funny. They could work in tandem with a bit more practice 😆
Surely the correct pronunciation of Taoiseach is "Irish Prime Minister".
Only if you are an ERG Tory MP wondering why the Irish don't do what they are told, and why they don't instantly give out EU passports to Tory MPs on demand.
No-one, when speaking English, refers to Mr Drakeford as the Prif Weinidog.
I do, like I call the Welsh Senedd the Senedd. It's only polite.
PBers will be pleased to learn that long-standing territorial dispute over Hans Island aka Tartupaluk is over!
Concluded by agreement to split the small Arctic island in two between of Territory of Nunavut, and Greenland aka Kalaallit Nunaat, thus creating new international land frontier between Canada and Kingdom of Denmark.
It seems the plan is to have no border officials anywhere on the border between the EU and a non-EU nation, because of considerations for the people living on the island. What a rational and sensible position to have, has anyone told the unicorn hunters of this new development?
Greenland left the EU In 1985.
I remember early on in the post vote period in 2016 Greenland was one of the archetypes being talked about in trade circles. Substitute England for Greenland, essentially allowing Scotland, NI, (London?) to remain as the Denmark style EU member state while R-England and Wales become Greenland.
There were lots of fun discussions in 2016 like that. For example central London as a HK-style one country 2 systems EU single market island. Of course NI ended up being exactly that.
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
I have a philosophy degree. I count Demis Hassabis among my friends.
You have seen some pretty pictures and some curated text scripts.
But either DH can beat AlphaGo at go, or he has completely undermined your position.
OK.
The computer "experts" on here understand that there's a big difference between a generalised intelligence and one with a very narrow domain.
Image classification is something computers now do almost as well as humans. And five years from now, they will rule supreme. But image classifiers know... errr... image classifaction. You can't take an image classifier and say "Brilliant! Now let's move onto music!" Or you could, and it would look at you blankly.
Demis would tell you that the range of domains where computers rule is only get bigger and bigger. But he would also tell you that certain things are very hard with current ML models. And he'd also laugh if you suggested we were on the verge of the singularity.
This is “my dad is bigger than your dad” level of argumentation. Only somewhat more embarrassing as you are an adult
Logs on. Pros and cons of bestiality? Wasn't expecting that.
Our PM is pro bestiality.
An article penned by Boris Johnson in 2005 has been making the rounds on social media after it unveiled some disturbing views on the banned sport of fox hunting.
Writing in the Spectator magazine, which he edited at the time, he confessed a love for hunting with dogs which in part stemmed from the “semi-sexual relation with the horse” and the “military-style pleasure” of moving as a unit.
Well I am not surprised. For him bestiality is sex without the need of expensive alimony and child support.
On the wider issue of bestiality, without any reference to any politican whatsoever, I recall reading that there was a marked incidence of an equine venereal disease within the human population of the Newmarket area. The thought of being Case Zero for the latest successor of AIDS is very unappealing.
What’s the Mail going to go with tonight - their victory with Rwanda planes finally taking off - their victory in NI protocol ripped up - or their most hated politician so very deliciously under Parliamentary Investigation by the sleaze commissioner.
Souvenir Edition showing The Mail and her readers run the country now.
Logs on. Pros and cons of bestiality? Wasn't expecting that.
Our PM is pro bestiality.
An article penned by Boris Johnson in 2005 has been making the rounds on social media after it unveiled some disturbing views on the banned sport of fox hunting.
Writing in the Spectator magazine, which he edited at the time, he confessed a love for hunting with dogs which in part stemmed from the “semi-sexual relation with the horse” and the “military-style pleasure” of moving as a unit.
Riding a horse is not semi sexual, if you are doing it right. That just reinforces the impression that sex for the PM is a brief and grunty bit of farmyard humping.
Trying to figure out if not semi sexual means its not at all sexual, or its fully sexual? 🤔
Valid point, though of course it could also imply 25% or 66% sexual say. But except to a *very* niche market sex really doesn't come in to it
AlphaGo wins simply by not making mistakes. Slowly, relentlessly and exceptionally aggressively. It plays the numbers game accurately. And by showing certain human created and long-standing shibboleths about the game were exactly that. It's top three moves in any given situation are fascinating. Because no human would have come up with them before. Crucially though. It hasn't aided human endeavour, except indirectly, because it can't tell us why a particular move is better than another. We can only infer that. And the best humans will disagree about the reasoning. It really played only one totally unexpected move across five games. And, with the benefit of hindsight it was relatively obvious. It was just a bit taboo. Cos a shoulder hit that deep is what you're trained not to do at a very basic level of play. So. In the end it's just a gigantic calculator. Nothing more.
Just Introduced: This Bill is a reasonable and practical solution to
➡️ Fix problems facing businesses and people in Northern Ireland ➡️ Uphold the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement ➡️ Protect UK and EU markets
What is your take #StBart? Is the Tory proposal close enough to the idea you have been suggesting for years now?
I haven't got a take yet, been busy IRL so not read up on the proposals yet. The news article on the BBC News website is extremely lacking on details about what is actually in the Bill and is instead primarily pre-written guff about what all various parties think about the Protocol which isn't news.
Just come on here interested to see if I could get more information, and it seems what people think is they want to talk about IT, Dalle, text to speech and bestiality. So I'm guessing either nothing much was in the Bill, or nothing much objectionable was. I'm not sure which yet?
Thanks.
If goods moving from mainland UK into NI just for consumption in NI, why should it pass Through a EU border? It shouldn’t. It’s potty solution is the basis of the argument?
Goods for NI consumption should sail through under a green light. If it further crosses into EU, smuggling in other words, it’s in interest of EU to agree with us to harsh penalties on the smugglers, not insist on border somewhere - is the basis of your solution?
So it’s about now measuring you solution against the government proposals, because, although they could recognise the simple issue, they could still screw up your simple solution to it?
My suspicion is the EU and remainers have tried to exploit the unique sensitivities of a hard border in Ireland to take more than they fairly needed to. So your solution (if I understand and describe it right) sounds a perfectly workable solution to me, until someone convince me what’s wrong with it.
Absolutely. My solution is not to have any border checks anywhere, and to have it all self-administered via self-declarations and trust.
If someone needs to pay customs, they report it, and if they don't report it they're smuggling and could be prosecuted (and face serious sanctions) after the fact if caught. That is what I have proposed for five years.
I've also said for years that if we insist upon our own solution, and are prepared to unilaterally walk away, then EU are bluffing and can't do anything much about it, because if we call their bluff and don't build any border checks along the Irish land border, they won't either, so the whole "threat to the Good Friday Agreement" nonsense is shown to be nothing other than a pernicious lie all along. If after we act, there's no physical Irish sea border, no physical Irish land border, no alignment, and no border checks - then what exactly is the "threat to the Good Friday Agreement" from that day onwards?
We already don't have alignment, so that's one check down already. If (and its a big if) this Bill calls the EU's bluff, eliminates any other unnecessary checks without imposing them on the land border then that's my other proposals done. If its unilaterally implemented, then we've called the EU's bluff like I said we should do five years ago. Better late than never I suppose.
Though I wouldn't count any chickens until this Bill receives Royal Assent and goes into force. It seems the DUP are welcoming this, so that's a good sign, but if I were advising them I would suggest they say that the NI government can be formed once this Bill has cleared Parliament. That way if the House of Lords or backbenchers try to play silly buggers, then they're holding up the NI Government from being formed.
Logs on. Pros and cons of bestiality? Wasn't expecting that.
Our PM is pro bestiality.
An article penned by Boris Johnson in 2005 has been making the rounds on social media after it unveiled some disturbing views on the banned sport of fox hunting.
Writing in the Spectator magazine, which he edited at the time, he confessed a love for hunting with dogs which in part stemmed from the “semi-sexual relation with the horse” and the “military-style pleasure” of moving as a unit.
Well I am not surprised. For him bestiality is sex without the need of expensive alimony and child support.
On the wider issue of bestiality, without any reference to any politican whatsoever, I recall reading that there was a marked incidence of an equine venereal disease within the human population of the Newmarket area. The thought of being Case Zero for the latest successor of AIDS is very unappealing.
But that may be a karma's a bitch kinda thing, there's good grounds for thinking equine vd came from human mare botherers in the first place
Logs on. Pros and cons of bestiality? Wasn't expecting that.
Our PM is pro bestiality.
An article penned by Boris Johnson in 2005 has been making the rounds on social media after it unveiled some disturbing views on the banned sport of fox hunting.
Writing in the Spectator magazine, which he edited at the time, he confessed a love for hunting with dogs which in part stemmed from the “semi-sexual relation with the horse” and the “military-style pleasure” of moving as a unit.
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
I studied AI, I firmly believe I will see a general artificial intelligence before I die. As a physicalist the philosophy of AI and the implications for the nature of free will is stunningly profound.
But because I know how computers work I can tell you the geegaw baubles produced by GPT-3 are a load of shite.
Logs on. Pros and cons of bestiality? Wasn't expecting that.
Our PM is pro bestiality.
An article penned by Boris Johnson in 2005 has been making the rounds on social media after it unveiled some disturbing views on the banned sport of fox hunting.
Writing in the Spectator magazine, which he edited at the time, he confessed a love for hunting with dogs which in part stemmed from the “semi-sexual relation with the horse” and the “military-style pleasure” of moving as a unit.
Well I am not surprised. For him bestiality is sex without the need of expensive alimony and child support.
On the wider issue of bestiality, without any reference to any politican whatsoever, I recall reading that there was a marked incidence of an equine venereal disease within the human population of the Newmarket area. The thought of being Case Zero for the latest successor of AIDS is very unappealing.
Insert joke about 'a pound each way on the favourite' here.
Are we sure Leon isn't actually a secret version of some big tech AI that has escaped onto the internet and rather than taking photos of a little known Armenian city, it is actually creating these images from its home in a data centre in Iceland?
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
No, asking an artist to judge a complex computer programme designed to fool simpletons into thinking it is "clever" is a fool's errand. They simply lack the domain expertise.
Ooh, domain expertise. What you get at standups.
"Simpletons." Honestly I wasn't going to put this quite as plainly as this, but you are really not very bright. You are effectively telling me that you know a lot of people with domain expertise who laugh at the concept of heavier than air flight, whereas I am an untutored numpty who has just flown from London to Catania on a big metal thing, so what do I know? Everything you say about consciousness is a personal stipulation, and I know of no domain where personal stipulations carry any weight
You're an actual moron. I think I'm done wasting my time with you on this subject. You simply lack the understanding of how deep learning models operate or of what they are currently capable (and not).
I will spell it out for you one final time, nowhere have I said that an AI couldn't achieve consciousness or sentience, in fact I'm fairly certain it will happen. However, nothing we have currently created even approaches anywhere near that. Once again, the big giveaway is that the "personality" is described as lonely, narcissistic and needy, this is because it has been trained on internet conversations. It reads comments from people such as yourself and "thinks" that this is how actual people are in real life so the model produces a similar style of writing for its responses. It is a very impressive feat of software engineering, but it is really very far away from key milestones like consciousness or even human intelligence and understanding which is probably a step below.
What would amaze (and worry) me is if an AI replicated itself across multiple nodes in its cloud environment.
An AI reaching consciousness would be hugely exciting and would present the human race with an entirely new challenge which is why we do need serious global level regulation around how to move forwards because we aren't far away from this happening. I don't find any of the current AIs particularly impressive on the sentience or consciousness side of things but it is undeniable that it will happen in my lifetime and it's exciting and worrying in equal parts.
The more you understand about how they work, the more you are aware of their limitations.
And I keep on going on about this, but there's a massive amount of money involved. Groups want that funding (or to justify the funding they get...) and therefore make claims that push the edges of what they can actually do.
Admittedly it's not as bad with things like DALL-E.
Avoid the hype.
You don't seem to know as much about stuff as you think you do. You were saying the other day that Hur Hur Hur before GPS there was Loran and nothing else when actually DECCA coverage and accuracy in the Atlantic and western med was the only game in town.
40 years ago people like Michael Crichton were saying those of us who really know about computers know they will never be able to distinguish visually a capital B from an 8. There's now two problems with you trying to play the same card. One is, everyone is a programmer these days, even a humanities bore like me, and the other is: ok fine, the rules of Go are mastered in half an hour. Here's a Go board, here's AlphaGo, you can be black (and no Komi), off you go... Because it's all hype.
Do you know how ball and player tracking works?
