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The Tories edge up a touch in theTiverton and Honiton betting – politicalbetting.com

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  • Daveyboy1961Daveyboy1961 Posts: 3,883
    stodge said:

    HYUFD said:

    Taz said:

    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.

    https://twitter.com/dannyshawnews/status/1536412291498971139?s=21&t=8w7CW9Dhnu8kOOiaK7nEFA

    Voters back the policy 44% to 40% with Tories and Leave voters overwhelmingly in favour

    https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1536361303442325504?s=20&t=g_TkNpQFM7Lkb18KUxB_iQ
    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?
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,719

    stodge said:

    HYUFD said:

    Taz said:

    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.

    https://twitter.com/dannyshawnews/status/1536412291498971139?s=21&t=8w7CW9Dhnu8kOOiaK7nEFA

    Voters back the policy 44% to 40% with Tories and Leave voters overwhelmingly in favour

    https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1536361303442325504?s=20&t=g_TkNpQFM7Lkb18KUxB_iQ
    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?
  • Alphabet_SoupAlphabet_Soup Posts: 3,228
    Carnyx said:

    Liz Truss really is as dumb as a box of rocks.

    Apparently you pronounce Taoiseach as 'Tea Socks'

    https://twitter.com/killianbyrne/status/1536398417659846656

    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.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    edited June 2022
    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    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
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,037

    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.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,026
    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    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
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,737
    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    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!
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,552

    dixiedean said:

    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.


    https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/boris-johnson-article-describing-his-semi-sexual-love-of-fox-hunting-resurfaces-195277/
    Well I am not surprised. For him bestiality is sex without the need of expensive alimony and child support.
  • Sunil_PrasannanSunil_Prasannan Posts: 51,760

    stodge said:

    HYUFD said:

    Taz said:

    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.

    https://twitter.com/dannyshawnews/status/1536412291498971139?s=21&t=8w7CW9Dhnu8kOOiaK7nEFA

    Voters back the policy 44% to 40% with Tories and Leave voters overwhelmingly in favour

    https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1536361303442325504?s=20&t=g_TkNpQFM7Lkb18KUxB_iQ
    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?
    A Fish called Rwanda.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,719

    Carnyx said:

    Liz Truss really is as dumb as a box of rocks.

    Apparently you pronounce Taoiseach as 'Tea Socks'

    https://twitter.com/killianbyrne/status/1536398417659846656

    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.
  • sladeslade Posts: 2,029

    MaxPB said:

    Arsene Wenger knows nothing about football, no wonder he left Arsenal with such a terrible legacy.

    'Kick-ins' could replace throw-ins with trial discussed for Arsene Wenger idea

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2022/06/13/kick-ins-could-replace-throw-ins-trial-discussed-arsene-wenger/

    He also proposed a world cup every two years. He's clearly got a screw loose since he joined FIFA. Kick-ins, wtf.
    What next? Goalies only allowed to use heads or feet?
    Hockey replaced roll-ins many years ago with hit -ins.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,342
    ...
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,928
    edited June 2022
    Carnyx said:

    Farooq said:

    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.

    https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canada-and-denmark-reach-settlement-over-disputed-arctic-island/

    St Martin of the (Far) North?

    How does the EU plan to prevent smuggling?
    Canada isn't in the EU
    Whoosh!

    Denmark is.

    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.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,026
    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    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
    His dad could kick your dad off this site
    Fair play. You got a proper chuckle
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,719
    Foxy said:

    dixiedean said:

    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.


    https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/boris-johnson-article-describing-his-semi-sexual-love-of-fox-hunting-resurfaces-195277/
    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.
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 13,446
    edited June 2022
    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.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    IshmaelZ said:

    dixiedean said:

    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.


    https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/boris-johnson-article-describing-his-semi-sexual-love-of-fox-hunting-resurfaces-195277/
    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
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,384
    edited June 2022
    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.
  • CatManCatMan Posts: 3,056
    Speaking of football, the Australia - Peru World Cup Playoff has gone to penalties. On the BBC Red Button if you wanna watch
  • https://twitter.com/trussliz/status/1536396141402763267

    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.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    Carnyx said:

    Foxy said:

    dixiedean said:

    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.


    https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/boris-johnson-article-describing-his-semi-sexual-love-of-fox-hunting-resurfaces-195277/
    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
  • solarflaresolarflare Posts: 3,705
    Carnyx said:

    Foxy said:

    dixiedean said:

    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.


    https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/boris-johnson-article-describing-his-semi-sexual-love-of-fox-hunting-resurfaces-195277/
    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
    It's not one of the more frequent openings to a post here, I'll grant you that.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    Leon said:

    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.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,342
    ...
    Carnyx said:

    Foxy said:

    dixiedean said:

    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.


    https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/boris-johnson-article-describing-his-semi-sexual-love-of-fox-hunting-resurfaces-195277/
    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.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    I know I've used the example before but with current technique we are still decades away from a AI that could setup a chess board for a game of chess.

