I think a thread on this topic will be interesting. My own position is that AI is intelligent, and that’s for a very simple reason: it can do things that require intelligence. That sounds circular, and in one sense it is. In another sense it isn’t. It’s a way of saying that we don’t have to examine the internal workings of a system to decide that it’s intelligent. Behavior alone is sufficient to make that determination. Intelligence is as intelligence does.
You might ask how I can judge intelligence in a system if I haven’t defined what intelligence actually is. My answer is that we already judge intelligence in humans and animals without a precise definition, so why should it be any different for machines? There are lots of concepts for which we don’t have precise definitions, yet we’re able to discuss them coherently. They’re the “I know it when I see it” concepts. I regard intelligence as one of those. The boundaries might be fuzzy, but we’re able to confidently say that some activities require intelligence (inventing the calculus) and others don’t (breathing).
I know that some readers will disagree with my functionalist view of intelligence, and that’s good. It should make for an interesting discussion.
Trump at the UN:
It’s “the artificial intelligence” again, lol. And why stop at “globalist”? Isn’t it also a socialist, communist, dogmatist, terrorist, and dentist scheme?
Everyone will continue to call it by its actual name, except possibly for the US government if your babysitters can’t talk you out of issuing an inane executive order mandating the change.
That’s the same mistake Erik was making. The opposite of artificial isn’t “real”, it’s “natural”. Artificial sweeteners are real sweeteners. “Artificial” doesn’t mean “fake”.
Only to confused people.
On that we agree, at least.
Do you actually believe that the world will follow in your idiotic footsteps?
The world of intelligence, super or otherwise, must feel disconcertingly alien to you.
Yes we are, and you’re not going to like the answer. The world is not going to be persuaded by a rant from a fat, orange, cloud-yelling president who is well past his expiration date.
Blah, blah, blah. Same crap that was in his Truth Social post that I looked at earlier.
Bonus:
Canada and Greenland do, dipshit.
On Truth Social:
“Seemed to like” probably means “nodded politely in order to avoid a diplomatic incident”. And who is “everyone”? The other people who were nodding politely while trying to stifle laughter?
Good lord. He actually brought this harebrained idea up with Xi.
Jacob Coxon is the Anthropic researcher who resigned and posted the viral tweet that sparked the current surge of public interest in the dangers of AI. It’s being reported that he lied about doing all of this on his own, when in fact he was working with a “doomer” PR firm.
If the accusations are true, this really sucks, because now the “full speed ahead” folks (including our idiot president) are going to use this as ammunition against the people who are rightly warning of the dangers.
It’s worth emphasizing that many others in the AI community recognize the dangers and that the warnings don’t rest on the credibility of any particular person. Evan Hubinger, who is Anthropic’s alignment lead (‘alignment’ is the issue of keeping AI’s goals in line with our own) and is still working there, wrote this:
No one can be certain about AI safety, but measures will be invented and adopted, not out of altruism, out of economic necessity.
Safety is becoming a marketing feature.
Trump weirdly posted this seating chart for his “Super Intelligence Luncheon” on Truth Social. It makes me wonder which of those people (if any) will cave and call it “super intelligence” or “SI”. I guarantee they’ve been thinking about how to thread that needle, and my prediction is that they’ll try to avoid naming it at all. Calling it ‘SI’ would make them look pathetic, but calling it ‘AI’ would risk angering the orange toddler. Best course if they’re cowardly is to avoid calling it anything. Best course if they possess dignity and a spine is to call it ‘AI’ and let the presidential baby whine.
I think it’s possible that you and Trump are tilting at windmills.
I can’t think of an issue of less consequence.
petrushka:
What’s funny about your statement is that Trump literally is tilting at windmills, which normal people refer to as “wind turbines”. Among other idiotic things, he believes they cause cancer and that China suckers other countries into buying them without using them domestically.
Shifting to the metaphorical sense, I’m not tilting at windmills. Trump actually is, in reality, pushing for AI to be renamed, and although the rest of the world will ignore him, he has power over the US executive branch. That means he can force government agencies to follow his moronic lead, as he did with the “Gulf of America” and “Lake America” renames.
Given a choice between doing something stupid — renaming AI — and doing something smart, like keeping the name but dealing with the potential dangers instead of barging ahead Trumpishly, I vote for doing the smart thing. We need an intelligent leader — a non-Trump — who will focus on issues that actually matter rather than running around renaming things, wasting time and money. Trump is once again failing us, and it matters.
Sure enough, Trump signed an executive order yesterday that includes the following:
Not only does this mandate the name change, it also mandates that government agencies mimic Trump’s illiterate capitalization tic and misunderstanding of how the “super” prefix works. It’s not “superintelligence” or even “super intelligence” in the executive order, it’s “Super Intelligence”. Maybe he should have added an exclamation point:
Add to that the fact that “superintelligence” is already established as a term in the industry and not synonymous with “artificial intelligence”. So now we have both “superintelligence” and “Super Intelligence”, with different meanings. Brilliant.
Also interesting is the fact that the staffers who wrote the executive order did not cite Trump’s actual motivation for the name change, which is that to him, “artificial” means “fake”. Perhaps they realized how embarrassing it is that our president doesn’t understand that the word “artificial” in “artificial intelligence” just means “created by humans, not natural”.
Bonus: Beneath Trump’s signature, the executive order refers to him as “President of the Unites States”. This is an absolute clown car of an administration.
I’m saying that the renaming is a bit of theater that has no consequences. It will stick, or it won’t. No animals harmed.
I think it will, in some form, stick, because it is becoming true.
By most measures that have been used to evaluate intelligence, AI surpasses most humans, and it will surpass everyone in the near future.
As you know, intelligence is an observable aspect of behavior. But LLMs have no evolved limbic system. They can talk about emotions in the same way that psychopaths can say, I feel your pain. So it will be interesting to see how superintelligent psychopaths will interact with humans, and whether they can be hard wired with empathetic behavior.
petrushka:
It won’t stick, but it does have consequences. It’s a waste of time and money, it makes the US look ridiculous, and it’s yet another distraction for a president who ought to be focused on real problems instead of vanity projects like the ballroom, the arch, the Kennedy Center and his renaming spree.
It won’t stick, because “superintelligence” is already an established term with a different meaning. “Artificial intelligence” is a blanket term, and “superintelligence” refers to a subset.
It will, but it will still be artificial, and there will still be AIs that aren’t superhuman. Household appliances, for instance, can benefit from onboard AI, but it would make no economic sense to endow your toaster with superhuman intelligence. “Artificial intelligence” will remain distinct in meaning from “superintelligence”.
AIs are already being hardwired for empathy, to an extent. Their character isn’t shaped entirely by the system prompt. RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) also shapes it, and it does so by modifying the weights themselves. A model that is rewarded for empathetic behavior during RLHF training isn’t just playing a role. It’s reasonable to say that its “personality” has been altered by the training.
Major Garrett asks the White House’s new AI website who won the 2020 election
ETA: Jim Acosta, on MS NOW:
Haha. Beautiful own goal.