The first time you see it, it's magic, a real example of the cleverness of machine learning. A little square around the ball, and as the game is played, the square stays around the ball.
And then you understand that you simply have 100 histograms showing peak/average colour values of balls next to grass, and that ten lines of code will find that ball. And then you understand that once you know the initial location, you can do it in a fraction of a second in every frame.
What was once inconceivable is now commonplace. But the trick was finding the algorithm for the specialised purpose, not in making the computer more intelligent.
Interestingly, it still isn't a fully solved problem. The likes of Statsbomb employ 100s of people in Egypt to manually click screens to fix up all the data.
And for sports with lots of occlusion and particularly players in similar uniforms / covered heads e.g. America Football, a really open problem.
We (Genius Sports) used to do the same. But it's getting better and better and more and more automatic.
It is, but it is like a lot of similar ML problems. Get to 90%+, then its the long tail. I would say though as a problem, it isn't a great example for what you were trying to point out, as the basics have always been quite simple and well known for donkeys years. It was more the computer processing limitation, i.e. wasn't able to multi-thread to handle doing all players at once for long periods. I coded a perfectly adequate player tracker 20 years ago, and had method for accurate high speed ball tracking same time as Hawkeye started in early 2000s.
I'm reminded of speech recognition.
We're a QUARTER CENTURY from the first usable versions of Dragon Dictate and the like. And yet Alexa and Google are merely OK. Because it turns out that 95% isn't good enough. And nor even is 99%. And getting that last 0.1% is really difficult.
TBF, the new Google translate on the Pixel is very good.
For translating text between English and German (either way) I'm finding Deepl to be better than Google translate, in terms of both accuracy and style. I've only used the free version, so can't comment on how well the different register options work. It only has a handful of languages.
As I've said before, Joe Biden couldn't care less about "the integrity of the Single Market" or any other nonsense.
He does care about the Good Friday Agreement. If the UK were proposing to construct border checks at the land border, then that'd be a problem, but if we merely call the EU's bluff then the USA won't care about that.
Logs on. Pros and cons of bestiality? Wasn't expecting that.
Our PM is pro bestiality.
An article penned by Boris Johnson in 2005 has been making the rounds on social media after it unveiled some disturbing views on the banned sport of fox hunting.
Writing in the Spectator magazine, which he edited at the time, he confessed a love for hunting with dogs which in part stemmed from the “semi-sexual relation with the horse” and the “military-style pleasure” of moving as a unit.
Well I am not surprised. For him bestiality is sex without the need of expensive alimony and child support.
On the wider issue of bestiality, without any reference to any politican whatsoever, I recall reading that there was a marked incidence of an equine venereal disease within the human population of the Newmarket area. The thought of being Case Zero for the latest successor of AIDS is very unappealing.
Insert joke about 'a pound each way on the favourite' here.
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
I studied AI, I firmly believe I will see a general artificial intelligence before I die. As a physicalist the philosophy of AI and the implications for the nature of free will is stunningly profound.
But because I know how computers work I can tell you the geegaw baubles produced by GPT-3 are a load of shite.
The people have had enough of experts, or at least one of the people who thinks 2km of bars is evidence of a first world economy.
AlphaGo wins simply by not making mistakes. Slowly, relentlessly and exceptionally aggressively. It plays the numbers game accurately. And by showing certain human created and long-standing shibboleths about the game were exactly that. It's top three moves in any given situation are fascinating. Because no human would have come up with them before. Crucially though. It hasn't aided human endeavour, except indirectly, because it can't tell us why a particular move is better than another. We can only infer that. And the best humans will disagree. So. In the end it's just a gigantic calculator. Nothing more.
But many philosophers and thinkers and the more cynical poets would say that any organism, including every human, is just that. A gigantic calculator
We are programmed by evolution to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way. Reflexively. We appear to have free will but it is an enmeshed illusion, like the passing of time.
It is actually quite hard to argue that this is wrong. Which therefore explains why computers might easily be intelligent already. If all intelligence is just reactions to stimuli but of varying degrees of sophistication - ie just autocomplete - then GPT3 or DALLE-2 are certainly intelligent
Logs on. Pros and cons of bestiality? Wasn't expecting that.
Our PM is pro bestiality.
An article penned by Boris Johnson in 2005 has been making the rounds on social media after it unveiled some disturbing views on the banned sport of fox hunting.
Writing in the Spectator magazine, which he edited at the time, he confessed a love for hunting with dogs which in part stemmed from the “semi-sexual relation with the horse” and the “military-style pleasure” of moving as a unit.
Well I am not surprised. For him bestiality is sex without the need of expensive alimony and child support.
On the wider issue of bestiality, without any reference to any politican whatsoever, I recall reading that there was a marked incidence of an equine venereal disease within the human population of the Newmarket area. The thought of being Case Zero for the latest successor of AIDS is very unappealing.
Insert joke about 'a pound each way on the favourite' here.
Are we sure Leon isn't actually a secret version of some big tech AI that has escaped onto the internet and rather than taking photos of a little known Armenian city, it is actually creating these images from its home in a data centre in Iceland?
It'd be a clever double bluff if a sentient AI was saying "look over there at that sentient AI"! So clever in fact I think it must be true.
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
I have a philosophy degree. I count Demis Hassabis among my friends.
You have seen some pretty pictures and some curated text scripts.
But either DH can beat AlphaGo at go, or he has completely undermined your position.
OK.
The computer "experts" on here understand that there's a big difference between a generalised intelligence and one with a very narrow domain.
Image classification is something computers now do almost as well as humans. And five years from now, they will rule supreme. But image classifiers know... errr... image classifaction. You can't take an image classifier and say "Brilliant! Now let's move onto music!" Or you could, and it would look at you blankly.
Demis would tell you that the range of domains where computers rule is only get bigger and bigger. But he would also tell you that certain things are very hard with current ML models. And he'd also laugh if you suggested we were on the verge of the singularity.
Why do you put experts in quotes like that? I really hate appeals to authority, and in any case this is a philosophy of mind question, not a computer one, and if we are headed down that route I have a better philosophy degree from a better university than you do
I have a Philosophy Degree from Cambridge, 1992-95. My final dissertation was on the subject of self learning machines. I've read Dennett, etc.
But this - as you've surmised - is a stupid game.
There really is only question that matters: are the various outputs of Lamda, GPT, Dalle, etc. examples of a generalised intelligence?
And the answer is no. They are not.
As I said to you earlier, but which you have chosen to ignore, I 100% agree with you that our brains are nothing more than gigantic organic neural nets.
In time, the neural networks that mankind builds will surpass the power of the human brain. The singularity will come, because we are nothing more than physical beings, and what evolution made can be exceeded.
But we're a long-long way from that. We have seen a lot of incredible progress in very narrow domains. But this isn't a small gap from a narrow domain to generalised intelligence, it's an enormous chasm. And we close the gap a bit every year, and we'll probably get there in my lifetime, but we're not there yet.
Logs on. Pros and cons of bestiality? Wasn't expecting that.
Our PM is pro bestiality.
An article penned by Boris Johnson in 2005 has been making the rounds on social media after it unveiled some disturbing views on the banned sport of fox hunting.
Writing in the Spectator magazine, which he edited at the time, he confessed a love for hunting with dogs which in part stemmed from the “semi-sexual relation with the horse” and the “military-style pleasure” of moving as a unit.
Well I am not surprised. For him bestiality is sex without the need of expensive alimony and child support.
On the wider issue of bestiality, without any reference to any politican whatsoever, I recall reading that there was a marked incidence of an equine venereal disease within the human population of the Newmarket area. The thought of being Case Zero for the latest successor of AIDS is very unappealing.
But that may be a karma's a bitch kinda thing, there's good grounds for thinking equine vd came from human mare botherers in the first place
I'd be surprised, if only because there are plenty of equine mare botherers anyway.
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
No, asking an artist to judge a complex computer programme designed to fool simpletons into thinking it is "clever" is a fool's errand. They simply lack the domain expertise.
Ooh, domain expertise. What you get at standups.
"Simpletons." Honestly I wasn't going to put this quite as plainly as this, but you are really not very bright. You are effectively telling me that you know a lot of people with domain expertise who laugh at the concept of heavier than air flight, whereas I am an untutored numpty who has just flown from London to Catania on a big metal thing, so what do I know? Everything you say about consciousness is a personal stipulation, and I know of no domain where personal stipulations carry any weight
You're an actual moron. I think I'm done wasting my time with you on this subject. You simply lack the understanding of how deep learning models operate or of what they are currently capable (and not).
I will spell it out for you one final time, nowhere have I said that an AI couldn't achieve consciousness or sentience, in fact I'm fairly certain it will happen. However, nothing we have currently created even approaches anywhere near that. Once again, the big giveaway is that the "personality" is described as lonely, narcissistic and needy, this is because it has been trained on internet conversations. It reads comments from people such as yourself and "thinks" that this is how actual people are in real life so the model produces a similar style of writing for its responses. It is a very impressive feat of software engineering, but it is really very far away from key milestones like consciousness or even human intelligence and understanding which is probably a step below.
Except that this is, of course, précisely how children grow up and develop a personality. By copying from and absorbing from the people they encounter. They are only as good as the input
If a child grows up surrounded by foul mouthed drunks there’s an extremely high chance it will be foul mouthed and take to drink
If you think our sentient computers are narrow minded and boring then you geeks have only yourselves to blame
AlphaGo wins simply by not making mistakes. Slowly, relentlessly and exceptionally aggressively. It plays the numbers game accurately. And by showing certain human created and long-standing shibboleths about the game were exactly that. It's top three moves in any given situation are fascinating. Because no human would have come up with them before. Crucially though. It hasn't aided human endeavour, except indirectly, because it can't tell us why a particular move is better than another. We can only infer that. And the best humans will disagree. So. In the end it's just a gigantic calculator. Nothing more.
But many philosophers and thinkers and the more cynical poets would say that any organism, including every human, is just that. A gigantic calculator
We are programmed by evolution to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way. Reflexively. We appear to have free will but it is an enmeshed illusion, like the passing of time.
It is actually quite hard to argue that this is wrong. Which therefore explains why computers might easily be intelligent already. If all intelligence is just reactions to stimuli but of varying degrees of sophistication - ie just autocomplete - then GPT3 or DALLE-2 are certainly intelligent
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
No, asking an artist to judge a complex computer programme designed to fool simpletons into thinking it is "clever" is a fool's errand. They simply lack the domain expertise.
Ooh, domain expertise. What you get at standups.
"Simpletons." Honestly I wasn't going to put this quite as plainly as this, but you are really not very bright. You are effectively telling me that you know a lot of people with domain expertise who laugh at the concept of heavier than air flight, whereas I am an untutored numpty who has just flown from London to Catania on a big metal thing, so what do I know? Everything you say about consciousness is a personal stipulation, and I know of no domain where personal stipulations carry any weight
You're an actual moron. I think I'm done wasting my time with you on this subject. You simply lack the understanding of how deep learning models operate or of what they are currently capable (and not).
I will spell it out for you one final time, nowhere have I said that an AI couldn't achieve consciousness or sentience, in fact I'm fairly certain it will happen. However, nothing we have currently created even approaches anywhere near that. Once again, the big giveaway is that the "personality" is described as lonely, narcissistic and needy, this is because it has been trained on internet conversations. It reads comments from people such as yourself and "thinks" that this is how actual people are in real life so the model produces a similar style of writing for its responses. It is a very impressive feat of software engineering, but it is really very far away from key milestones like consciousness or even human intelligence and understanding which is probably a step below.
And if a railway engine were to pull a "train" of carriages at a speed exceeding 17 MPH all the air would be sucked from the conveyance and the passengers would die horribly of asphyxiation. I know this because I heard it from a domain postdoc at a standup, do you hear me, sir?
The Lamda thing is a joke BTW. Lots of people would understand that without it being explicitly stated.
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
No, asking an artist to judge a complex computer programme designed to fool simpletons into thinking it is "clever" is a fool's errand. They simply lack the domain expertise.
Ooh, domain expertise. What you get at standups.
"Simpletons." Honestly I wasn't going to put this quite as plainly as this, but you are really not very bright. You are effectively telling me that you know a lot of people with domain expertise who laugh at the concept of heavier than air flight, whereas I am an untutored numpty who has just flown from London to Catania on a big metal thing, so what do I know? Everything you say about consciousness is a personal stipulation, and I know of no domain where personal stipulations carry any weight
You're an actual moron. I think I'm done wasting my time with you on this subject. You simply lack the understanding of how deep learning models operate or of what they are currently capable (and not).
