nednobbins
@nednobbins@lemmy.zip
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 3 days ago:
We certainly haven’t ruled out the possibility that the human brain is capable of some sort of “super Turing” calculations. That would lead me to 2 questions;
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Can we devise some test to show this? If we expand our definition of “test” to include anything we can measure, directly or indirectly, through our senses?
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What do we think is the “magic” ingredient that allows humans to engage in “super turing” activities, that a computer doesn’t have? eg Are carbon compounds inherently more suited to intelligence than silicon compounds?
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- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 3 days ago:
There’s a real vs theoretical distinction. Turing machines are defined as having infinite memory. Running out of memory is a big issue that prevents computers from solving problems that Turing machines should be able to solve.
The halting problem, a bunch of problems involving prime numbers, a bunch of other weird math problems are all things that can’t be solved with Turing machines. They can all sort of be solved in some circumstances (eg A TM can correctly classify many programs as either halting or not halting but there are a bunch of edge cases it can’t figure out, even with infinite memory).
From what I remember, most researchers believe that human brains are Turing Complete. I’m not aware of any class of problem that humans can solve that we don’t think are solvable by sufficiently large computers.
You’re right that Quantum Computers are Turing Complete. They’re just the closest practical thing I could think of to something beyond it. They often let you knock down the Big Oh relative to regular computers. That was my point though. We can describe something that goes beyond TC (like “it can solve the halting lemma”) but there don’t seem to be any examples of them.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 4 days ago:
Most modern languages are theoretically Turing complete but they all have finite memory. That also keeps human brains from being Turing complete. I’ve read a little about theories beyond Turing completeness, like quantum computers, but I’m not aware of anyone claiming that human brains are capable of that.
A game of Magic could theoretically do any task a Turing machine could do but it would be really slow. Even if it could “think” it would likely take years to decide to do something as simple as farting.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 4 days ago:
Feelings are certainly real. That doesn’t mean that they provide any evidence beyond the existence of the feeling. The standard thought experiment around that is to think about dreams. In a dream, everything I feel can be completely convincing and I have no way to know it’s a hallucination. Once I wake up that reality becomes clear and I know that the feelings I was 100% certain of a few moments ago, were false. That suggests that even complete certainty in our feelings is not indicative of underlying truth.
The extra dimension thing is a bit tricky. The standard 3+1 are widely accepted. There are several conjectures that involve more dimensions but we haven’t found evidence to support them. All of those are still physical dimensions. They generally fall into 2 categories; testable and not testable.
The non-testability is why everyone looks down on string theorists. Their models “explain” everything by piling on more and more dimensions but non of it is testable.
Since none of the dimensions above 4 are measurable, I’m much more comfortable believing they don’t exist than that they do. I don’t see why it would make sense to fill a void of non-knowledge with arbitrary guesses. I don’t see a problem in not knowing if it’s possible for AIs (or humans) to be conscious.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 4 days ago:
I can understand a desire to find something beyond ourselves but I’m not driven by it.
That’s exactly where Descartes lost me. I was with him on the whole “cogito ergo sum” thing but his insistence that his feelings of a higher being meant that it must exist in real form somewhere made no sense to me.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 4 days ago:
I’m not talking about a precise definition of consciousness, I’m talking about a consistent one. Without a definition, you can’t argue that an AI, a human, a dog, or a squid has consciousness. You can proclaim, it but you can’t back it up.
The problem is that I have more than a basic understanding of how an LLM works. I’ve written NNs from scratch and I know that we model perceptrons after neurons.
Researchers know that there are differences between the two. We can generally eliminate any of those differences (and many research do exactly that). No researcher, scientist, or philosopher can tell you what critical property neurons may have that enable consciousness. Nobody actually knows and people who claim to know are just making stuff up.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 4 days ago:
I think this is likely an unsurmountable point of difference.
The problem is that once we eliminate measurability we can’t differentiate between reality and fantasy. We can imagine anything we want and believe in it.
The Philosophy of Balance has “believe in the universal God” as its first core tenant. That makes it more like a religion than a philosophy.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 4 days ago:
I don’t know if we’ll ever define consciousness or if we’ll ever discover what it is.
My central claim is that if we don’t do that we can’t convincingly claim that an AI is or is not conscious. We can conjecture about it either way and either guess may be right, but we won’t be able to move past guesses.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 4 days ago:
This definition of consciousness essentially says that humans have souls and machines don’t. It’s unsatisfying because it just kicks the definition question down the road.
Saying that consciousness exists outside the realm of physics and science is a very strong statement. It claims that none of our normal analysis and measurement tools apply to it. That may be true, but if it is, how can anyone defend the claim that an AI does or does not have it?
