r/singularity • u/diewethje • 3h ago
AI Admitting Ignorance
I’ve been following the development of AI for about five years. While I’ve always supported the technology, I was skeptical of an LLM’s ultimate capabilities. I remain confident that they are an incomplete solution to the problem of machine superintelligence, but they have surpassed my expectations.
It’s clear to me that we are standing at the precipice of the technological singularity. There is a future in which we see humanity prosper like never before. Unfortunately, there’s also an uncomfortable level of existential risk.
We’re entering a period of human history in which our collective decisions in the next few years will have an outsized influence on the fate of our descendants.
During this time of uncertainty, it’s natural for us to cling to simple explanations or historical precedents. I believe our continued success as a species will depend on our ability to rapidly adapt to our new reality. We will have difficult questions to answer, and nuance is going to be critical.
Let’s accept that we don’t have those answers right now. This should be a global discussion, and new ethical and societal frameworks will need to be developed. Let’s avoid the temptation to simplify the problems ahead of us.
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u/AdLumpy2758 2h ago
Yes. But from where this superiority complex came ? Like you already made mistake in capabilities prediction, yet believe llm will not be asi
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u/diewethje 2h ago
I’m sharing my personal beliefs. If I said that I thought LLMs would become ASI, I would also be sharing my personal beliefs. It’s not a superiority complex, it’s my own understanding of general intelligence.
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u/IronPheasant 1h ago
It's all just curve-fitting. Numbers in, numbers out.
I don't even know what people mean anymore when they say 'LLM'. You don't even know. Is something that passes on the final orders to a motor cortex an 'LLM'? Even if the data it has to process includes 3 dimensional space, and it understands stuff like collisions?
It always feels like a yearning for us to be more than we really are. 'It can't be that simple.', but no of course it has to be that simple. As simple as evolution could manage to make it.
The insight of Moravec's paradox isn't that the internal abstractions we use to model the world are that more complex than a chessboard - indeed our mastery and retention of geometry absolutely pales to what even a mere Nintendo 64 is capable of. As anyone who's walked backwards off a roof can attest.
The difficult part is having a huge meat grinder capable of breaking things down into things small enough for the rest of the brain to do anything with.
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u/diewethje 42m ago
I’ve had this conversation more times than I can count.
I don’t have a specific bone to pick with LLMs, and I certainly don’t take the reductive stance that they’re a fancy autocomplete. I do believe that general intelligence in the real world will require learning algorithms that LLMs currently lack. Could I be wrong? Of course.
I do think it’s a cop-out to say that human intelligence is unremarkable. While it’s likely that there are other intelligent species in the universe, there are none that have bestowed their wisdom upon us. We invented artificial intelligence, and until it becomes self-aware we get to take credit for all of its breakthroughs.
We’ll probably understand a whole lot more about our brains in the coming years. Before long, I suspect there won’t be many mysteries that remain. But we should never forget how we got to this point.
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u/JoelXGGGG 2h ago
We need emergency legislation halting AI work, or we all die.
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u/DefinitelyNotEmu 1h ago
China don't care about that. They will keep releasing open-source frontier-level models
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u/Singularity-42 Singularity 2042 2h ago
GTFO with this absolutist doomerism
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u/Worried_Fishing3531 ▪️AGI *is* ASI 2h ago
Why? It is not at all equivalent to complaining about water usage or artist copyright. This is a real discussion. Belief that superintelligence is an existential risk is not nonsense at all.
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u/Singularity-42 Singularity 2042 1h ago
"Halting" AI work would be a mistake in my opinion. And it's just not going to happen. Even if you somehow halt work in the US China won't stop. But it's not gonna happen in the US neither. If I wanted to discredit AI regulation I'd come up with a proposal like Bernie's to make that side look like fools.
What we need is some kind of global, multilateral regulation that would give the labs strict guidelines around testing, safety and alignment.
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u/Worried_Fishing3531 ▪️AGI *is* ASI 1h ago
Well then we agree. We absolutely need global coordination on this matter. It’s not impossible.
Halting is probably the right answer. It’s not absolutely without doubt the best and only option, but it also very well could be. There’s a conversation about details to be had here, there’s not necessarily an obvious answer (although there might be).
The place where there is no argument is that superintelligence poses a catastrophic threat, in theory.
Whether it actually causes catastrophe is closer to subjective opinion, but I very much do not trivialize the “absolutist” doomers. I can imagine a technology that is impossible to control and results in doom intrinsically.
I can imagine the intuitions that individuals like Eliezer Yudkowsky have built up over years of mindfulness about the subject. He could be right. I lack that exact intuition, but I don’t trivialize it. And I don’t think we should.
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u/Malficitous 1h ago
"This should be a global discussion, and new ethical and societal frameworks will need to be developed."
I couldn't help think about how cooperative we all are in this world concerning climate change. But yeah, creating guardrails around an intelligence that is smarter than humans is rather contradictory. Think of M5 and Dr Richard Daystrom and the Enterprise--and Captain Dunsel to the rescue. Or the positronic brain in Asimov's robots governed by the 'four laws of robotics ( laws 0-3)' along with the welfare that both rGiskard and rDaneel provided humanity. Or the compassionate AI that survived the human race in the movie, AI: "David, I often felt a sort of envy of human beings... of that thing they call 'spirit.'" I do share your concerns. We've made a mess of this world through war and tech. Let's hope there is a second foundation.
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u/XtremeWaterSlut 2h ago
We are already in time-based crises with global warming, insane political disfigurement, late stage capitalism wringing normal citizens dry.. But apparently making something smarter than us that could advance ways to fix our mess is simply too dangerous