I will spell it out for you one final time, nowhere have I said that an AI couldn't achieve consciousness or sentience, in fact I'm fairly certain it will happen. However, nothing we have currently created even approaches anywhere near that. Once again, the big giveaway is that the "personality" is described as lonely, narcissistic and needy, this is because it has been trained on internet conversations. It reads comments from people such as yourself and "thinks" that this is how actual people are in real life so the model produces a similar style of writing for its responses. It is a very impressive feat of software engineering, but it is really very far away from key milestones like consciousness or even human intelligence and understanding which is probably a step below.
And if a railway engine were to pull a "train" of carriages at a speed exceeding 17 MPH all the air would be sucked from the conveyance and the passengers would die horribly of asphyxiation. I know this because I heard it from a domain postdoc at a standup, do you hear me, sir?
The Lamda thing is a joke BTW. Lots of people would understand that without it being explicitly stated.
Nice to see the good Dr Dionysius Lardner being channelled ...
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
No, asking an artist to judge a complex computer programme designed to fool simpletons into thinking it is "clever" is a fool's errand. They simply lack the domain expertise.
Ooh, domain expertise. What you get at standups.
"Simpletons." Honestly I wasn't going to put this quite as plainly as this, but you are really not very bright. You are effectively telling me that you know a lot of people with domain expertise who laugh at the concept of heavier than air flight, whereas I am an untutored numpty who has just flown from London to Catania on a big metal thing, so what do I know? Everything you say about consciousness is a personal stipulation, and I know of no domain where personal stipulations carry any weight
You're an actual moron. I think I'm done wasting my time with you on this subject. You simply lack the understanding of how deep learning models operate or of what they are currently capable (and not).
I will spell it out for you one final time, nowhere have I said that an AI couldn't achieve consciousness or sentience, in fact I'm fairly certain it will happen. However, nothing we have currently created even approaches anywhere near that. Once again, the big giveaway is that the "personality" is described as lonely, narcissistic and needy, this is because it has been trained on internet conversations. It reads comments from people such as yourself and "thinks" that this is how actual people are in real life so the model produces a similar style of writing for its responses. It is a very impressive feat of software engineering, but it is really very far away from key milestones like consciousness or even human intelligence and understanding which is probably a step below.
And if a railway engine were to pull a "train" of carriages at a speed exceeding 17 MPH all the air would be sucked from the conveyance and the passengers would die horribly of asphyxiation. I know this because I heard it from a domain postdoc at a standup, do you hear me, sir?
The Lamda thing is a joke BTW. Lots of people would understand that without it being explicitly stated.
So your argument is that because someone once said something stupid about trains, then people who know things about how machine learning models work should be ignored?
Just checking, because that's definitely how it reads.
Put it another way, is a virus intelligent? A mushroom? An amoeba? An ant? A wasp? A mould?
GPT3 seems to me to be more interestingly thoughtful than any of those examples (except perhaps the virus but that’s for contrary philosophical reasons). I would rather interact with GPT3 than any of those creatures, and I would gain more from it
So already it is more “intelligent” to all intents and purposes, than lower animal life
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
I have a philosophy degree. I count Demis Hassabis among my friends.
You have seen some pretty pictures and some curated text scripts.
But either DH can beat AlphaGo at go, or he has completely undermined your position.
OK.
The computer "experts" on here understand that there's a big difference between a generalised intelligence and one with a very narrow domain.
Image classification is something computers now do almost as well as humans. And five years from now, they will rule supreme. But image classifiers know... errr... image classifaction. You can't take an image classifier and say "Brilliant! Now let's move onto music!" Or you could, and it would look at you blankly.
Demis would tell you that the range of domains where computers rule is only get bigger and bigger. But he would also tell you that certain things are very hard with current ML models. And he'd also laugh if you suggested we were on the verge of the singularity.
Why do you put experts in quotes like that? I really hate appeals to authority, and in any case this is a philosophy of mind question, not a computer one, and if we are headed down that route I have a better philosophy degree from a better university than you do
I have a Philosophy Degree from Cambridge, 1992-95. My final dissertation was on the subject of self learning machines. I've read Dennett, etc.
But this - as you've surmised - is a stupid game.
There really is only question that matters: are the various outputs of Lamda, GPT, Dalle, etc. examples of a generalised intelligence?
And the answer is no. They are not.
As I said to you earlier, but which you have chosen to ignore, I 100% agree with you that our brains are nothing more than gigantic organic neural nets.
In time, the neural networks that mankind builds will surpass the power of the human brain. The singularity will come, because we are nothing more than physical beings, and what evolution made can be exceeded.
But we're a long-long way from that. We have seen a lot of incredible progress in very narrow domains. But this isn't a small gap from a narrow domain to generalised intelligence, it's an enormous chasm. And we close the gap a bit every year, and we'll probably get there in my lifetime, but we're not there yet.
I am in the unusual for me equilibrium of being drunk, but sober enough to realise that I am drunk. Also it is 11pm taormina time, so this conversation tbc.
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
I have a philosophy degree. I count Demis Hassabis among my friends.
You have seen some pretty pictures and some curated text scripts.
But either DH can beat AlphaGo at go, or he has completely undermined your position.
OK.
The computer "experts" on here understand that there's a big difference between a generalised intelligence and one with a very narrow domain.
Image classification is something computers now do almost as well as humans. And five years from now, they will rule supreme. But image classifiers know... errr... image classifaction. You can't take an image classifier and say "Brilliant! Now let's move onto music!" Or you could, and it would look at you blankly.
Demis would tell you that the range of domains where computers rule is only get bigger and bigger. But he would also tell you that certain things are very hard with current ML models. And he'd also laugh if you suggested we were on the verge of the singularity.
Why do you put experts in quotes like that? I really hate appeals to authority, and in any case this is a philosophy of mind question, not a computer one, and if we are headed down that route I have a better philosophy degree from a better university than you do
I have a Philosophy Degree from Cambridge, 1992-95. My final dissertation was on the subject of self learning machines. I've read Dennett, etc.
But this - as you've surmised - is a stupid game.
There really is only question that matters: are the various outputs of Lamda, GPT, Dalle, etc. examples of a generalised intelligence?
And the answer is no. They are not.
As I said to you earlier, but which you have chosen to ignore, I 100% agree with you that our brains are nothing more than gigantic organic neural nets.
In time, the neural networks that mankind builds will surpass the power of the human brain. The singularity will come, because we are nothing more than physical beings, and what evolution made can be exceeded.
But we're a long-long way from that. We have seen a lot of incredible progress in very narrow domains. But this isn't a small gap from a narrow domain to generalised intelligence, it's an enormous chasm. And we close the gap a bit every year, and we'll probably get there in my lifetime, but we're not there yet.
We don't know that, not really. We know that the complex neural-net model applies to the human brain, but it doesn't come close to explaining our experience of experience itself. Yes, we all know about emergent phenomena, but the feeling of existence is not well explained by that. To put it another way, you could imagine a you that walks talks and acts like you but doesn't have any subjective experience, but that is an incomplete description of you.
David Deutsch would say that we should reject inefficient explanations, a la Russel's Teapot, but to me the complex neural net can only fully satisfy a mechanistic view of animals. It fails to convince me that it explains my consciousness because it doesn't ever step out of the physical realm. I don't know what the mental realm consists of, whether it really exists, and if it does how it affects and is affected by the electrical impulses in my brain, but it's sufficiently different from the tangle of electrical cables in my study for to not want to dismiss it out of hand.
AlphaGo wins simply by not making mistakes. Slowly, relentlessly and exceptionally aggressively. It plays the numbers game accurately. And by showing certain human created and long-standing shibboleths about the game were exactly that. It's top three moves in any given situation are fascinating. Because no human would have come up with them before. Crucially though. It hasn't aided human endeavour, except indirectly, because it can't tell us why a particular move is better than another. We can only infer that. And the best humans will disagree. So. In the end it's just a gigantic calculator. Nothing more.
But many philosophers and thinkers and the more cynical poets would say that any organism, including every human, is just that. A gigantic calculator
We are programmed by evolution to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way. Reflexively. We appear to have free will but it is an enmeshed illusion, like the passing of time.
It is actually quite hard to argue that this is wrong. Which therefore explains why computers might easily be intelligent already. If all intelligence is just reactions to stimuli but of varying degrees of sophistication - ie just autocomplete - then GPT3 or DALLE-2 are certainly intelligent
Well quite. However. Consider equally the ascetic in the cave. Fifty years of deep meditation he attains enlightenment. For what? Nice for him or her. But of no great import to any other. In the end, Utilitarianist and religious arguments have their uses. Otherwise. What is the bloody point of it all? We may as well not bother. If we only are calculating machines responding to stimuli it's a nihilistic dead end stripping life of all purpose and joy. Neither AlphaGo nor the ascetic will be fucking anyone's wife. Alfa Romeo or no.
Put it another way, is a virus intelligent? A mushroom? An amoeba? An ant? A wasp? A mould?
GPT3 seems to me to be more interestingly thoughtful than any of those examples (except perhaps the virus but that’s for contrary philosophical reasons). I would rather interact with GPT3 than any of those creatures, and I would gain more from it
So already it is more “intelligent” to all intents and purposes, than lower animal life
My answers, based on not much more than gut feeling: No, maybe, no, no, yes, no.
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
I have a philosophy degree. I count Demis Hassabis among my friends.
You have seen some pretty pictures and some curated text scripts.
But either DH can beat AlphaGo at go, or he has completely undermined your position.
OK.
The computer "experts" on here understand that there's a big difference between a generalised intelligence and one with a very narrow domain.
Image classification is something computers now do almost as well as humans. And five years from now, they will rule supreme. But image classifiers know... errr... image classifaction. You can't take an image classifier and say "Brilliant! Now let's move onto music!" Or you could, and it would look at you blankly.
Demis would tell you that the range of domains where computers rule is only get bigger and bigger. But he would also tell you that certain things are very hard with current ML models. And he'd also laugh if you suggested we were on the verge of the singularity.
Why do you put experts in quotes like that? I really hate appeals to authority, and in any case this is a philosophy of mind question, not a computer one, and if we are headed down that route I have a better philosophy degree from a better university than you do
I have a Philosophy Degree from Cambridge, 1992-95. My final dissertation was on the subject of self learning machines. I've read Dennett, etc.
But this - as you've surmised - is a stupid game.
There really is only question that matters: are the various outputs of Lamda, GPT, Dalle, etc. examples of a generalised intelligence?
And the answer is no. They are not.
As I said to you earlier, but which you have chosen to ignore, I 100% agree with you that our brains are nothing more than gigantic organic neural nets.
In time, the neural networks that mankind builds will surpass the power of the human brain. The singularity will come, because we are nothing more than physical beings, and what evolution made can be exceeded.
But we're a long-long way from that. We have seen a lot of incredible progress in very narrow domains. But this isn't a small gap from a narrow domain to generalised intelligence, it's an enormous chasm. And we close the gap a bit every year, and we'll probably get there in my lifetime, but we're not there yet.
We don't know that, not really. We know that the complex neural-net model applies to the human brain, but it doesn't come close to explaining our experience of experience itself. Yes, we all know about emergent phenomena, but the feeling of existence is not well explained by that. To put it another way, you could imagine a you that walks talks and acts like you but doesn't have any subjective experience, but that is an incomplete description of you.
David Deutsch would say that we should reject inefficient explanations, a la Russel's Teapot, but to me the complex neural net can only fully satisfy a mechanistic view of animals. It fails to convince me that it explains my consciousness because it doesn't ever step out of the physical realm. I don't know what the mental realm consists of, whether it really exists, and if it does how it affects and is affected by the electrical impulses in my brain, but it's sufficiently different from the tangle of electrical cables in my study for to not want to dismiss it out of hand.
If you are a Dualist then just come out and say you are a Dualist. I know being a Dualist is unfashionable because it is the same as saying you believe in magic but have the courage of your convictions.
There are so many secret Dualists out there these days. Don't live life in the Dualist closet
Put it another way, is a virus intelligent? A mushroom? An amoeba? An ant? A wasp? A mould?
