Lots of people made them back in the day (70s). Not much call for it this century, but there's plenty of retrocomputing types that would likely give it a go if prodded.
> The changing climate killed more, but the humans were the differentiating factor, so which one do you point the finger at?
If we're the differentiating factor, I'd have to blame us. Am I right in understanding that these species were normally being thinned during each glacial maxima, such that it was already a set part of their evolutionary environment? If that's right, then aren't we the ones to blame?
Otherwise, is a murderer merely a "contributing cause" to someone's death if the victim happens to be sick at the time of the killing?
I think there's a good argument that either or both factors contributed. We tend to blame people because they have agency and the natural world does not, and that's not a bad way to understand things.
My main point was that I don't think it would be denialism for someone to say "no, the species was pushed to the brink by climate change anyway, we know other species went extinct prior to human colonisation, and even though humans arguably made it worse there's no conclusive evidence". Glacial maxima are hundreds of thousands of years apart and given the timescales involved it's hard to say whether a species is adapted to them or whether it just got lucky.
Weren't there something like 5 glacial maxima in the past 200 thousand years? I had the impression they were more regularly occurring than "hundreds of thouands of years apart".
Yeah my bad, I meant that glacial and interglacial periods happen in a cycle that can take up to 100k years before it repeats, but phrased it in a way that's outright wrong as well as misleading. I think the overall point still stands though.
It seems to cut both ways. If words are powerful, restricting words is also powerful. It's not clear why this leads to a pro-censorship stance, any more than to an anti-censorship one.
Oh indeed. That's why dictators both censor and propagandise.
It's a narrow path, absolutely a challenge to walk without slipping, and not one I feel confident of humanity rising to even as a team effort.
Just like the difference between liberty and authoritarianism in general: much as I'd like to be an anarchist in theory, in practice that's just a way to let people with big sticks take over.
> But more saliently, I think it's absurd to think our brains, or brains in general, do polynomial curve fitting in any meaningful sense.
Why would an AI need to use the same mechanisms as a human to think? Most machines we create are quite different in character from their natural counterparts (what bird has a propeller?)
Is the Wittgensteinian problem that the AGI wouldn't understand concepts like we do, or is the problem that it wouldn't be able to use them better than a human?
There’s a few different ways one can look at it if trying to take lessons and ideas from Wittgenstein. I didn’t do a brilliant job of the thesis to be honest… but I got a few things on an intuitive level from trying to grok a bunch of Wittgenstein that left me feeling like there was a serious problem in our attempts to build an AI.
One of them is that we only have language with which to build an AI - language and symbols. Yet these nevertheless capture absolutely nothing about what it is to perceive and understand, on a human level, so yeah. It’s kind of what Searle was getting at - symbolic outputs and translation based on rules doesn’t get you intelligence, even if it produces a system that looks as if it is intelligent.
There’s also that we have an intersubjective attunement to others that is pre-linguistic. Ultimately “meaning is use” which is a pithy take on later Wittgenstein- there’s nothing in language which means anything at all. So it’s not that it wouldn’t be able to use language or concepts better than we do, it’s that we change with the AI and don’t accept them - particularly as they start to become uncanny or unpredictable.
There really is something to sentience that we all know that cannot be reduced to language or machinery.
Our language about machinery, and intelligent machinery, is full of usage mistakes and categorical errors that we overlook, but which are more serious when analysed.
We are complete beings - my intelligence is part of a system, and it makes no sense to abstract it out of that system in order to nail it down.
“Pain” cannot be reduced down to or captured in language. Suffering is part of our intelligence and we’d be nowhere without it.
So ideas kind of like that and more.
AGI would have to suffer to become general enough to warrant the use of the word general.
>AGI would have to suffer to become general enough to warrant the use of the word general.
Jo Cameron doesn't have general intelligence? This seems absurd. Intelligence is orthogonal to phenomenology and affective states. People aren't worried about AGI because it might have a Cartesian theater, the worry is that it might be more competent than humans and put humans out of a job. The semantics of whether it "truly" has intelligence is irrelevant.
>Suffering is part of our intelligence and we’d be nowhere without it.
It might be part of our intelligence, but why would it need to be part of machine's intelligence? GPT4 is already beating humans at theory of mind tasks[1], and I doubt that it suffers. Our suffering is an evolutionary stroke of bad luck. It has nothing to do with intelligence itself, and it would have been better if we had evolved some other way that didn't need it.
If LLMs are beating humans in theory of mind tasks, your theory of mind is incorrect.
I’d not heard of Jo Cameron but one outlier, for me, wouldn’t hyper-negate the whole idea out of existence. A huge amount of what I suffer with is not physical pain.
> A huge amount of what I suffer with is not physical pain.
It's not just physical suffering that she's supposedly immune to. She's also immune to all psychological suffering as well. And she is married, has kids, and is perfectly healthy. If she's in fact the real deal (I don't know this myself, but I haven't seen anyone debunking her) then dismissing her as an outlier would be a remarkable form of complacency. If the effect can be understood and replicated, suffering will become fully as needless as it deserves to be, with its final eradication mourned probably as much as the death of smallpox.
> If LLMs are beating humans in theory of mind tasks, your theory of mind is incorrect.
Or, LLMs have better theory of mind than most humans do, which is the finding of that study. Is it metaphysically impossible? If your mental image of how LLM cognition works is the same type of expert system that Searle was writing about back in the day, it's refreshingly bizarre to read how LLMs appear to work:
Where is the Chinese Room in this? I don't see one. Just a lot of complex and vague conceptual associations mediated through neural connections. Whether or not these models are conscious or have an inner life, they seem to be doing just fine understanding concepts.