    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.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 81,813
    edited June 2022
    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?
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 38,694
    IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    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.
  • kamskikamski Posts: 5,186
    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    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.
  • NEW: Win for the UK as US says its unilateral override bill of the protocol will NOT damage its current trade dialogues with Washington.

    Asked if it will be a hinderance to the talks or chances of future trade deal, White House spox said: "I don't believe it will be."


    https://twitter.com/e_casalicchio/status/1536440200116699140

    LOL.

    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.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,384

    ...

    Carnyx said:

    Foxy said:

    dixiedean said:

    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.


    https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/boris-johnson-article-describing-his-semi-sexual-love-of-fox-hunting-resurfaces-195277/
    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.
    Chapeau Sir.
  • EPGEPG Posts: 6,650
    Alistair said:

    Leon said:

    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.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,026
    dixiedean said:

    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


  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,719

    ...

    Carnyx said:

    Foxy said:

    dixiedean said:

    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.


    https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/boris-johnson-article-describing-his-semi-sexual-love-of-fox-hunting-resurfaces-195277/
    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.
    Sorry, don't get it?
  • solarflaresolarflare Posts: 3,705

    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.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,384
    edited June 2022
    Alistair said:

    I know I've used the example before but with current technique we are still decades away from a AI that could setup a chess board for a game of chess.

    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.

    Equally. I'll accept Alpha Go when it can "talk" us through its games. And has the ability to coach players to improvement at all levels.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,719
    IshmaelZ said:

    Carnyx said:

    Foxy said:

    dixiedean said:

    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.


    https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/boris-johnson-article-describing-his-semi-sexual-love-of-fox-hunting-resurfaces-195277/
    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.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,026
    MaxPB said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    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
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,037
    Leon said:

    dixiedean said:

    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


    The first two paragraphs are absolutely right.

    And then there's a giant leap of ignorance.

    And we get the third paragraph.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    MaxPB said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    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.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,719
    IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    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 ...
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,037
    edited June 2022
    IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    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.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,026
    edited June 2022
    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
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 28,319

    Liz Truss really is as dumb as a box of rocks.

    Apparently you pronounce Taoiseach as 'Tea Socks'

    https://twitter.com/killianbyrne/status/1536398417659846656

    Ah, that is very cute...if she were aged four.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    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.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,384
    Leon said:

    dixiedean said:

    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.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    Farooq said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    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
  • Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    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.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,384
    edited June 2022
    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    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?
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 81,813
    Pours some petrol on the fire.....

    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
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,026
    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    dixiedean said:

    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
  • Sunil_PrasannanSunil_Prasannan Posts: 51,760
    dixiedean said:

    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    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?
    Ants are highly specialised wasps.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 62,607
    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    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.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 38,694
    Leon said:

    MaxPB said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    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.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,482
    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.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 62,607
    How likely is NI to stay in SM?

    'Cause it seems to me a hell of a lot massive business investment rests on the answer being several years if not decades.
  • RogerRoger Posts: 19,854

    https://twitter.com/trussliz/status/1536396141402763267

    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.
  • MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    MaxPB said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    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.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,482
    I now find it VERY interesting that there has been no LibDem poll result released in T&H.....
  • Roger said:

    https://twitter.com/trussliz/status/1536396141402763267

    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.

    Oh well. Too bad. So sad.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,384
    Leon said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    dixiedean said:

    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.
  • How likely is NI to stay in SM?

    'Cause it seems to me a hell of a lot massive business investment rests on the answer being several years if not decades.

    Extremely likely.

    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.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 13,732
    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:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s470pR1ADUE
    Lyrics here: https://halfmanhalfbiscuit.uk/the-voltarol-years/oblong-of-dreams/
  • kamskikamski Posts: 5,186
    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Liz Truss really is as dumb as a box of rocks.

    Apparently you pronounce Taoiseach as 'Tea Socks'

    https://twitter.com/killianbyrne/status/1536398417659846656

    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)).
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,496

    I now find it VERY interesting that there has been no LibDem poll result released in T&H.....

    They're not 'spinning here'?
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,384
    edited June 2022

    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!
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 21,295

    I now find it VERY interesting that there has been no LibDem poll result released in T&H.....

    Yes, this vaguely dawned on me this morning.

    Too late, though, the media have unthinkingly all jumped on the “of course the Tories lose this” bandwagon.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,316
    Roger said:

    https://twitter.com/trussliz/status/1536396141402763267

    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?
  • solarflaresolarflare Posts: 3,705

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    MaxPB said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    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.
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,518
    rcs1000 said:


    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).
  • geoffwgeoffw Posts: 8,692
    "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?
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 21,295

    Roger said:

    https://twitter.com/trussliz/status/1536396141402763267

    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.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,026
    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    MaxPB said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    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

    GPT9 will be a God
  • Sunil_PrasannanSunil_Prasannan Posts: 51,760
    kamski said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Liz Truss really is as dumb as a box of rocks.