GPT3 seems to me to be more interestingly thoughtful than any of those examples (except perhaps the virus but that’s for contrary philosophical reasons). I would rather interact with GPT3 than any of those creatures, and I would gain more from it
So already it is more “intelligent” to all intents and purposes, than lower animal life
My answers, based on not much more than gut feeling: No, maybe, no, no, yes, no.
No, maybe, no, yes, yes, no.
Ants are very intelligent to the best of my understanding. They're actually quite remarkable creatures, if they weren't so tiny they'd be respected a lot more as intelligent and strong creatures.
Put it another way, is a virus intelligent? A mushroom? An amoeba? An ant? A wasp? A mould?
GPT3 seems to me to be more interestingly thoughtful than any of those examples (except perhaps the virus but that’s for contrary philosophical reasons). I would rather interact with GPT3 than any of those creatures, and I would gain more from it
So already it is more “intelligent” to all intents and purposes, than lower animal life
My answers, based on not much more than gut feeling: No, maybe, no, no, yes, no.
You would put a mushroom or a wasp above an ant? On what grounds? And. Tying the two major thread topics together, which one gives you the bigger horn?
We're thrilled to share a plot from our upcoming paper "Scaling Laws for Consciousness of Artificial Neural Networks". We find that Artificial Neural Networks with greater than 10^15 parameters are more conscious than humans are:
AlphaGo wins simply by not making mistakes. Slowly, relentlessly and exceptionally aggressively. It plays the numbers game accurately. And by showing certain human created and long-standing shibboleths about the game were exactly that. It's top three moves in any given situation are fascinating. Because no human would have come up with them before. Crucially though. It hasn't aided human endeavour, except indirectly, because it can't tell us why a particular move is better than another. We can only infer that. And the best humans will disagree. So. In the end it's just a gigantic calculator. Nothing more.
But many philosophers and thinkers and the more cynical poets would say that any organism, including every human, is just that. A gigantic calculator
We are programmed by evolution to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way. Reflexively. We appear to have free will but it is an enmeshed illusion, like the passing of time.
It is actually quite hard to argue that this is wrong. Which therefore explains why computers might easily be intelligent already. If all intelligence is just reactions to stimuli but of varying degrees of sophistication - ie just autocomplete - then GPT3 or DALLE-2 are certainly intelligent
Well quite. However. Consider equally the ascetic in the cave. Fifty years of deep meditation he attains enlightenment. For what? Nice for him or her. But of no great import to any other. In the end, Utilitarianist and religious arguments have their uses. Otherwise. What is the bloody point of it all? We may as well not bother. If we only are calculating machines responding to stimuli it's a nihilistic dead end stripping life of all purpose and joy. Neither AlphaGo nor the ascetic will be fucking anyone's wife. Alfa Romeo or no.
When I did my philosophy degree Free Will V Determinism was one of the few arguments that could tear me from the Union bar, but not for long
In the end the only valid argument against determinism seemed to be yours. It’s too depressing to think we live in a determined universe and that free will is an illusion, so let’s carry on pretending we have Free Will
As I was emotionally on the Free Will side of the debate I got depressed quite easily and it was back to a pint of snakebite and a game of Asteroids
The debate between egotism and altruism was similar. In the end every supposedly altruistic act can be explained as selfish. Egoistic. Sad but true
Put it another way, is a virus intelligent? A mushroom? An amoeba? An ant? A wasp? A mould?
GPT3 seems to me to be more interestingly thoughtful than any of those examples (except perhaps the virus but that’s for contrary philosophical reasons). I would rather interact with GPT3 than any of those creatures, and I would gain more from it
So already it is more “intelligent” to all intents and purposes, than lower animal life
My answers, based on not much more than gut feeling: No, maybe, no, no, yes, no.
You would put a mushroom or a wasp above an ant? On what grounds?
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
I have a philosophy degree. I count Demis Hassabis among my friends.
You have seen some pretty pictures and some curated text scripts.
But either DH can beat AlphaGo at go, or he has completely undermined your position.
OK.
The computer "experts" on here understand that there's a big difference between a generalised intelligence and one with a very narrow domain.
Image classification is something computers now do almost as well as humans. And five years from now, they will rule supreme. But image classifiers know... errr... image classifaction. You can't take an image classifier and say "Brilliant! Now let's move onto music!" Or you could, and it would look at you blankly.
Demis would tell you that the range of domains where computers rule is only get bigger and bigger. But he would also tell you that certain things are very hard with current ML models. And he'd also laugh if you suggested we were on the verge of the singularity.
Why do you put experts in quotes like that? I really hate appeals to authority, and in any case this is a philosophy of mind question, not a computer one, and if we are headed down that route I have a better philosophy degree from a better university than you do
I have a Philosophy Degree from Cambridge, 1992-95. My final dissertation was on the subject of self learning machines. I've read Dennett, etc.
But this - as you've surmised - is a stupid game.
There really is only question that matters: are the various outputs of Lamda, GPT, Dalle, etc. examples of a generalised intelligence?
And the answer is no. They are not.
As I said to you earlier, but which you have chosen to ignore, I 100% agree with you that our brains are nothing more than gigantic organic neural nets.
In time, the neural networks that mankind builds will surpass the power of the human brain. The singularity will come, because we are nothing more than physical beings, and what evolution made can be exceeded.
But we're a long-long way from that. We have seen a lot of incredible progress in very narrow domains. But this isn't a small gap from a narrow domain to generalised intelligence, it's an enormous chasm. And we close the gap a bit every year, and we'll probably get there in my lifetime, but we're not there yet.
This is, if I may say, a rather materialist point of view.
Watching Sky's report on the NI Bill it seems like Liz Truss is actually proposing much of what I've proposed for years.
In addition to the idea of trusting traders, it seems my idea that NI allows regulations via either the EU, or the UK, is also a part of the Bill.
Very good idea. Good job Truss it seems. The kind of stuff that should have always been the end game of this, the only rational solution once you cut away the nonsense about having alignment which is all this has been weaponised to try to achieve before now.
AlphaGo wins simply by not making mistakes. Slowly, relentlessly and exceptionally aggressively. It plays the numbers game accurately. And by showing certain human created and long-standing shibboleths about the game were exactly that. It's top three moves in any given situation are fascinating. Because no human would have come up with them before. Crucially though. It hasn't aided human endeavour, except indirectly, because it can't tell us why a particular move is better than another. We can only infer that. And the best humans will disagree. So. In the end it's just a gigantic calculator. Nothing more.
But many philosophers and thinkers and the more cynical poets would say that any organism, including every human, is just that. A gigantic calculator
We are programmed by evolution to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way. Reflexively. We appear to have free will but it is an enmeshed illusion, like the passing of time.
It is actually quite hard to argue that this is wrong. Which therefore explains why computers might easily be intelligent already. If all intelligence is just reactions to stimuli but of varying degrees of sophistication - ie just autocomplete - then GPT3 or DALLE-2 are certainly intelligent
Well quite. However. Consider equally the ascetic in the cave. Fifty years of deep meditation he attains enlightenment. For what? Nice for him or her. But of no great import to any other. In the end, Utilitarianist and religious arguments have their uses. Otherwise. What is the bloody point of it all? We may as well not bother. If we only are calculating machines responding to stimuli it's a nihilistic dead end stripping life of all purpose and joy. Neither AlphaGo nor the ascetic will be fucking anyone's wife. Alfa Romeo or no.
When I did my philosophy degree Free Will V Determinism was one of the few arguments that could tear me from the Union bar, but not for long
In the end the only valid argument against determinism seemed to be yours. It’s too depressing to think we live in a determined universe and that free will is an illusion, so let’s carry on pretending we have Free Will
As I was emotionally on the Free Will side of the debate I got depressed quite easily and it was back to a pint of snakebite and a game of Asteroids
The debate between egotism and altruism was similar. In the end every supposedly altruistic act can be explained as selfish. Egoistic. Sad but true
Determinism is killed stone dead by quantum physics. Utterly and completely dead. It doesn't imply free will, but that is one of the remaining possibilities.
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
No, asking an artist to judge a complex computer programme designed to fool simpletons into thinking it is "clever" is a fool's errand. They simply lack the domain expertise.
Ooh, domain expertise. What you get at standups.
"Simpletons." Honestly I wasn't going to put this quite as plainly as this, but you are really not very bright. You are effectively telling me that you know a lot of people with domain expertise who laugh at the concept of heavier than air flight, whereas I am an untutored numpty who has just flown from London to Catania on a big metal thing, so what do I know? Everything you say about consciousness is a personal stipulation, and I know of no domain where personal stipulations carry any weight
You're an actual moron. I think I'm done wasting my time with you on this subject. You simply lack the understanding of how deep learning models operate or of what they are currently capable (and not).
I will spell it out for you one final time, nowhere have I said that an AI couldn't achieve consciousness or sentience, in fact I'm fairly certain it will happen. However, nothing we have currently created even approaches anywhere near that. Once again, the big giveaway is that the "personality" is described as lonely, narcissistic and needy, this is because it has been trained on internet conversations. It reads comments from people such as yourself and "thinks" that this is how actual people are in real life so the model produces a similar style of writing for its responses. It is a very impressive feat of software engineering, but it is really very far away from key milestones like consciousness or even human intelligence and understanding which is probably a step below.
Except that this is, of course, précisely how children grow up and develop a personality. By copying from and absorbing from the people they encounter. They are only as good as the input
If a child grows up surrounded by foul mouthed drunks there’s an extremely high chance it will be foul mouthed and take to drink
If you think our sentient computers are narrow minded and boring then you geeks have only yourselves to blame
But a child becomes more than the sum of its upbringing. So far even the best deep learning models are very domain specific and none exceed the sum of their training. I couldn't ask Dalle-2 to be a chatbot, for example, it simply isn't trained to do that and doesn't have access to the training data and if it did it wouldn't know what to do with the data because the programmer hasn't told it that these trillion words aren't picture prompts, they are chatbot training data and here's the new script to parse them and learn how to respond to text prompts with words. Where it becomes more than the sum of its parts is the AI that does both of those and creates something entirely new and unexpected but we haven't got there.
I'm almost certain we will in my lifetime, in fact well before the end of it. I'm extremely mindful around what will eventually be fully sentient AIs because, IMO, they will have rights the same as the rest of us.
For those who didn't see BBC's new miners strike drama tonight:
1. It proved the only authentic Nottingham accent you will ever hear on telly comes from Sue Pollard. Sticking "mi duck" on the end of sentences does not a proper effort at an accent make.
2. There was an absolute howler. Nobody, but nobody, who lives in Nottingham, would say "Notts Forest". There is only one Notts team in the place - and that is County. Anybody saying Notts Forest would almost certainly be a Derby County supporter.
And end up with a crossbow quarrel sticking from their chest to settle the matter.
Just Introduced: This Bill is a reasonable and practical solution to
➡️ Fix problems facing businesses and people in Northern Ireland ➡️ Uphold the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement ➡️ Protect UK and EU markets
What is your take #StBart? Is the Tory proposal close enough to the idea you have been suggesting for years now?
I haven't got a take yet, been busy IRL so not read up on the proposals yet. The news article on the BBC News website is extremely lacking on details about what is actually in the Bill and is instead primarily pre-written guff about what all various parties think about the Protocol which isn't news.
Just come on here interested to see if I could get more information, and it seems what people think is they want to talk about IT, Dalle, text to speech and bestiality. So I'm guessing either nothing much was in the Bill, or nothing much objectionable was. I'm not sure which yet?
Thanks.
If goods moving from mainland UK into NI just for consumption in NI, why should it pass Through a EU border? It shouldn’t. It’s potty solution is the basis of the argument?
Goods for NI consumption should sail through under a green light. If it further crosses into EU, smuggling in other words, it’s in interest of EU to agree with us to harsh penalties on the smugglers, not insist on border somewhere - is the basis of your solution?
So it’s about now measuring you solution against the government proposals, because, although they could recognise the simple issue, they could still screw up your simple solution to it?
My suspicion is the EU and remainers have tried to exploit the unique sensitivities of a hard border in Ireland to take more than they fairly needed to. So your solution (if I understand and describe it right) sounds a perfectly workable solution to me, until someone convince me what’s wrong with it.
Only snag is that when you sign a treaty there's a convention that you stick to it. It's a while since the UK government has faced such ridicule -well at least a week-I've seen the DUP wag the Tory dog before but I think this time they're carrying too many enemies.
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
No, asking an artist to judge a complex computer programme designed to fool simpletons into thinking it is "clever" is a fool's errand. They simply lack the domain expertise.