Are you thinking of Searle's Chinese Room or another famous thought experiment? Is your issue that an AGI wouldn't really "understand" concepts, despite being better at using them than a human?
>and as a trained philosopher, I don't buy into the whole AGI nonsense
It's hard to imagine Socrates using this form of argument.
I really dig Socrates, and his arguments. I also dig Nietzsche for pointing out “he was a buffoon who got himself killed”. Dialectics is useful up to the point you start going round in circles and that is as far as most ever get with it.
Well, if we're taking the stories at face value, Socrates knew what he was getting himself into when he chose to die, even when he could have easily escaped. He died to prove a point. If Nietzsche thinks this is silly, it's one of those times he's at odds with his own philosophy.
> To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there
Nietzsche thought that it was so obvious that he was going round corrupting the youth by showing people not to have a clue what they were talking about via using dialectics, that he knew what he was getting himself into long long before the whole “dying to prove a point (that he respected the laws of the Athenian state)”. He was purposefully using dialectics as a tool to show people up, and to show them “hey you thought you knew what virtue was?? Turns out you don’t know shit about virtue omfg?!?!” Whereas people did all know about virtue because it was a common thing they shared in their understanding of using the meaning of the concept. It didn’t need dialectics to reduce that definition to absurdio and prove that nothing conceptually was true or known in the Athenian state, and him doing this was causative of its downfall, and so he was no martyr for drinking the hemlock.
That really is Nietzsche’s angle on it if you care to go looking rather than cite him at me to disprove what I said. I think it’s in Will to Power but it’s been a while. You’ll also notice throughout that Nietzsche isn’t a dialectical thinker. He doesn’t go round in circles trying to find the antithesis of his polemics – he’s calling it how it is for him.
Edit: some of his perspective on Socrates is in Twilight - Google: Nietzsche Socrates Buffoon.
Sentience is the ability to have experiences like pain and tasting sweetness. People usually use the word "sapient" or terms like AGI to describe an AI with advanced reasoning ability. This might sound like nitpicking since I was still able to understand your meaning, but the distinction between sentience/sapience is a useful one to keep around and preserve in common usage, at least for the sake of ethics (e.g. a newborn baby isn't sapient, but is sentient).
I'm not sure of exact timing and laws that are in place but basically since 2003 actual military equipment has made its way from the armed forces to local police departments all over the country. I believe in many cases it has come free of charge. As a result you see cops in small towns armed like they're going to war in Fallujah.
Yep, easy to google, I'm not sure why folks want us to summarize and explain it all here for them. It's been going on for years and when you have stuff like that, you unfortunately tend to find a reason to use it.
Things that are political or politics-adjacent often mean different things to different people (e.g. "defund the police"). Someone asking someone else for a definition of their own meaning helps prevent a shouting match.
Personally it means taking their long guns and any type of armored vehicles away. I dont want to see cops with SBRs, APCs, night vision equipment, kitted out rifles or any of the other trappings of military special forces or death squads. I could see perhaps some exceptions but not just for any municipal PD.
Along this line but to a greater extreme that I dont actually think is possible right now is taking all their guns away. Generally the argument for cops having guns is so they can defend themselves from armed and violent criminals. This implies using those guns to shoot said criminals before they can hurt cops. I am against this because I believe in the rule of law and that is circumventing the entire judicial system by making the officer capable of being judge jury and executioner. This is wrong and undermines the entire judicial apparatus.
I would have guessed the primary argument for armed police would be to scare criminals and dissuade them from violent crime. I'd guess some people would argue that having N fewer incidents of cops murdering suspects isn't worth having X% more crime overall. But I'd also expect it's really hard to build a statistical model for how cause and effect would work.
Would you say that this is a topic where there's a clear utilitarian winner, or not?
Well theres a couple ways to come at this first theres the idea that as you put it N fewer incidents of cops murdering people is proportionate to some decrease in crime deterrence. Then theres my preferred perspective which is that the strength and legitimacy of the rule of law tends to be a greater force in benefitting society than any % increase or decrease of the other factors. I think weve done a great job creating the framework for a generally equitable and reasonable justice system (especially considering that its not set in stone and we can adjust it to be more effective as we see fit) and just have done a less than great job at implementing it.
To answer your question I dont think theres a clear winner but as I generally believe in the forward march of civilization I do think we can simultaneously disarm cops and reduce crime while also making the judicial system more focused on rehab and less on punishment. I'm bullish on empathy, freedom and peace!
That makes sense to me. However, I live in an area with very little crime, so I might be biased towards an approach that centers on the legitimacy of the rule of law, without me needing to worry much about law and order being the result of that commitment. I wonder if you consider El Salvador to be an exception to your rule, or if you think Bukele is actually restoring effectual rule of law. Ecuador is another similar case.
I have a pretty low opinion of Bukele in general. I think the tactics used for the seemingly miraculous suppression of gangs actually weaken the rule of law in an abstract way.
I think law and order rest on a contract with the governed. Robert Peel probably got much (though not all IMO) of this right and as far as El Salvador goes I think 5th and 6th of his Peelian principles are the most trampled in Bukele's El Salvador. Something about Bukele's regime somehow reminds me a bit too much of Italy in the 1920s.
I would like to think that the rule of law can be so strengthened and engrained in society and the citizenry so moral and educated and resources and care so abundant and given freely that down the road we wont need cops.
Let them keep the long guns (of reasonable calibers; not, say, .50 BMG). It doesn't make much of a difference in terms of lethality, but long guns are much easier to shoot accurately, and the average American cop is very bad at that as it is.
I wouldn't have predicted that the inventor of modern CPUs would be so certain that computation is a bad model for consciousness. Is that a good way to characterize him and his position?
