corbin

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago (8 children)

I'm gonna be polite, but your position is deeply sneerworthy; I don't really respect folks who don't read. The article has quite a few quotes from neuroscientist Anil Seth (not to be confused with AI booster Anil Dash) who says that consciousness can be explained via neuroscience as a sort of post-hoc rationalizing hallucination akin to the multiple-drafts model; his POV helps deflate the AI hype. Quote:

There is a growing view among some thinkers that as AI becomes even more intelligent, the lights will suddenly turn on inside the machines and they will become conscious. Others, such as Prof Anil Seth who leads the Sussex University team, disagree, describing the view as "blindly optimistic and driven by human exceptionalism." … "We associate consciousness with intelligence and language because they go together in humans. But just because they go together in us, it doesn't mean they go together in general, for example in animals."

At the end of the article, another quote explains that Seth is broadly aligned with us about the dangers:

In just a few years, we may well be living in a world populated by humanoid robots and deepfakes that seem conscious, according to Prof Seth. He worries that we won't be able to resist believing that the AI has feelings and empathy, which could lead to new dangers. "It will mean that we trust these things more, share more data with them and be more open to persuasion." But the greater risk from the illusion of consciousness is a "moral corrosion", he says. "It will distort our moral priorities by making us devote more of our resources to caring for these systems at the expense of the real things in our lives" – meaning that we might have compassion for robots, but care less for other humans.

A pseudoscience has an illusory object of study. For example, parapsychology studies non-existent energy fields outside the Standard Model, and criminology asserts that not only do minds exist but some minds are criminal and some are not. Robotics/cybernetics/artificial intelligence studies control loops and systems with feedback, which do actually exist; further, the study of robots directly leads to improved safety in workplaces where robots can crush employees, so it's a useful science even if it turns out to be ill-founded. I think that your complaint would be better directed at specific AGI position papers published by techbros, but that would require reading. Still, I'll try to salvage your position:

Any field of study which presupposes that a mind is a discrete isolated event in spacetime is a pseudoscience. That is, fields oriented around neurology are scientific, but fields oriented around psychology are pseudoscientific. This position has no open evidence against it (because it's definitional!) and aligns with the expectations of Seth and others. It is compatible with definitions of mind given by Dennett and Hofstadter. It immediately forecloses the possibility that a computer can think or feel like humans; at best, maybe a computer could slowly poorly emulate a connectome.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 days ago

Oh, sorry. We're in agreement and my sentence was poorly constructed. The computation of a matrix multiplication usually requires at least pencil and paper, if not a computer. I can't compute anything larger than a 2 × 2. But I'll readily concede that Strassen's specific trick is simple enough that a mentalist could use it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Only the word "theoretical" is outdated. The Beeping Busy Beaver problem is hard even with a Halting oracle, and we have a corresponding Beeping Busy Beaver Game.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Your understanding is correct. It's worth knowing that the matrix-multiplication exponent actually controls multiple different algorithms. I stubbed a little list a while ago; important examples include several graph-theory algorithms as well as parsing for context-free languages. There's also a variant of P vs NP for this specific problem, because we can verify that a matrix is a product in quadratic time.

That Reddit discussion contains mostly idiots, though. We expect an iterative sequence of ever-more-complicated algorithms with ever-slightly-better exponents, approaching quadratic time in the infinite limit. We also expected a computer to be required to compute those iterates at some point; personally I think Strassen's approach only barely fits inside a brain and the larger approaches can't be managed by humans alone.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago (1 children)

To be fair, I'm skeptical of the idea that humans have minds or perform cognition outside of what's known to neuroscience. We could stand to be less chauvinist and exceptionalist about humanity. Chatbots suck but that doesn't mean humans are good.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Read it to the end and then re-read 2009's The Gervais Principle. I hope Ed eventually comes back to Rao's rant because they complement each other perfectly; Zitron's Business Idiot is Rao's Clueless! What Rao brings to the table is an understanding that Sociopaths exist and steer the Clueless, and also that the ratio of (visible) Clueless to Sociopaths is an indication of the overall health of an (individual) business; Zitron's argument is then that we are currently in an environment (the "Rot Economy" in his writing) which is characterized by mostly Clueless business leaders.

Then re-read Doctorow's 2022 rant Social Quitting, which introduced "enshittification", an alternate understanding of Rao's process. To Rao, a business pivots from Sociopath to Clueless leadership by mere dilution, but for Doctorow, there's a directed market pressure which eliminates (or M&As) any businesses not willing to give up some Sociopathy in favor of the more generally-accepted Clueless principles. Concretely relevant to this audience, note how Sociopathic approaches to cryptocurrency-oriented banking have failed against Clueless GAAP accounting, not just at the regulatory level but at the level of handshakes between small-business CEOs.