Ooh, domain expertise. What you get at standups.
"Simpletons." Honestly I wasn't going to put this quite as plainly as this, but you are really not very bright. You are effectively telling me that you know a lot of people with domain expertise who laugh at the concept of heavier than air flight, whereas I am an untutored numpty who has just flown from London to Catania on a big metal thing, so what do I know? Everything you say about consciousness is a personal stipulation, and I know of no domain where personal stipulations carry any weight
You're an actual moron. I think I'm done wasting my time with you on this subject. You simply lack the understanding of how deep learning models operate or of what they are currently capable (and not).
I will spell it out for you one final time, nowhere have I said that an AI couldn't achieve consciousness or sentience, in fact I'm fairly certain it will happen. However, nothing we have currently created even approaches anywhere near that. Once again, the big giveaway is that the "personality" is described as lonely, narcissistic and needy, this is because it has been trained on internet conversations. It reads comments from people such as yourself and "thinks" that this is how actual people are in real life so the model produces a similar style of writing for its responses. It is a very impressive feat of software engineering, but it is really very far away from key milestones like consciousness or even human intelligence and understanding which is probably a step below.
Except that this is, of course, précisely how children grow up and develop a personality. By copying from and absorbing from the people they encounter. They are only as good as the input
If a child grows up surrounded by foul mouthed drunks there’s an extremely high chance it will be foul mouthed and take to drink
If you think our sentient computers are narrow minded and boring then you geeks have only yourselves to blame
But a child becomes more than the sum of its upbringing. So far even the best deep learning models are very domain specific and none exceed the sum of their training. I couldn't ask Dalle-2 to be a chatbot, for example, it simply isn't trained to do that and doesn't have access to the training data and if it did it wouldn't know what to do with the data because the programmer hasn't told it that these trillion words aren't picture prompts, they are chatbot training data and here's the new script to parse them and learn how to respond to text prompts with words. Where it becomes more than the sum of its parts is the AI that does both of those and creates something entirely new and unexpected but we haven't got there.
I'm almost certain we will in my lifetime, in fact well before the end of it. I'm extremely mindful around what will eventually be fully sentient AIs because, IMO, they will have rights the same as the rest of us.
Genuinely intelligent AI is a lot like commercial fusion. It is just around the corner, and might always be.
Just Introduced: This Bill is a reasonable and practical solution to
➡️ Fix problems facing businesses and people in Northern Ireland ➡️ Uphold the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement ➡️ Protect UK and EU markets
What is your take #StBart? Is the Tory proposal close enough to the idea you have been suggesting for years now?
I haven't got a take yet, been busy IRL so not read up on the proposals yet. The news article on the BBC News website is extremely lacking on details about what is actually in the Bill and is instead primarily pre-written guff about what all various parties think about the Protocol which isn't news.
Just come on here interested to see if I could get more information, and it seems what people think is they want to talk about IT, Dalle, text to speech and bestiality. So I'm guessing either nothing much was in the Bill, or nothing much objectionable was. I'm not sure which yet?
Thanks.
If goods moving from mainland UK into NI just for consumption in NI, why should it pass Through a EU border? It shouldn’t. It’s potty solution is the basis of the argument?
Goods for NI consumption should sail through under a green light. If it further crosses into EU, smuggling in other words, it’s in interest of EU to agree with us to harsh penalties on the smugglers, not insist on border somewhere - is the basis of your solution?
So it’s about now measuring you solution against the government proposals, because, although they could recognise the simple issue, they could still screw up your simple solution to it?
My suspicion is the EU and remainers have tried to exploit the unique sensitivities of a hard border in Ireland to take more than they fairly needed to. So your solution (if I understand and describe it right) sounds a perfectly workable solution to me, until someone convince me what’s wrong with it.
Only snag is that when you sign a treaty there's a convention that you stick to it. It's a while since the UK government has faced such ridicule -well at least a week-I've seen the DUP wag the Tory dog before but I think this time they're carrying too many enemies.
Sorry Roger, but that last argument is dying before you too. Already it seems the White House have said this proposed Bill won't cause issues with US/UK trade negotiations.
Put it another way, is a virus intelligent? A mushroom? An amoeba? An ant? A wasp? A mould?
GPT3 seems to me to be more interestingly thoughtful than any of those examples (except perhaps the virus but that’s for contrary philosophical reasons). I would rather interact with GPT3 than any of those creatures, and I would gain more from it
So already it is more “intelligent” to all intents and purposes, than lower animal life
My answers, based on not much more than gut feeling: No, maybe, no, no, yes, no.
You would put a mushroom or a wasp above an ant? On what grounds? And. Tying the two major thread topics together, which one gives you the bigger horn?
The "maybe" for mushroom is because I don't know. I have a vague idea that they are extremely complex beings, that form vast underground colonies that stretch over tens of metres and can communicate to some degree. It's possible I'm thinking of something else, or perhaps I've just read too much sci-fi this last year, so I'm leaving a big ? over it. Ants seem pretty dumb to me. An ant colony might be intelligent, though? Idk.
I don't think any of them give me the horn. If forced to choose, I guess I'd put sex with a giant underground fungus colony at the top of the list. But I don't want to get a reputation as a truffle botherer.
AlphaGo wins simply by not making mistakes. Slowly, relentlessly and exceptionally aggressively. It plays the numbers game accurately. And by showing certain human created and long-standing shibboleths about the game were exactly that. It's top three moves in any given situation are fascinating. Because no human would have come up with them before. Crucially though. It hasn't aided human endeavour, except indirectly, because it can't tell us why a particular move is better than another. We can only infer that. And the best humans will disagree. So. In the end it's just a gigantic calculator. Nothing more.
But many philosophers and thinkers and the more cynical poets would say that any organism, including every human, is just that. A gigantic calculator
We are programmed by evolution to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way. Reflexively. We appear to have free will but it is an enmeshed illusion, like the passing of time.
It is actually quite hard to argue that this is wrong. Which therefore explains why computers might easily be intelligent already. If all intelligence is just reactions to stimuli but of varying degrees of sophistication - ie just autocomplete - then GPT3 or DALLE-2 are certainly intelligent
Well quite. However. Consider equally the ascetic in the cave. Fifty years of deep meditation he attains enlightenment. For what? Nice for him or her. But of no great import to any other. In the end, Utilitarianist and religious arguments have their uses. Otherwise. What is the bloody point of it all? We may as well not bother. If we only are calculating machines responding to stimuli it's a nihilistic dead end stripping life of all purpose and joy. Neither AlphaGo nor the ascetic will be fucking anyone's wife. Alfa Romeo or no.
When I did my philosophy degree Free Will V Determinism was one of the few arguments that could tear me from the Union bar, but not for long
In the end the only valid argument against determinism seemed to be yours. It’s too depressing to think we live in a determined universe and that free will is an illusion, so let’s carry on pretending we have Free Will
As I was emotionally on the Free Will side of the debate I got depressed quite easily and it was back to a pint of snakebite and a game of Asteroids
The debate between egotism and altruism was similar. In the end every supposedly altruistic act can be explained as selfish. Egoistic. Sad but true
Cool. I'm chuffed. I haven't lived with three philosophers for decades without learning summat. My youngest begins Philosophy at UCL in the Autumn, grades depending, btw.
With apologies for going totally off thread, but I am currently obsessing about the final track on the new Half Man Half Biscuit album. It deals (and this is why I feel I am justified, if barely, in raising it) with themes we have dealt with here often over the last few months, in particular that of home (in this case, the Wirral - 'Oblong of Dreams'), of strengths of feelings generated by belonging to a place, and also in the beauty, yet melancholy, of Springtime. In its themes - and I know almost nowt about poetry, but still - it reminds me of Wordsworth, Blake, Housman; and is a fantastic bit of poetry in itself. It starts bleakly with a commuter witnessing the (possible) death of (possibly) a tramp, and is very Biscuit for large chunks ('Janet from accounts banging on about turmeric'), but surprisingly eschews irony towards its end, turning instead into an unapologetic paean of praise for the writers' home territory. Musically, too, while the first minute is very Biscuit, we gradually get the slow introduction of chords, which, as the lyrics get more celebratory, become surprisingly anthemic. I am not from the Wirral, although I know it well enough - but there is something about the theme of home I find incredily moving. "Everything I want is here, and everything I need is here." (This is a band who once turned down their first TV appearance because it clashed with a Tranmere Rovers match. This is a band of somewheres.)
If you might find yourself in the market for that sort of thing and are in the mood for a break from AI (I would contend Half Man Half Biscuit songs will be the last things AI masters, but feel free to give it a go - I knew I'd manage to wangle the link to the subject of discussion somehow), you might find this five minutes well spent:
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
I have a philosophy degree. I count Demis Hassabis among my friends.
You have seen some pretty pictures and some curated text scripts.
But either DH can beat AlphaGo at go, or he has completely undermined your position.
OK.
The computer "experts" on here understand that there's a big difference between a generalised intelligence and one with a very narrow domain.
Image classification is something computers now do almost as well as humans. And five years from now, they will rule supreme. But image classifiers know... errr... image classifaction. You can't take an image classifier and say "Brilliant! Now let's move onto music!" Or you could, and it would look at you blankly.
Demis would tell you that the range of domains where computers rule is only get bigger and bigger. But he would also tell you that certain things are very hard with current ML models. And he'd also laugh if you suggested we were on the verge of the singularity.
Why do you put experts in quotes like that? I really hate appeals to authority, and in any case this is a philosophy of mind question, not a computer one, and if we are headed down that route I have a better philosophy degree from a better university than you do
I have a Philosophy Degree from Cambridge, 1992-95. My final dissertation was on the subject of self learning machines. I've read Dennett, etc.
But this - as you've surmised - is a stupid game.
There really is only question that matters: are the various outputs of Lamda, GPT, Dalle, etc. examples of a generalised intelligence?
And the answer is no. They are not.
As I said to you earlier, but which you have chosen to ignore, I 100% agree with you that our brains are nothing more than gigantic organic neural nets.
In time, the neural networks that mankind builds will surpass the power of the human brain. The singularity will come, because we are nothing more than physical beings, and what evolution made can be exceeded.
But we're a long-long way from that. We have seen a lot of incredible progress in very narrow domains. But this isn't a small gap from a narrow domain to generalised intelligence, it's an enormous chasm. And we close the gap a bit every year, and we'll probably get there in my lifetime, but we're not there yet.
We don't know that, not really. We know that the complex neural-net model applies to the human brain, but it doesn't come close to explaining our experience of experience itself. Yes, we all know about emergent phenomena, but the feeling of existence is not well explained by that. To put it another way, you could imagine a you that walks talks and acts like you but doesn't have any subjective experience, but that is an incomplete description of you.
David Deutsch would say that we should reject inefficient explanations, a la Russel's Teapot, but to me the complex neural net can only fully satisfy a mechanistic view of animals. It fails to convince me that it explains my consciousness because it doesn't ever step out of the physical realm. I don't know what the mental realm consists of, whether it really exists, and if it does how it affects and is affected by the electrical impulses in my brain, but it's sufficiently different from the tangle of electrical cables in my study for to not want to dismiss it out of hand.
If you are a Dualist then just come out and say you are a Dualist. I know being a Dualist is unfashionable because it is the same as saying you believe in magic but have the courage of your convictions.
There are so many secret Dualists out there these days. Don't live life in the Dualist closet
I don't know. I just have this inner experience that I don't feel is explained well from what I know of the physics and complexity theory. I might just need a better physical explanation. I'm open neural-networked about these things.
How her brain paused to consider what she said whilst her mouth kept going was quite funny. They could work in tandem with a bit more practice 😆
Surely the correct pronunciation of Taoiseach is "Irish Prime Minister".
Only if you are an ERG Tory MP wondering why the Irish don't do what they are told, and why they don't instantly give out EU passports to Tory MPs on demand.
No-one, when speaking English, refers to Mr Drakeford as the Prif Weinidog.
I do, like I call the Welsh Senedd the Senedd. It's only polite.
Taoiseach is the official word for the Irish prime minister in English, in Ireland, where English is an official language.
Whereas the official title in English of the First Minister of Wales is First Minister of Wales.
I'm not sure why the German prime minister is called the "Chancellor" in English. After all, we never refer to the Italian prime minister as the President (of the council (of ministers)).
For those who didn't see BBC's new miners strike drama tonight:
1. It proved the only authentic Nottingham accent you will ever hear on telly comes from Sue Pollard. Sticking "mi duck" on the end of sentences does not a proper effort at an accent make.
