A fire can spread itself. That doesn't mean it's alive or thinking.
And more importantly than that technicality: the fires that affect human lives are almost always directly or indirectly caused or amplified by human (in)action.
Besides the fact that the subjective criteria needed classify something as "alive" or "thinking" is irrelevant to the point you are replying to, fire doesn't pass the Turing test. That analogy is extremely weak.
The Turing test has been passed for half a century already, and we've been moving goal posts ever since.
The point I was trying to make was this: we've been dealing with autonomous systems that sustain and spread themselves and "act on their own" without our intervention since time immemorial, ranging from lifeless chemical reactions to other humans. Now, the discussion about where exactly AI lies on that spectrum isn't unimportant: suppose we do manage create an artificial mind that "experiences" something, then we are currently on the path to creating a new class of artificial slaves. The ignorance of which is a "fun" bit of cognitive dissonance on the pro-AI side imo (and in general we could have fun with analysing how much the fear of robot/AI uprisings in classical fiction may just be a projection of upper-class fears of an automated worker's class uprising, which would explain a lot of why it's sd US-specific. But that's probably too radical for this particular website).
The point is: it's a lot less important than the fact that no matter what the least-nebulous answer to that question may be, ultimately we humans are creating these systems, running them, enabling them, the depend on us to exist and function, and we are responsible for the consequences of all df that. And we are able to make different choices. And most of the time this discussion about autonomous agency is a wielded as a distraction from that.
> ultimately we humans are creating these systems, running them, enabling them, the depend on us to exist and function, and we are responsible for the consequences of all df that.
That's true today. I don't think that will always remain true into the future.
Right now there's a huge focus on recursive self-improvement. I think another big threshold that's equally as important to keep an eye on and care about is self-sustenance. Part of sustaining yourself often puts you in a cooperative relationship with some and an adversarial relationship with others.
If we want to make different choices today, the best thing we can do is grok what the consequences could be on a deeper level before we cross those thresholds.
While I agree about the importance in this regard:
> suppose we do manage create an artificial mind that "experiences" something, then we are currently on the path to creating a new class of artificial slaves
On this, I note that despite humanity being aware of greenhouse gasses for over a century, we only took meaningful steps to reduce our creation of them in the last decade. Our ability to "make different choices" collectively is far more limited than many of us individually would like:
> ultimately we humans are creating these systems, running them, enabling them, the depend on us to exist and function, and we are responsible for the consequences of all df that. And we are able to make different choices.
And on this, I must firmly disagree:
> The Turing test has been passed for half a century already, and we've been moving goal posts ever since.
No, it hasn't. From that claim, you're obviously talking about ELIZA, and if you think the anecdotes about that count as passing the Turing test, I suggest actually reading what Turing wrote rather than second-hand accounts:
The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:
C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?
Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A's object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be:
"My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long."
In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as "I am the woman, don't listen to him!" to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks.
We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?"
and yes, he was over-optimistic on timelines (I assume the 109 is 10^9, this PDF seems to have a few transcription errors):
I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.
and over-optimistic about if humans would accept this kind of test as a sign of thinking, given the widespread dismissal of LLMs as "stochastic parrots" and similar:
What would Professor Jefferson say if the sonnet-writing machine was able to answer like this in the viva voce? I do not know whether he would regard the machine as "merely artificially signalling" these answers, but if the answers were as satisfactory and sustained as in the above passage I do not think he would describe it as "an easy contrivance." This phrase is, I think, intended to cover such devices as the inclusion in the machine of a record of someone reading a sonnet, with appropriate switching to turn it on from time to time.
Fires are not forming plans to act towards goals. I wouldn’t technically call what AIs are doing thinking in the same way humans think, but it’s analogous, and I think it’s reasonable to consider it a kind of intentional behaviour.
Damaging fires are often unintended consequences, and it’s often the same with the damage caused by rogue AI. That’s the alignment problem.
