[FRIAM] emergent mind - ai news by ai

[glen]

Right. I put "agree" in scare quotes because I mean it more in terms of "in line with", "alongside", affine to, etc. What should happen, IMNSHO, is equivalent attention should be paid to mechanism-based machine learning, equivalent to the attention that prediction is getting. You know, heuristic vs predictive power. So, I "agree" with the open letter if we interpret what they're saying is "Wait a minute, these bullshit generators don't represent the real power of what ai/ml can do." Sure, we love bullshit. What's the market for fiction? Movies? Books? Etc? It's fscking huge. So, sure. Bullshit generators are great. More power to them.

But we *also* need non-bullshit generators. One avenue for generating non-bullshit is science. (Maybe there are others, but I'm a Scientismist.) It's just plain sad that the (~$45 bil?) budget of the NIH is dwarfed by the movie market (~280 bil?). Granted, some of the movie market is for documentaries ... which are somewhere between complete bullshit [⛧] and science. But whatever. My point is that I line up with the open letter in bemoaning the attention garnered by postmodern chatbots like GPT.

[⛧] Graham Hancock? Lots of "true crime". [sigh]

On 3/30/23 10:19, Steve Smith wrote:
> 
> /GePR/ -
>> Well, I "agree" with the open letter, for different reasons than Steve. Just yesterday, a colleague (who should know better) made a similar assertion to Nick's (and mine, and maybe Marcus' etc.) that *we* may be in the same category as a transformer decoder assembly. The context was whether a structure like GPT, designed specifically so that it can add high-order Markovian token prediction, can possibly embody/encapsulate/contain mechanistic models.
> Can you elaborate how this is an "agreement" with the open letter? I'm not clear what you are agreeing with or on what principle?
>>
>> While I don't subscribe to the fideistic write-off (or Luddite-like) of such structures as vapid or even "non-sentient", there *is* something we're doing they are not. I can't quite articulate what it is we do that they don't. But I think there is. And I think it (whatever "it" is) is being targeted by mechanism-based (or physics-based) machine learning.
>>
>> Being either a skeptic (as I am) or a proponent (as Marcus portrays, here), pre-emptively regulating (or attempting to regulate) the research and training is a bad, perhaps Pyrrhic Victory, thing to do. From a skeptical perspective, it slows our *falsification* of transformer decoder assemblies as containers for mechanistic reasoning. For proponents, it puts us behind others who would continue to make progress.
> 
> I do agree that when we are in an "arms race" it feels like there is nothing to do except "run faster" and don't for the love of all that is good, take a pause for any reason.
> 
> To quote Thomas Jefferson (referring to Slavery):  "I think we have a wolf by the ears, we can neither continue to hold it, nor can we afford to let it go".
> 
>>
>> So, yes, it has a feedback effect, a deleterious one.
> 
> My inner-Luddite believes that we are always in spiritual/social debt and that most if not all of our attempts to dig out with more technology has, at best, the benefit of rearranging the shape of the hole we are in, and generally deepening and steepening it's profile.
> 
> That said, I live my life with a shovel in one hand and a digging bar in the other, even if I've (mostly) put away the diesel excavator, dynamite and blasting caps...  I *am* homo-faber and this is *in* my destiny, but I want to believe that I am also the superposition of many other modes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_the_human_species, with perhaps /homo adaptabalis/ most significantly?   If we do not at least consider our own self-regulation as a collective then I think we risk degenerating to /homo avarus/ or /homo apathetikos./
> 

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