2. There was an absolute howler. Nobody, but nobody, who lives in Nottingham, would say "Notts Forest". There is only one Notts team in the place - and that is County. Anybody saying Notts Forest would almost certainly be a Derby County supporter.
And end up with a crossbow quarrel sticking from their chest to settle the matter.
1. Vicky.McClure? 2. And yes wrong accents are hugely irritating. Corrie with a family with accents from 4 different accents from 2 counties. Aaagh!
Just Introduced: This Bill is a reasonable and practical solution to
➡️ Fix problems facing businesses and people in Northern Ireland ➡️ Uphold the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement ➡️ Protect UK and EU markets
What is your take #StBart? Is the Tory proposal close enough to the idea you have been suggesting for years now?
I haven't got a take yet, been busy IRL so not read up on the proposals yet. The news article on the BBC News website is extremely lacking on details about what is actually in the Bill and is instead primarily pre-written guff about what all various parties think about the Protocol which isn't news.
Just come on here interested to see if I could get more information, and it seems what people think is they want to talk about IT, Dalle, text to speech and bestiality. So I'm guessing either nothing much was in the Bill, or nothing much objectionable was. I'm not sure which yet?
Thanks.
If goods moving from mainland UK into NI just for consumption in NI, why should it pass Through a EU border? It shouldn’t. It’s potty solution is the basis of the argument?
Goods for NI consumption should sail through under a green light. If it further crosses into EU, smuggling in other words, it’s in interest of EU to agree with us to harsh penalties on the smugglers, not insist on border somewhere - is the basis of your solution?
So it’s about now measuring you solution against the government proposals, because, although they could recognise the simple issue, they could still screw up your simple solution to it?
My suspicion is the EU and remainers have tried to exploit the unique sensitivities of a hard border in Ireland to take more than they fairly needed to. So your solution (if I understand and describe it right) sounds a perfectly workable solution to me, until someone convince me what’s wrong with it.
Only snag is that when you sign a treaty there's a convention that you stick to it. It's a while since the UK government has faced such ridicule -well at least a week-I've seen the DUP wag the Tory dog before but I think this time they're carrying too many enemies.
The EU themselves have made proposals of how to change things. They accept that what both sides signed is not the end state. Should we ridicule the EU too?
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
No, asking an artist to judge a complex computer programme designed to fool simpletons into thinking it is "clever" is a fool's errand. They simply lack the domain expertise.
Ooh, domain expertise. What you get at standups.
"Simpletons." Honestly I wasn't going to put this quite as plainly as this, but you are really not very bright. You are effectively telling me that you know a lot of people with domain expertise who laugh at the concept of heavier than air flight, whereas I am an untutored numpty who has just flown from London to Catania on a big metal thing, so what do I know? Everything you say about consciousness is a personal stipulation, and I know of no domain where personal stipulations carry any weight
You're an actual moron. I think I'm done wasting my time with you on this subject. You simply lack the understanding of how deep learning models operate or of what they are currently capable (and not).
I will spell it out for you one final time, nowhere have I said that an AI couldn't achieve consciousness or sentience, in fact I'm fairly certain it will happen. However, nothing we have currently created even approaches anywhere near that. Once again, the big giveaway is that the "personality" is described as lonely, narcissistic and needy, this is because it has been trained on internet conversations. It reads comments from people such as yourself and "thinks" that this is how actual people are in real life so the model produces a similar style of writing for its responses. It is a very impressive feat of software engineering, but it is really very far away from key milestones like consciousness or even human intelligence and understanding which is probably a step below.
Except that this is, of course, précisely how children grow up and develop a personality. By copying from and absorbing from the people they encounter. They are only as good as the input
If a child grows up surrounded by foul mouthed drunks there’s an extremely high chance it will be foul mouthed and take to drink
If you think our sentient computers are narrow minded and boring then you geeks have only yourselves to blame
But a child becomes more than the sum of its upbringing. So far even the best deep learning models are very domain specific and none exceed the sum of their training. I couldn't ask Dalle-2 to be a chatbot, for example, it simply isn't trained to do that and doesn't have access to the training data and if it did it wouldn't know what to do with the data because the programmer hasn't told it that these trillion words aren't picture prompts, they are chatbot training data and here's the new script to parse them and learn how to respond to text prompts with words. Where it becomes more than the sum of its parts is the AI that does both of those and creates something entirely new and unexpected but we haven't got there.
I'm almost certain we will in my lifetime, in fact well before the end of it. I'm extremely mindful around what will eventually be fully sentient AIs because, IMO, they will have rights the same as the rest of us.
Genuinely intelligent AI is a lot like commercial fusion. It is just around the corner, and might always be.
Yes.
Though I think the genuine AI is going to come before the commercial fusion.
Incredible things are coming. But we're not there. Yet.
Translation has been completely transformed in the last 4 years. Al lthe major agencies now have systems based on neural networks which translate documents on the most abstruse subjects to 95% accuracy. The job has changed from translating 10,000 words to spotting the problems in 500 words. As a result, translators' pay has dropped by 25%, as have prices to customers, but our productivity has more than doubled - an example of technology leading to a good deal all round, since demand is almost inexhaustible (there's always one more company who want their brochure translated if ir doesn't cost much).
"Put it another way, is a virus intelligent? A mushroom? An amoeba? An ant? A wasp? A mould?" The first sentence that I learned in Finnish was hevosen on hevosella ajatuksia "a horse has a horse's thoughts". I'm sure that's true, and a horse might think that a human has human thoughts. But horse intelligence is obviously not the same as human intelligence, so isn't the notion of intelligence species-specific?
Just Introduced: This Bill is a reasonable and practical solution to
➡️ Fix problems facing businesses and people in Northern Ireland ➡️ Uphold the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement ➡️ Protect UK and EU markets
What is your take #StBart? Is the Tory proposal close enough to the idea you have been suggesting for years now?
I haven't got a take yet, been busy IRL so not read up on the proposals yet. The news article on the BBC News website is extremely lacking on details about what is actually in the Bill and is instead primarily pre-written guff about what all various parties think about the Protocol which isn't news.
Just come on here interested to see if I could get more information, and it seems what people think is they want to talk about IT, Dalle, text to speech and bestiality. So I'm guessing either nothing much was in the Bill, or nothing much objectionable was. I'm not sure which yet?
Thanks.
If goods moving from mainland UK into NI just for consumption in NI, why should it pass Through a EU border? It shouldn’t. It’s potty solution is the basis of the argument?
Goods for NI consumption should sail through under a green light. If it further crosses into EU, smuggling in other words, it’s in interest of EU to agree with us to harsh penalties on the smugglers, not insist on border somewhere - is the basis of your solution?
So it’s about now measuring you solution against the government proposals, because, although they could recognise the simple issue, they could still screw up your simple solution to it?
My suspicion is the EU and remainers have tried to exploit the unique sensitivities of a hard border in Ireland to take more than they fairly needed to. So your solution (if I understand and describe it right) sounds a perfectly workable solution to me, until someone convince me what’s wrong with it.
Only snag is that when you sign a treaty there's a convention that you stick to it. It's a while since the UK government has faced such ridicule -well at least a week-I've seen the DUP wag the Tory dog before but I think this time they're carrying too many enemies.
The EU themselves have made proposals of how to change things. They accept that what both sides signed is not the end state. Should we ridicule the EU too?
The EU have not proposed to disavow the NIP, which is now UKG policy.
As far as I can tell from a brief skim, the government’s proposals are very sensible. The shame is the method of (maybe) getting there.
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
No, asking an artist to judge a complex computer programme designed to fool simpletons into thinking it is "clever" is a fool's errand. They simply lack the domain expertise.
Ooh, domain expertise. What you get at standups.
"Simpletons." Honestly I wasn't going to put this quite as plainly as this, but you are really not very bright. You are effectively telling me that you know a lot of people with domain expertise who laugh at the concept of heavier than air flight, whereas I am an untutored numpty who has just flown from London to Catania on a big metal thing, so what do I know? Everything you say about consciousness is a personal stipulation, and I know of no domain where personal stipulations carry any weight
You're an actual moron. I think I'm done wasting my time with you on this subject. You simply lack the understanding of how deep learning models operate or of what they are currently capable (and not).
I will spell it out for you one final time, nowhere have I said that an AI couldn't achieve consciousness or sentience, in fact I'm fairly certain it will happen. However, nothing we have currently created even approaches anywhere near that. Once again, the big giveaway is that the "personality" is described as lonely, narcissistic and needy, this is because it has been trained on internet conversations. It reads comments from people such as yourself and "thinks" that this is how actual people are in real life so the model produces a similar style of writing for its responses. It is a very impressive feat of software engineering, but it is really very far away from key milestones like consciousness or even human intelligence and understanding which is probably a step below.
Except that this is, of course, précisely how children grow up and develop a personality. By copying from and absorbing from the people they encounter. They are only as good as the input
If a child grows up surrounded by foul mouthed drunks there’s an extremely high chance it will be foul mouthed and take to drink
If you think our sentient computers are narrow minded and boring then you geeks have only yourselves to blame
But a child becomes more than the sum of its upbringing. So far even the best deep learning models are very domain specific and none exceed the sum of their training. I couldn't ask Dalle-2 to be a chatbot, for example, it simply isn't trained to do that and doesn't have access to the training data and if it did it wouldn't know what to do with the data because the programmer hasn't told it that these trillion words aren't picture prompts, they are chatbot training data and here's the new script to parse them and learn how to respond to text prompts with words. Where it becomes more than the sum of its parts is the AI that does both of those and creates something entirely new and unexpected but we haven't got there.
I'm almost certain we will in my lifetime, in fact well before the end of it. I'm extremely mindful around what will eventually be fully sentient AIs because, IMO, they will have rights the same as the rest of us.
But nor could you ask a wasp to behave like an ant, or a raven, or a lemur. It will do waspy things. It can only do waspy things. Eat rotting apples. Get a bit drunk in September. Sting the kids. Annoy a beer garden. Die
It can’t swim or play bridge or squeal or stridulate
But is a wasp intelligent? I’d say maybe. Yes. Probably. Despite a notably narrow suite of behaviourisms
GPT3 is maybe like that. An extremely well informed insect? It cannot be taught or encouraged to do anything outside a tiny set of things - it just can’t do that - but those things it can do it does extremely well, and in ways that can surprise, like the wasp that crawls up your shirt. Zap
If GPT3 is an insect, GPT4 might be a pigeon, or even a rodent
How her brain paused to consider what she said whilst her mouth kept going was quite funny. They could work in tandem with a bit more practice 😆
Surely the correct pronunciation of Taoiseach is "Irish Prime Minister".
Only if you are an ERG Tory MP wondering why the Irish don't do what they are told, and why they don't instantly give out EU passports to Tory MPs on demand.
No-one, when speaking English, refers to Mr Drakeford as the Prif Weinidog.
I do, like I call the Welsh Senedd the Senedd. It's only polite.
Taoiseach is the official word for the Irish prime minister in English, in Ireland, where English is an official language.
Whereas the official title in English of the First Minister of Wales is First Minister of Wales.
I'm not sure why the German prime minister is called the "Chancellor" in English. After all, we never refer to the Italian prime minister as the President (of the council (of ministers)).
I presume because it's an exact translation of ,,Kanzler"?
Just Introduced: This Bill is a reasonable and practical solution to
➡️ Fix problems facing businesses and people in Northern Ireland ➡️ Uphold the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement ➡️ Protect UK and EU markets
What is your take #StBart? Is the Tory proposal close enough to the idea you have been suggesting for years now?
I haven't got a take yet, been busy IRL so not read up on the proposals yet. The news article on the BBC News website is extremely lacking on details about what is actually in the Bill and is instead primarily pre-written guff about what all various parties think about the Protocol which isn't news.
Just come on here interested to see if I could get more information, and it seems what people think is they want to talk about IT, Dalle, text to speech and bestiality. So I'm guessing either nothing much was in the Bill, or nothing much objectionable was. I'm not sure which yet?
Thanks.
If goods moving from mainland UK into NI just for consumption in NI, why should it pass Through a EU border? It shouldn’t. It’s potty solution is the basis of the argument?
Goods for NI consumption should sail through under a green light. If it further crosses into EU, smuggling in other words, it’s in interest of EU to agree with us to harsh penalties on the smugglers, not insist on border somewhere - is the basis of your solution?