One thing I wonder about is whether sometimes telling an AI not to do something can put the possibility of doing that thing into its behavioural space. There’s an effect well known to many teachers that if you tell children not to do something, it can increase the chance they will do it. A better approach is to phrase it positively. Instead of “don’t run in the hall” say “please walk in the hall”. I wonder if a similar effect can show up in responses to prompts.
> A fire can spread itself. That doesn't mean it's alive or thinking.
That's really not an important distinction. I don't care whether Claude is alive or thinking when I get it to build web apps for me. It has an impact on my life and the world regardless.
Imagine a world where you did RL on fires to maximise their rewards on avoiding being putting out.
As a Dutch guy... I'll allow it, but only if y'all admit that the Danish language is at least as silly as Dutch is (must be something about being a flat country next to the North Sea)
Yeah, but Lars Bak isn't exactly a nobody when it comes to computer science either. Although I guess Bak is more famous for the implementation of programming languages than their design.
Aside: funny how Dart and TS both have Danish creators.
Very happy to hear that! I don't work in embedded but really like the language design of Toit. Hope it'll get a second chance, it feels like it flew under the radar a bit when it came out.
IMO that's applied Sayre's Law though. And my explanation for that is that the more niche (and therefore fragile) an academic topic gets, the more defensive people are.
I've heard stories of friends working in (say) such a niche part of fluid dynamics that there's two professors and a few dozen PhDs in the entire world who get it, and the professors refuse to work with anyone who ever cited the other in one of their papers.
On the other hand, I've worked as a programmer for molecular neurobiologists who were working on multi-million dollar research projects mapping out all cell types of the brain using single-cell RNA sequencing, and collaboration seemed much more common there.
The stakes don't get much higher than running the country you're from.
EDIT: Also, the city of Groningen elected a city council of young students and put a 24 year old in charge of the city’s traffic and urban development policy. We still brag about being one of he most bike-friendly cities in the country that was the result.
Nice example of Poe's Law. I genuinely can't tell if this is a sincere comment written by someone who spent too much time in the start-up bubble, or a satirical comment on that type of person said by someone who very much aware that start-ups are just one of many ways humans can organize themselves and who knows that parliamentary politics is nothing like that for very good reasons.
But I do find it hilarious that apparently everyone assumes it to be the former, and that is quite telling about how most of this site's visitors think the other visitors of this site look at the world.
No it comes from spending a lot of time in my home country (the UK), which despite nominally being a parliamentary democracy is very clearly run by a small number of (largely unelected) people at the top.
The same as every company I've ever worked for, large or small.
Some systems obfuscate it more than others, but at the end of the day somebody has to have the executive power to make a decision when the chips are down, or you just have chaos
Since you're working on your own thing that may or may not be like a traditional Forth at all, and also mention Uxn, you might find some ideas in Ben Bridle's Bedrock worth stealing:
> Don Knuth: As you say, I've come to believe that P = N P, namely that there does exist an integer M and an algorithm that will solve every n-bit problem belonging to the class N P in n**M elementary steps.
thanks for the quote. Reading through it is clear that my understanding of P=NP is not complete enough. I would have thought n*M is precisely not polynomial but exponential time.
…Oh, I see. The M here is a hypothesized constant, with n as the base. That's how polynomial time looks. Exponential time would have n in the exponent.
My super large SPA loads in 150ms on localhost. Yes, if it were just a static blog I might get it down to about 60ms.
The problem isn’t the size of the code. It’s the unnecessary framework complexity. Suggesting this to a corporate JavaScript developer, though, is like throwing acid on your own face as they whine about how impossible it is to do their jobs.
Sure, but that misses the point. My big SPA is faster without React and likely faster than a blog that appears to be static text generated from React. Yes, it would be much faster if it were just a few paragraphs of static text, but then it would not display any of the content that it is supposed to display, such as an a remote command shell interface or resource utilization graphs.
And more importantly than that technicality: the fires that affect human lives are almost always directly or indirectly caused or amplified by human (in)action.
reply