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Comment Re:My Experience (Score 2) 81

Look up "Jagged capabilities". That's where we are so far. And if you go back a couple of decades, a calculator could do math a lot faster and more accurately than you could.

A claim of "AGI" is a claim that the weakest of it's jagged capabilities is still stronger than that of the average human, and I don't believe we'll see that this year.

Comment Re:Watch the responses... (Score 1) 81

We have NOT had AGI, and I'll be really surprised if the OpenAI offering is one. What we've had is tools that are very good for certain specialized tasks. One characteristic that all of the tasks it's be exceptionally good at is that it's easy to validate the answer after you get it. (P == NP?)

When you get to tasks that aren't easy to validate, then it gets a LOT weaker. And you've to to be certain that it isn't just fabulating...i.e. giving you an answer because you asked it to do so, even though it doesn't have a good guess at what the answer should be.

Note that, e.g., AIs that generate protein folding predictions aren't necessarily accurate, they're giving you a best guess, or a series of probable guesses. I'm not counting those as "easy to validate", because currently the AI, itself, can't do the validation. But they're quite useful, as the good models do about as well as a human expert, but a lot faster and cheaper...however you must NOT skip the validation step. (People can't make accurate predictions in this domain either.)

Comment Re:Still ignoring that elephant (Score 1) 54

Now imagine instead of factory workers, the machines randomly ripped arms off of people who had no association with the factory.

I don't suggest holding the AI responsible, I suggest holding it's USER responsible, just like the driver is held responsible if they fail to keep their car under control and plow into pedestrians.

Comment Re: Renamed already (Score 1) 47

Since the Wealth of Nations is the cornerstone of Capitalism, I would expect people cheerleading for it to read it. Smith is not god and economics shouldn't be a religion, but The Wealth of Nations is key to understanding how it can work for the benefit of all. His warning about corporate charters was in part inspired by his observation that corporations know nothing of compassion. I'm quite certain that by exceedingly sparingly, he did NOT mean to anyone who fills out a form and pays $150.

Competition also meant more than having 2 or 3 sellers to choose from. He envisioned many sellers and many buyers who were not that far apart in economic power (not his exact words but the jist is within a couple orders of magnitude). I have often observed that the modern economy shows inadequate competition in most if not all markets. Given adequate competition, "value pricing" would be practically impossible.

Comment Re:Still ignoring that elephant (Score 1) 54

Agent mode is also where the AI decides that committing a felony is an acceptable risk (even if it isn't). Ask an AI based robot (I know, not yet available) to go buy an ice cream at the truck and it decides the kids surrounding it are an impediment to it's mission and shoves them into traffic.

It might change people's minds if they are made strictly responsible for any crimes committed by the AI.

More real life, an AI decides the production database needs to be deleted even though told not to touch production. AI later matter of factly states it ignored that instruction and the database can't be recovered.

Comment Re:I know its not an original idea (Score 1) 29

There are so many unknowns in "dark matter" that they can't really claim it doesn't interact with itself. Some of the theories have it not interacting with itself, but that's not a good argument. There are too many possibilities. ...From here on I'm just spinning ideas...
FWIW, I came up with a theory that there are nine basic flavors of dark matter, each about 1/10th the mass of the universe, and the various flavors don't interact with each other, but they do interact with themselves, and are as varied within themselves as ordinary matter is. So you'd have nine types of dark galaxies.

This is a really BAD theory, but it's fun. The problem is that dark matter tends to be associated with galaxies, and local dark suns should be quite noticeable in that circumstance. We don't see that kind of result, so there aren't any local dark suns. I'm not sure we could detect them in another galaxy, but they should affect stellar motions within our own in a noticeable way. Unless you want to special case our own galaxy, dark matter needs to be rather diffuse for some reason...nothing much larger than a G class sun, possibly a M class. The reason you can get away with something that large is that lack of friction with ordinary matter means that you wouldn't get anything captured into a binary orbit with a normal star.

Comment Re:Still ignoring that elephant (Score 1) 54

It's more like unpredictable software. I'm not saying we burn it, I'm saying don't give it agency. Only allow it to advise, not take action. I have experimentally used it myself on code, but did not allow it to commit to the repo, only show me it's proposed changes. It even proved somewhat useful at that, though I didn't apply it's changes, it did inspire a similar approach that I implemented and committed.

Comment Re: Renamed already (Score 1) 47

A key to Capitalism from Smith himself is that it requires strong regulation to keep the playing field level. Smith also warned that charters must be given out exceedingly sparingly and the resulting corporation kept on a tight leash and held strictly to it's charter.

I guess we really blew that one!

But I rather doubt anyone involved in MAGA or others shouting "deregulate all the things!" have ever read "The Wealth of Nations". Most probably can't do it since centuries later the text is quite stilted.

Comment Re:Still ignoring that elephant (Score 1) 54

There is no implied malice, that would require understanding what right and wrong are. It doesn't. The training so far for the various AIs seems to be whatever we can grab from the internet or scan from whatever books we can get our hands on.

Are you claiming LLMs are written to create fake social media accounts and launch a smear campaign against a project maintainer who refuses to apply the AI's PR? Because that actually happened. It was prompted to make a few requested changes to a program and get a PR accepted with those changes. And that's what the bot did, BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

Put another way, would you run a makefile containing several billion rules that you are not allowed to examine first? Because that's what giving agency to LLMs is. Or might you prefer a debug mode where it shows what actions would be taken, but cannot take them? That is what I mean by not giving it agency.

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