So it’s about now measuring you solution against the government proposals, because, although they could recognise the simple issue, they could still screw up your simple solution to it?
My suspicion is the EU and remainers have tried to exploit the unique sensitivities of a hard border in Ireland to take more than they fairly needed to. So your solution (if I understand and describe it right) sounds a perfectly workable solution to me, until someone convince me what’s wrong with it.
Only snag is that when you sign a treaty there's a convention that you stick to it. It's a while since the UK government has faced such ridicule -well at least a week-I've seen the DUP wag the Tory dog before but I think this time they're carrying too many enemies.
The EU themselves have made proposals of how to change things. They accept that what both sides signed is not the end state. Should we ridicule the EU too?
The EU have not proposed to disavow the NIP, which is now UKG policy.
As far as I can tell from a brief skim, the government’s proposals are very sensible. The shame is the method of (maybe) getting there.
Ball is in EU’s court now.
I don’t think the governments proposals is disavowing the NIP, it is about implementing it.
Expecting PB’s computer nerds to know about, or opine interestingly on, computer sentience, is a category error
It’s like asking a TV repairman about dramatised Shakespeare. It’s like asking a street sweeper why the Champs Elysee is beautiful. It’s like asking a forex dealer whether it is worth buying a Modigliani
These people are geeks. They have no clue beyond the tiny narrow subset of their wonk expertise, which certainly does not extend to epistemology and philosophy
No, asking an artist to judge a complex computer programme designed to fool simpletons into thinking it is "clever" is a fool's errand. They simply lack the domain expertise.
Ooh, domain expertise. What you get at standups.
"Simpletons." Honestly I wasn't going to put this quite as plainly as this, but you are really not very bright. You are effectively telling me that you know a lot of people with domain expertise who laugh at the concept of heavier than air flight, whereas I am an untutored numpty who has just flown from London to Catania on a big metal thing, so what do I know? Everything you say about consciousness is a personal stipulation, and I know of no domain where personal stipulations carry any weight
You're an actual moron. I think I'm done wasting my time with you on this subject. You simply lack the understanding of how deep learning models operate or of what they are currently capable (and not).
I will spell it out for you one final time, nowhere have I said that an AI couldn't achieve consciousness or sentience, in fact I'm fairly certain it will happen. However, nothing we have currently created even approaches anywhere near that. Once again, the big giveaway is that the "personality" is described as lonely, narcissistic and needy, this is because it has been trained on internet conversations. It reads comments from people such as yourself and "thinks" that this is how actual people are in real life so the model produces a similar style of writing for its responses. It is a very impressive feat of software engineering, but it is really very far away from key milestones like consciousness or even human intelligence and understanding which is probably a step below.
Except that this is, of course, précisely how children grow up and develop a personality. By copying from and absorbing from the people they encounter. They are only as good as the input
If a child grows up surrounded by foul mouthed drunks there’s an extremely high chance it will be foul mouthed and take to drink
If you think our sentient computers are narrow minded and boring then you geeks have only yourselves to blame
But a child becomes more than the sum of its upbringing. So far even the best deep learning models are very domain specific and none exceed the sum of their training. I couldn't ask Dalle-2 to be a chatbot, for example, it simply isn't trained to do that and doesn't have access to the training data and if it did it wouldn't know what to do with the data because the programmer hasn't told it that these trillion words aren't picture prompts, they are chatbot training data and here's the new script to parse them and learn how to respond to text prompts with words. Where it becomes more than the sum of its parts is the AI that does both of those and creates something entirely new and unexpected but we haven't got there.
I'm almost certain we will in my lifetime, in fact well before the end of it. I'm extremely mindful around what will eventually be fully sentient AIs because, IMO, they will have rights the same as the rest of us.
You're sailing fairly close to falsity there. Dalle-2 is made by OpenAI who have a general AI platform. It's quite the generalist. It can write code, compose stories, summarise text, write interview questions, come up with advertising slogans, act as a chatbot, and much more. All they need to do is integrate the two interfaces, which I think they probably will in the long run, and your statement there becomes false.
Just Introduced: This Bill is a reasonable and practical solution to
➡️ Fix problems facing businesses and people in Northern Ireland ➡️ Uphold the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement ➡️ Protect UK and EU markets
What is your take #StBart? Is the Tory proposal close enough to the idea you have been suggesting for years now?
I haven't got a take yet, been busy IRL so not read up on the proposals yet. The news article on the BBC News website is extremely lacking on details about what is actually in the Bill and is instead primarily pre-written guff about what all various parties think about the Protocol which isn't news.
Just come on here interested to see if I could get more information, and it seems what people think is they want to talk about IT, Dalle, text to speech and bestiality. So I'm guessing either nothing much was in the Bill, or nothing much objectionable was. I'm not sure which yet?
Thanks.
If goods moving from mainland UK into NI just for consumption in NI, why should it pass Through a EU border? It shouldn’t. It’s potty solution is the basis of the argument?
Goods for NI consumption should sail through under a green light. If it further crosses into EU, smuggling in other words, it’s in interest of EU to agree with us to harsh penalties on the smugglers, not insist on border somewhere - is the basis of your solution?
So it’s about now measuring you solution against the government proposals, because, although they could recognise the simple issue, they could still screw up your simple solution to it?
My suspicion is the EU and remainers have tried to exploit the unique sensitivities of a hard border in Ireland to take more than they fairly needed to. So your solution (if I understand and describe it right) sounds a perfectly workable solution to me, until someone convince me what’s wrong with it.
Only snag is that when you sign a treaty there's a convention that you stick to it. It's a while since the UK government has faced such ridicule -well at least a week-I've seen the DUP wag the Tory dog before but I think this time they're carrying too many enemies.
The EU themselves have made proposals of how to change things. They accept that what both sides signed is not the end state. Should we ridicule the EU too?
The EU have not proposed to disavow the NIP, which is now UKG policy.
As far as I can tell from a brief skim, the government’s proposals are very sensible. The shame is the method of (maybe) getting there.
Ball is in EU’s court now.
I don’t think the governments proposals is disavowing the NIP, it is about implementing it.
How her brain paused to consider what she said whilst her mouth kept going was quite funny. They could work in tandem with a bit more practice 😆
Surely the correct pronunciation of Taoiseach is "Irish Prime Minister".
Only if you are an ERG Tory MP wondering why the Irish don't do what they are told, and why they don't instantly give out EU passports to Tory MPs on demand.
No-one, when speaking English, refers to Mr Drakeford as the Prif Weinidog.
I do, like I call the Welsh Senedd the Senedd. It's only polite.
Taoiseach is the official word for the Irish prime minister in English, in Ireland, where English is an official language.
Whereas the official title in English of the First Minister of Wales is First Minister of Wales.
I'm not sure why the German prime minister is called the "Chancellor" in English. After all, we never refer to the Italian prime minister as the President (of the council (of ministers)).
I presume because it's an exact translation of ,,Kanzler"?
Put it another way, is a virus intelligent? A mushroom? An amoeba? An ant? A wasp? A mould?
GPT3 seems to me to be more interestingly thoughtful than any of those examples (except perhaps the virus but that’s for contrary philosophical reasons). I would rather interact with GPT3 than any of those creatures, and I would gain more from it
So already it is more “intelligent” to all intents and purposes, than lower animal life
My answers, based on not much more than gut feeling: No, maybe, no, no, yes, no.
No, maybe, no, yes, yes, no.
Ants are very intelligent to the best of my understanding. They're actually quite remarkable creatures, if they weren't so tiny they'd be respected a lot more as intelligent and strong creatures.
You could say the same about Leon’s powers of reasoning and judgement,
How her brain paused to consider what she said whilst her mouth kept going was quite funny. They could work in tandem with a bit more practice 😆
Surely the correct pronunciation of Taoiseach is "Irish Prime Minister".
Only if you are an ERG Tory MP wondering why the Irish don't do what they are told, and why they don't instantly give out EU passports to Tory MPs on demand.
No-one, when speaking English, refers to Mr Drakeford as the Prif Weinidog.
I do, like I call the Welsh Senedd the Senedd. It's only polite.
Taoiseach is the official word for the Irish prime minister in English, in Ireland, where English is an official language.
Whereas the official title in English of the First Minister of Wales is First Minister of Wales.
I'm not sure why the German prime minister is called the "Chancellor" in English. After all, we never refer to the Italian prime minister as the President (of the council (of ministers)).
I presume because it's an exact translation of ,,Kanzler"?
Well yes, sort of (chancellor is a different political office in the UK), but we don't for example call the Italian prime minister "president"
Just Introduced: This Bill is a reasonable and practical solution to
➡️ Fix problems facing businesses and people in Northern Ireland ➡️ Uphold the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement ➡️ Protect UK and EU markets
What is your take #StBart? Is the Tory proposal close enough to the idea you have been suggesting for years now?
I haven't got a take yet, been busy IRL so not read up on the proposals yet. The news article on the BBC News website is extremely lacking on details about what is actually in the Bill and is instead primarily pre-written guff about what all various parties think about the Protocol which isn't news.
Just come on here interested to see if I could get more information, and it seems what people think is they want to talk about IT, Dalle, text to speech and bestiality. So I'm guessing either nothing much was in the Bill, or nothing much objectionable was. I'm not sure which yet?
Thanks.
If goods moving from mainland UK into NI just for consumption in NI, why should it pass Through a EU border? It shouldn’t. It’s potty solution is the basis of the argument?
Goods for NI consumption should sail through under a green light. If it further crosses into EU, smuggling in other words, it’s in interest of EU to agree with us to harsh penalties on the smugglers, not insist on border somewhere - is the basis of your solution?
So it’s about now measuring you solution against the government proposals, because, although they could recognise the simple issue, they could still screw up your simple solution to it?
My suspicion is the EU and remainers have tried to exploit the unique sensitivities of a hard border in Ireland to take more than they fairly needed to. So your solution (if I understand and describe it right) sounds a perfectly workable solution to me, until someone convince me what’s wrong with it.
Only snag is that when you sign a treaty there's a convention that you stick to it. It's a while since the UK government has faced such ridicule -well at least a week-I've seen the DUP wag the Tory dog before but I think this time they're carrying too many enemies.
The EU themselves have made proposals of how to change things. They accept that what both sides signed is not the end state. Should we ridicule the EU too?
The EU have not proposed to disavow the NIP, which is now UKG policy.
As far as I can tell from a brief skim, the government’s proposals are very sensible. The shame is the method of (maybe) getting there.
Ball is in EU’s court now.
I don’t think the governments proposals is disavowing the NIP, it is about implementing it.
I don’t think many/any lawyers agree with you.
Really. They’ve all taken a look tonight, and communicated that judgement?
AlphaGo wins simply by not making mistakes. Slowly, relentlessly and exceptionally aggressively. It plays the numbers game accurately. And by showing certain human created and long-standing shibboleths about the game were exactly that. It's top three moves in any given situation are fascinating. Because no human would have come up with them before. Crucially though. It hasn't aided human endeavour, except indirectly, because it can't tell us why a particular move is better than another. We can only infer that. And the best humans will disagree. So. In the end it's just a gigantic calculator. Nothing more.
But many philosophers and thinkers and the more cynical poets would say that any organism, including every human, is just that. A gigantic calculator
We are programmed by evolution to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way. Reflexively. We appear to have free will but it is an enmeshed illusion, like the passing of time.
It is actually quite hard to argue that this is wrong. Which therefore explains why computers might easily be intelligent already. If all intelligence is just reactions to stimuli but of varying degrees of sophistication - ie just autocomplete - then GPT3 or DALLE-2 are certainly intelligent
Well quite. However. Consider equally the ascetic in the cave. Fifty years of deep meditation he attains enlightenment. For what? Nice for him or her. But of no great import to any other. In the end, Utilitarianist and religious arguments have their uses. Otherwise. What is the bloody point of it all? We may as well not bother. If we only are calculating machines responding to stimuli it's a nihilistic dead end stripping life of all purpose and joy. Neither AlphaGo nor the ascetic will be fucking anyone's wife. Alfa Romeo or no.
