pontus

Isn't there an analogy here to what's happening in software engineering? People keep saying things like "software engineering is so much more than programming". Couldn't one say that "mathematics is so much more than writing proofs"?

At least for now someone still has to decide what to prove and why. Like why are you trying to prove that thing to begin with? Presumably it's a step along some journey, right? Maybe the journey is where you need to start deriving your satisfaction from, then.

Vance said “They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.’ And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants”

My understanding is that this is pretty much how everyone does it, no? Not to say that I'm surprised that they're applying this argument asymmetrically to their allies vs. foes, of course, nor to say that I necessarily agree / disagree with this tactic.

I find the distinction between AGI and ASI to be a red herring. In my mind, we humans already have enough intelligence to basically solve any problem given enough time and a 'scratch pad'. It's sort of like Turing-completeness but for intelligence.

Saying that a computer exhibits artificial-SUPER-intelligence feels a little like saying that one universal Turing machine is more expressive than another universal Turing machine. The thing that sets the two Turing machines apart is not how expressive they are but how quickly and efficiently they can arrive at the given output.

It's hard for me to imagine a task that ASI could complete which a human with enough time and determination couldn't also complete, although I can imagine such tasks for dogs which don't exhibit the same level of intelligence as humans. Maybe I'm too human-centric and naive. Maybe there are other tasks out there that are beyond human intelligence even given infinite time.

If, however, my view of intelligence is correct, then the distinction between ASI and AGI is illusory, and the real distinction that we would see between systems is just their speed, efficiency, determination, etc.

In my mind, once we achieve AGI, we immediately have ASI: just run that AGI on a faster computer, across many nodes, etc. Instead of having humans solve quantum gravity over the next 1000 years, just have AGI solve it over the next month.

So I'll have to park my car in a garage first, then take a bus to the terminal just so that a robot can move my car from the place where I parked it to a different place? I was hoping it'd be something where I'd pull up to the curb, grab my bags and head in while the robot parked the car for me but apparently I'll still have to take a bus to the terminal?

Also consider the possibility that the people who argue against the hard problem of consciousness may, in fact, not be conscious. How could they ever understand the nuance of conscious experience and how it is fundamentally different from 'structure and function' if they don't have it? To them there is only the easy problem of consciousness.

And, of course, if they disagree with me about this and want to claim that they are, in fact, conscious, I'm not sure they can do that because... well the hard problem of consciousness.

I would buy this in a heartbeat. I am profoundly bothered by the slop software that is on every TV these days. I keep joking that as tech invades more and more corners of our lives, we will at some point in the future be helping our parents with their couches by saying "Have you tried restarting your couch?"

Don't get me wrong, tech is great when it's a value-add, but TV tech has gotten out of control.

Somewhat related question:

Any suggestions for a scanner meant for bulk scans of old family photos (think a few thousand images)? I bought, what I thought, was a reasonably solid scanner, the Pacific Image Powerfilm scanner but the software is so janky that it hangs every two strips and has to be restarted making the entire process super labor intensive. Also the entire "bulk feature" where it's meant to pull the strips one at a time iis not even close to working.

I'm curious what you mean when you say that this clearly is not intelligence because it's just Markov chains on steroids.

My interpretation of what you're saying is that since the next token is simply a function of the proceeding tokens, i.e. a Markov chain on steroids, then it can't come up with something novel. It's just regurgitating existing structures.

But let's take this to the extreme. Are you saying that systems that act in this kind of deterministic fashion can't be intelligent? Like if the next state of my system is simply some function of the current state, then there's no magic there, just unrolling into the future. That function may be complex but ultimately that's all it is, a "stochastic parrot"?

If so, I kind of feel like you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The laws of physics are deterministic (I don't want to get into a conversation about QM here, there are senses in which that's deterministic too and regardless I would hope that you wouldn't need to invoke QM to get to intelligence), but we know that there are physical systems that are intelligent.

If anything, I would say that the issue isn't that these are Markov chains on steroids, but rather that they might be Markov chains that haven't taken enough steroids. In other words, it comes down to how complex the next token generation function is. If it's too simple, then you don't have intelligence but if it's sufficiently complex then you basically get a human brain.

Just to pile on here, there's also ambiguity around how the observed girl is selected. Consider the following framing:

I go to a random house on a random street and knock on the door. A young girl opens the door. I ask how many siblings they have and they say one. What's the probability that they have a sister?

Now it's 50% even though cosmetically it seems like it'd be fair to say that the family has at least one daughter. The reason is that once I see a girl at the door, I'm slightly more confident in that it's a GG household since a GB or BG household would sometimes show a boy opening the door (assuming the two kids are equally likely to open the door).

P(GG | G at door) = P(G at door | GG) P(GG) / P(G at door)

P(G at door) = 1/2 (by symmetry)

So, P(GG | G at door) = 1 * 1/4 * 2 = 1/2

I'm not making a value judgement on how much I would or other people should consume in the first scenario. I'm simply saying that you could have profound effects due to AI without it being evident in the top-level metrics like economic growth, unemployment, and so on. It seems like we often say that either we see explosive economic growth or AI has either no, or at best very minimal impact in our lives. I don't think this dichotomy is correct.

I think two possible effects of AI are often conflated.

On the one hand you can imagine that work gets supercharged, allowing companies to produce 10x the number of widgets at 1/10th the cost. The economy would grow rapidly, wealth inequality would presumably be exacerbated, jobs would be automated, we might need some version of universal basic income, and so on. People debate whether or not this kind of transition is imminent or if it'd take decades.

On the other hand, it's conceivable that not much would happen in the "bulk" of the economy while at the same time the frontier of humanity might be pushed forward. We may see new treatments for diseases, new types of energy production, and so on. In this version of the world, jobs would mostly remain unchanged (at least in the short to intermediate term), perhaps with some small multiplicative efficiency factor, the economy wouldn't grow rapidly, there wouldn't be any mass unemployment, and so on.

In my mind, I'm much more excited about the second kind of impact that AI might have than the first. I guess I don't really feel like I want to have 10x the stuff that I already have while I'm really excited about someone curing cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, and so on.

Even if AI can't replace an entire worker, they may still be able to help one worker do the work of two which by itself could lead to massive unemployment (at least in the short term.)

I think the OP was pointing out that the reason Strasssen's algorithm works is that it somehow uncovered a kind of repeated work that's not evident in a simple divide and conquer approach. It's by the clever definition of the various submatrices that this "overlapping" work can be avoided.

In other words, the power of Strasssens algorithm comes from a strategy that's similar to / reminiscent of dynamic programming.

Isn't it just that the IP router happens to use IPs in Russia as part of the rotation?

If they're trying to exfiltrate data, they might want to rotate through IP addresses in order to obfuscate what's going on or otherwise circumvent restrictions. Using a simple ip rotator like the post talks about would maybe be an approach they'd use. If they're not careful with the IP addresses, once in a while one might get caught due to some restriction like being outside the US. It'd maybe appear as though you're getting these weird requests from Russia, but that's just because you're not logging the requests that are not being flagged from the US.

Maybe I'm reading the post incorrectly though (if so, please correct me!)

Is this just a data play? Need more data. Start a social network. Own said data.