    Apparently you pronounce Taoiseach as 'Tea Socks'

    https://twitter.com/killianbyrne/status/1536398417659846656

    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"?
  • solarflaresolarflare Posts: 3,705
    Farooq said:

    If forced to choose, I guess I'd put sex with a giant underground fungus colony at the top of the list.

    That's another of the "sentences I didn't think I'd read today" entries.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,316

    Roger said:

    https://twitter.com/trussliz/status/1536396141402763267

    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.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 21,295

    Roger said:

    https://twitter.com/trussliz/status/1536396141402763267

    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.
  • Sunil_PrasannanSunil_Prasannan Posts: 51,760

    I now find it VERY interesting that there has been no LibDem poll result released in T&H.....

    @MoonRabbit please explain :lol:
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,316

    kamski said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Liz Truss really is as dumb as a box of rocks.

    Apparently you pronounce Taoiseach as 'Tea Socks'

    https://twitter.com/killianbyrne/status/1536398417659846656

    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 we can’t use Fuhrer can we...
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,845

    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    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,
  • kamskikamski Posts: 5,186

    kamski said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Liz Truss really is as dumb as a box of rocks.

    Apparently you pronounce Taoiseach as 'Tea Socks'

    https://twitter.com/killianbyrne/status/1536398417659846656

    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"
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,316

    Roger said:

    https://twitter.com/trussliz/status/1536396141402763267

    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?
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 62,607
    New BBC News set is awful.

    Maybe I am just a misery guts.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,026
    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    dixiedean said:

    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
  • Roger said:

    https://twitter.com/trussliz/status/1536396141402763267

    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.
    Proposing alternative implementations of the NIP is entirely within fitting of international law and the NIP, especially if you consider the Belfast Agreement to be the higher priority, which is what the NIP was supposed to be about.

    The shame is that the EU tried to weaponise the Belfast Agreement to get what they want and couldn't get from negotiations alone. The shame is that the EU have shown sclerotic rigidity and not shown any of the flexibility the UK and partners had to exercise in order to negotiate the Belfast Agreement in the first place.

    If the government's proposals are sensible, then they should be implemented, and that should be the end of the matter.
  • Redfield & Wilton Strategies

    Highest % for the Lib Dems that we've recorded.

    Westminster Voting Intention (12 June):

    Labour 39% (-1)
    Conservative 32% (–)
    Liberal Democrat 15% (+2)
    Green 6% (+1)
    Scottish National Party 5% (+1)
    Reform UK 2% (-2)
    Other 3% (+1)

    BJO goes back to his hole.

    What a shame, PB Tories wrong again
  • New BBC News set is awful.

    Maybe I am just a misery guts.

    Agreed. The bit about the NI protocol came across as massively dumbed down too
  • BTW, I predicted Lib Dems would be up to 16% by the end of the year from recollection.
  • At this moment, which of the following individuals do you think would be the better PM for the United Kingdom? (12 June)

    Keir Starmer: 41% (+4)
    Rishi Sunak: 31% (+1)
    Don't know: 28% (-5)

    Changes +/- 5 June

    Whomp whomp
  • At this moment, which of the following individuals do you think would be the better PM for the UK? (12 June)

    Keir Starmer: 38% (+1)
    Boris Johnson: 33% (+2)
    Don't know: 29% (-3)

    Changes +/- 5 June

    Whomp whomp
  • Keir Starmer Approval Rating (12 June):

    Approve: 28% (-1)
    Disapprove: 31% (-1)
    Net: -3% (–)

    Changes +/- 8 June

    Boring results in decent ratings, who knew?
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,316

    At this moment, which of the following individuals do you think would be the better PM for the UK? (12 June)

    Keir Starmer: 38% (+1)
    Boris Johnson: 33% (+2)
    Don't know: 29% (-3)

    Changes +/- 5 June

    Whomp whomp

    Staggering leads there for Starmer. Bookies might as well pay out now.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 38,694
    Farooq said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    MaxPB said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    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.
    "here's the script"
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,384
    Fifth anniversary of Grenfell tomorrow.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 62,607
    dixiedean said:

    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!
    Samantha Morton

    And Cherie Lunghi.
  • New BBC News set is awful.

    Maybe I am just a misery guts.

    Agreed. The bit about the NI protocol came across as massively dumbed down too
    The NI Protocol article on the BBC news website is massively dumbed down too.

    Interesting discussion of it on Sky News and (with the to-be-expected viewpoints) the Sky paper review too that is much more detailed than what's on the BBC website.
  • At this moment, which of the following individuals do you think would be the better PM for the UK? (12 June)

    Keir Starmer: 38% (+1)
    Boris Johnson: 33% (+2)
    Don't know: 29% (-3)

    Changes +/- 5 June

    Whomp whomp

    Staggering leads there for Starmer. Bookies might as well pay out now.
    They aren't staggering at all - but I am not really sure why people expect Starmer to be doing better.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,026
    MaxPB said:

    Farooq said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    MaxPB said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    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.
    "here's the script"
    But you’re wrong

    There was no script when it came to textual prompts creating images. GPT3 was not expected to have this faculty. Yet it does. Totally unforeseen

This discussion has been closed.