When I did my philosophy degree Free Will V Determinism was one of the few arguments that could tear me from the Union bar, but not for long
In the end the only valid argument against determinism seemed to be yours. It’s too depressing to think we live in a determined universe and that free will is an illusion, so let’s carry on pretending we have Free Will
As I was emotionally on the Free Will side of the debate I got depressed quite easily and it was back to a pint of snakebite and a game of Asteroids
The debate between egotism and altruism was similar. In the end every supposedly altruistic act can be explained as selfish. Egoistic. Sad but true
Cool. I'm chuffed. I haven't lived with three philosophers for decades without learning summat. My youngest begins Philosophy at UCL in the Autumn, grades depending, btw.
Good luck to your youngest. That’s exactly where I did my Philosophy. UCL. It’s a marvellous university - you get a world class education yet you are ALSO right in the middle of London, the world city. Quite hard to beat
Tho from what I hear UCL is not quite the druggy hedonistic loved-up free-for-all it used to be, tho that is probably a good thing. It was quite scarily excessive
Comments
If goods moving from mainland UK into NI just for consumption in NI, why should it pass Through a EU border? It shouldn’t. It’s potty solution is the basis of the argument?
Goods for NI consumption should sail through under a green light. If it further crosses into EU, smuggling in other words, it’s in interest of EU to agree with us to harsh penalties on the smugglers, not insist on border somewhere - is the basis of your solution?
So it’s about now measuring you solution against the government proposals, because, although they could recognise the simple issue, they could still screw up your simple solution to it?
My suspicion is the EU and remainers have tried to exploit the unique sensitivities of a hard border in Ireland to take more than they fairly needed to. So your solution (if I understand and describe it right) sounds a perfectly workable solution to me, until someone convince me what’s wrong with it.
I do not find that universally true. I can certainly provide (careful Toms!) counterexamples. The same person can use logic. Or play with it.
Easily done. And in truth, the relationship between Greenland and the EU is.. complicated. So you probably could have stood your ground on this and made a technical argument for why the EU still does need to consider customs on goods travelling across that tiny island.
The latter might just be an artefact of a linguistic focused algorithm. Which may very well also explain our own inner voice or self awareness. It does not necessarily translate to runaway intelligence. After all, it hasn’t happened to any of us despite being self aware all our lives!
There were lots of fun discussions in 2016 like that. For example central London as a HK-style one country 2 systems EU single market island. Of course NI ended up being exactly that.
Souvenir Edition showing The Mail and her readers run the country now.
And by showing certain human created and long-standing shibboleths about the game were exactly that.
It's top three moves in any given situation are fascinating. Because no human would have come up with them before.
Crucially though. It hasn't aided human endeavour, except indirectly, because it can't tell us why a particular move is better than another.
We can only infer that. And the best humans will disagree about the reasoning.
It really played only one totally unexpected move across five games. And, with the benefit of hindsight it was relatively obvious. It was just a bit taboo. Cos a shoulder hit that deep is what you're trained not to do at a very basic level of play.
So. In the end it's just a gigantic calculator. Nothing more.
If someone needs to pay customs, they report it, and if they don't report it they're smuggling and could be prosecuted (and face serious sanctions) after the fact if caught. That is what I have proposed for five years.
I've also said for years that if we insist upon our own solution, and are prepared to unilaterally walk away, then EU are bluffing and can't do anything much about it, because if we call their bluff and don't build any border checks along the Irish land border, they won't either, so the whole "threat to the Good Friday Agreement" nonsense is shown to be nothing other than a pernicious lie all along. If after we act, there's no physical Irish sea border, no physical Irish land border, no alignment, and no border checks - then what exactly is the "threat to the Good Friday Agreement" from that day onwards?
We already don't have alignment, so that's one check down already. If (and its a big if) this Bill calls the EU's bluff, eliminates any other unnecessary checks without imposing them on the land border then that's my other proposals done. If its unilaterally implemented, then we've called the EU's bluff like I said we should do five years ago. Better late than never I suppose.
Though I wouldn't count any chickens until this Bill receives Royal Assent and goes into force. It seems the DUP are welcoming this, so that's a good sign, but if I were advising them I would suggest they say that the NI government can be formed once this Bill has cleared Parliament. That way if the House of Lords or backbenchers try to play silly buggers, then they're holding up the NI Government from being formed.
But because I know how computers work I can tell you the geegaw baubles produced by GPT-3 are a load of shite.
As in, set down a robot in a room and get it to setup a board safely ready to play a human.
We will need profound new techniques to get there.
I will spell it out for you one final time, nowhere have I said that an AI couldn't achieve consciousness or sentience, in fact I'm fairly certain it will happen. However, nothing we have currently created even approaches anywhere near that. Once again, the big giveaway is that the "personality" is described as lonely, narcissistic and needy, this is because it has been trained on internet conversations. It reads comments from people such as yourself and "thinks" that this is how actual people are in real life so the model produces a similar style of writing for its responses. It is a very impressive feat of software engineering, but it is really very far away from key milestones like consciousness or even human intelligence and understanding which is probably a step below.
It only has a handful of languages.
As I've said before, Joe Biden couldn't care less about "the integrity of the Single Market" or any other nonsense.
He does care about the Good Friday Agreement. If the UK were proposing to construct border checks at the land border, then that'd be a problem, but if we merely call the EU's bluff then the USA won't care about that.
We are programmed by evolution to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way. Reflexively. We appear to have free will but it is an enmeshed illusion, like the passing of time.
It is actually quite hard to argue that this is wrong. Which therefore explains why computers might easily be intelligent already. If all intelligence is just reactions to stimuli but of varying degrees of sophistication - ie just autocomplete - then GPT3 or DALLE-2 are certainly intelligent
But this - as you've surmised - is a stupid game.
There really is only question that matters: are the various outputs of Lamda, GPT, Dalle, etc. examples of a generalised intelligence?
And the answer is no. They are not.
As I said to you earlier, but which you have chosen to ignore, I 100% agree with you that our brains are nothing more than gigantic organic neural nets.
In time, the neural networks that mankind builds will surpass the power of the human brain. The singularity will come, because we are nothing more than physical beings, and what evolution made can be exceeded.
But we're a long-long way from that. We have seen a lot of incredible progress in very narrow domains. But this isn't a small gap from a narrow domain to generalised intelligence, it's an enormous chasm. And we close the gap a bit every year, and we'll probably get there in my lifetime, but we're not there yet.
If a child grows up surrounded by foul mouthed drunks there’s an extremely high chance it will be foul mouthed and take to drink
If you think our sentient computers are narrow minded and boring then you geeks have only yourselves to blame
And then there's a giant leap of ignorance.
And we get the third paragraph.
The Lamda thing is a joke BTW. Lots of people would understand that without it being explicitly stated.
Just checking, because that's definitely how it reads.
GPT3 seems to me to be more interestingly thoughtful than any of those examples (except perhaps the virus but that’s for contrary philosophical reasons). I would rather interact with GPT3 than any of those creatures, and I would gain more from it
So already it is more “intelligent” to all intents and purposes, than lower animal life
David Deutsch would say that we should reject inefficient explanations, a la Russel's Teapot, but to me the complex neural net can only fully satisfy a mechanistic view of animals. It fails to convince me that it explains my consciousness because it doesn't ever step out of the physical realm. I don't know what the mental realm consists of, whether it really exists, and if it does how it affects and is affected by the electrical impulses in my brain, but it's sufficiently different from the tangle of electrical cables in my study for to not want to dismiss it out of hand.
In the end, Utilitarianist and religious arguments have their uses. Otherwise.
What is the bloody point of it all?
We may as well not bother.
If we only are calculating machines responding to stimuli it's a nihilistic dead end stripping life of all purpose and joy.
Neither AlphaGo nor the ascetic will be fucking anyone's wife. Alfa Romeo or no.
No, maybe, no, no, yes, no.
There are so many secret Dualists out there these days. Don't live life in the Dualist closet
Ants are very intelligent to the best of my understanding. They're actually quite remarkable creatures, if they weren't so tiny they'd be respected a lot more as intelligent and strong creatures.
On what grounds?
And. Tying the two major thread topics together, which one gives you the bigger horn?
We're thrilled to share a plot from our upcoming paper "Scaling Laws for Consciousness of Artificial Neural Networks". We find that Artificial Neural Networks with greater than 10^15 parameters are more conscious than humans are:
https://twitter.com/ethanCaballero/status/1536388337396862977?s=20&t=8q0dJhMwt1r_pMZFSuu8Ow
In the end the only valid argument against determinism seemed to be yours. It’s too depressing to think we live in a determined universe and that free will is an illusion, so let’s carry on pretending we have Free Will
As I was emotionally on the Free Will side of the debate I got depressed quite easily and it was back to a pint of snakebite and a game of Asteroids
The debate between egotism and altruism was similar. In the end every supposedly altruistic act can be explained as selfish. Egoistic. Sad but true
In addition to the idea of trusting traders, it seems my idea that NI allows regulations via either the EU, or the UK, is also a part of the Bill.
Very good idea. Good job Truss it seems. The kind of stuff that should have always been the end game of this, the only rational solution once you cut away the nonsense about having alignment which is all this has been weaponised to try to achieve before now.
It doesn't imply free will, but that is one of the remaining possibilities.
I'm almost certain we will in my lifetime, in fact well before the end of it. I'm extremely mindful around what will eventually be fully sentient AIs because, IMO, they will have rights the same as the rest of us.
1. It proved the only authentic Nottingham accent you will ever hear on telly comes from Sue Pollard. Sticking "mi duck" on the end of sentences does not a proper effort at an accent make.
2. There was an absolute howler. Nobody, but nobody, who lives in Nottingham, would say "Notts Forest". There is only one Notts team in the place - and that is County. Anybody saying Notts Forest would almost certainly be a Derby County supporter.
And end up with a crossbow quarrel sticking from their chest to settle the matter.
'Cause it seems to me a hell of a lot massive business investment rests on the answer being several years if not decades.
Oh well. Too bad. So sad.
Ants seem pretty dumb to me. An ant colony might be intelligent, though? Idk.
I don't think any of them give me the horn. If forced to choose, I guess I'd put sex with a giant underground fungus colony at the top of the list. But I don't want to get a reputation as a truffle botherer.
My youngest begins Philosophy at UCL in the Autumn, grades depending, btw.
NI will be in a quantum state of Schrodinger's Brexit. They will simultaneously be in the Single Market, and the UK, at the same time.
Apologies to any physicists if I've butchered the reference.
I am not from the Wirral, although I know it well enough - but there is something about the theme of home I find incredily moving. "Everything I want is here, and everything I need is here." (This is a band who once turned down their first TV appearance because it clashed with a Tranmere Rovers match. This is a band of somewheres.)
If you might find yourself in the market for that sort of thing and are in the mood for a break from AI (I would contend Half Man Half Biscuit songs will be the last things AI masters, but feel free to give it a go - I knew I'd manage to wangle the link to the subject of discussion somehow), you might find this five minutes well spent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s470pR1ADUE
Lyrics here: https://halfmanhalfbiscuit.uk/the-voltarol-years/oblong-of-dreams/
Whereas the official title in English of the First Minister of Wales is First Minister of Wales.
I'm not sure why the German prime minister is called the "Chancellor" in English. After all, we never refer to the Italian prime minister as the President (of the council (of ministers)).
2. And yes wrong accents are hugely irritating. Corrie with a family with accents from 4 different accents from 2 counties. Aaagh!
Too late, though, the media have unthinkingly all jumped on the “of course the Tories lose this” bandwagon.
Though I think the genuine AI is going to come before the commercial fusion.
The first sentence that I learned in Finnish was hevosen on hevosella ajatuksia "a horse has a horse's thoughts". I'm sure that's true, and a horse might think that a human has human thoughts. But horse intelligence is obviously not the same as human intelligence, so isn't the notion of intelligence species-specific?
As far as I can tell from a brief skim, the government’s proposals are very sensible.
The shame is the method of (maybe) getting there.
Ball is in EU’s court now.
It can’t swim or play bridge or squeal or stridulate
But is a wasp intelligent? I’d say maybe. Yes. Probably. Despite a notably narrow suite of behaviourisms
GPT3 is maybe like that. An extremely well informed insect? It cannot be taught or encouraged to do anything outside a tiny set of things - it just can’t do that - but those things it can do it does extremely well, and in ways that can surprise, like the wasp that crawls up your shirt. Zap
If GPT3 is an insect, GPT4 might be a pigeon, or even a rodent
GPT9 will be a God
Maybe I am just a misery guts.
Tho from what I hear UCL is not quite the druggy hedonistic loved-up free-for-all it used to be, tho that is probably a good thing. It was quite scarily excessive