Somebody could start a new flavor of Marxism here, one which (to quote an old toot of mine @[email protected] that I can't find) starts by understanding that management is a failed paradigm of production and that quotes all of these various managers (Galloway, Rao, and Zitron were all management bros at one point, as were their heroes Scott Adams and Mike Judge) as having a modicum of insight cloaked in MBA-speak.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Trying to remember who said it, but there's a Mastodon thread somewhere that said it should be called Theocracy. The introduction would talk about the quiverfull movement, the Costco would become a megachurch ("Welcome to church. Jesus loves you."), etc. It sounds straightforward and depressing.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

You may be thinking of checkers. Chess is still open and unsolved, although there is strong evidence that the player who goes first has a large advantage.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

I adjusted her ESAS downward by 5 points for questioning me, but 10 points upward for doing it out of love.

Oh, it's a mockery all right. This is so fucking funny. It's nothing less than the full application of SCP's existing temporal narrative analysis to Big Yud's philosophy. This is what they actually believe. For folks who don't regularly read SCP, any article about reality-bending is usually a portrait of a narcissist, and the body horror is meant to give analogies for understanding the psychological torture they inflict on their surroundings; the article meanders and takes its time because there's just so much worth mocking.

This reminded me that SCP-2718 exists. 2718 is a Basilisk-class memetic cognitohazard; it will cause distress in folks who have been sensitized to Big Yud's belief system, and you should not click if you can't handle that. But it shows how these ideas weren't confined to LW.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It's been almost six decades of this, actually; we all know what this link will be. Longer if you're like me and don't draw a distinction between AI, cybernetics, and robotics.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Perhaps! But not because we adopted vibe coding. I do have faith in our ability to climb out of the Turing tarpit (WP, Esolangs) eventually, but only by coming to a deeper understanding of algorithmic complexity.

Also, from a completely different angle: when I was a teenager, I could have a programmable calculator with 18MHz Z80 in my hand for $100. NASA programmers today have the amazing luxury of the RAD750, a 110MHz PowerPC chipset. We're already past the gourmet phase and well into fusion.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

A German lawyer is upset because open-source projects don't like it when he pastes chatbot summaries into bug reports. If this were the USA, he would be a debit to any bar which admits him, because the USA's judges have started to disapprove of using chatbots for paralegal work.

 

Sorry, no sneer today. I'm tired of this to the point where I'm dreaming up new software licenses.

A trans person no longer felt safe in our community and is no longer developing. In response, at least four different forums full of a range of Linux users and developers (Lemmy #1, Lemmy #2, HN, Phoronix (screenshot)) posted their PII and anti-trans hate.

I don't have any solutions. I'm just so fucking disappointed in my peers and I feel a deep inadequacy at my inability to get these fuckwads to be less callous.

 

After a decade of cryptofascism and failed political activism, our dear friend jart is realizing that they don't really have much of a positive legacy. If only there was something they could have done about that.

 

In this big thread, over and over, people praise the Zuck-man for releasing Llama 3's weights. How magnanimous! How courteous! How devious!

Of course, Meta is doing this so that they don't have to worry about another 4chan leak of weights via Bittorrent.

 

Sometimes what is not said is as sneerworthy as what is said.

It is quite telling to me that HN's regulars and throwaway accounts have absolutely nothing to say about the analysis of cultural patterns.

 

Possibly the worst defense yet of Garry Tan's tweeting of death threats towards San Francisco's elected legislature. In yet more evidence for my "HN is a Nazi bar" thesis, this take is from an otherwise-respected cryptographer and security researcher. Choice quote:

sorry, but 2Pac is now dad music, I don't make the rules

Best sneer so far is this comment, which links to this Key & Peele sketch about violent rap lyrics in the context of gang violence.

 

Choice quote:

Actually I feel violated.

It's a KYC interview, not a police interrogation. I've always enjoyed KYC interviews; I get to talk about my business plans, or what I'm going to do with my loan, or how I ended up buying/selling stocks. It's hard to empathize with somebody who feels "violated" by small talk.

 

In today's episode, Yud tries to predict the future of computer science.

 

Choice quote:

Putting “ACAB” on my Tinder profile was an effective signaling move that dramatically improved my chances of matching with the tattooed and pierced cuties I was chasing.

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