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 4 days ago:
Defining “consciousness” requires much more handwaving and many more assumptions than any of the other three. It requires so much that I claim it’s essentially an undefined term.
With such a vague definition of what “consciousness” is, there’s no logical way to argue that an AI does or does not have it.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 5 days ago:
I can define “LLM”, “a painting”, and “alive”. Those definitions don’t require assumptions or gut feelings. We could easily come up with a set of questions and an answer key that will tell you if a particular thing is an LLM or a painting and whether or not it’s alive.
I’m not aware of any such definition of conscious, nor am I aware of any universal tests of consciousness. Without that definition, it’s like Ebert claiming that, “Video games can never be art”.
- Comment on So much... 4 weeks ago:
Kurt Gödel wrote a whole paper on it.
He used math to show that all statements, in any language, can be expressed as math statements. He then proved that it’s impossible to create any cpnsistent set of math statements that completely describes everything.
- Comment on true love is rare 1 month ago:
Are there any lab scientists that don’t hate their pipettes? My wife used to complain constantly about getting cramps from those things, especially those multi-drop dispensers.
Her explanation was always that biotechs can afford robots to do the pipetting but academia is budget constrained and grad students are (were) cheaper than robots.
- Comment on If it works it works 1 month ago:
<puts on nerd hat> Normal people rarely see the above image. When you look at Jupiter with the naked eye, you see a slightly brighter dot. The only way to tell it’s not a star is that it changes position relative to them from day to day.
If you look at it with a good pair of binoculars, you can see that the dot seems to be slightly bigger than other dots. You still can’t see the red spot.
If you look at it through a telescope with a 10" objective and 100x magnification, you can definitely make out the red spot and you can make out that the rest of the planet has some texture.An image that clear and crisp takes some very expensive equipment.
- Comment on Last year China generated almost 3 times as much solar power as the EU did, and it's close to overtaking all OECD countries put together (whose combined population is 1.38 billion people) 5 months ago:
It’s a better measure but not a perfect one. The big problem with the US-China GDP comparison is that the US has much more of a service economy while China has a much more manufacturing based economy.
Manufacturing pollutes much more than services do but services don’t exist without the manufacturing.
That’s why I was saying a better measure would be pollution per GNP. That would cut out services and basically just count manufacturing output. That would make sense because it’s the biggest source of pollution and it’s the source you can do the most about (ie there’s a lot of room to make many parts of the manufacturing chain cleaner).
Nobody is as green as their marketing suggests and China is no exception. China is making huge investments in green tech and there’s still a long way to go.
- Comment on Last year China generated almost 3 times as much solar power as the EU did, and it's close to overtaking all OECD countries put together (whose combined population is 1.38 billion people) 5 months ago:
Because humans just existing produces far less pollution than humans producing a lot of stuff.
It’s trivial to say that a bunch of hunter-gatherers don’t pollute much but we’re not generally willing to relegate people to living in the stone age.
Our economic choices have a much larger impact on pollution than our personal choices do. Ideally we’d have a measure of pollution per consumption. Everyone would have a score that calculates the total pollution created by the entire supply chain that supports their choices. So if a mine in Africa is polluting so a Chinese guy can have a nice air condition, that should be counted for China; and if a factory in China pollutes so that a guy in the US can have a new Iphone, that should be counted for the US.
I’m not aware of any such data set. The closest proxy would be GDP or GNP. That essentially provides a measure of how much pollution the total lifestyle of that population produces.
- Comment on Last year China generated almost 3 times as much solar power as the EU did, and it's close to overtaking all OECD countries put together (whose combined population is 1.38 billion people) 5 months ago:
That’s not really how it works. Some random Chinese peasant (that’s the vast majority of China’s population) doesn’t produce much CO2. You can add or remove millions of them without significantly impacting coal consumption or CO2 production.
Industry pollutes. Some types pollute more than others.
China has been increasing energy usage across the board at a much higher rate than the population has been growing. It’s a nonsense plan because there’s no reason to think that reducing the population would affect that trend.
While there’s a clear trend of China using more coal there’s just as clear a trend of coal making up a smaller and smaller share of China’s power usage over time. Just about every analysis says they’re solidly on track to completely phase out coal by 2025 and nobody predicts they’ll need to shrink their population to do it.
- Comment on Last year China generated almost 3 times as much solar power as the EU did, and it's close to overtaking all OECD countries put together (whose combined population is 1.38 billion people) 5 months ago:
So you’re saying there are just too many Chinese people? How many should there be?
- Comment on Last year China generated almost 3 times as much solar power as the EU did, and it's close to overtaking all OECD countries put together (whose combined population is 1.38 billion people) 5 months ago:
Trains and ships are part of the logistics chain but trucks are definitely part of it. They have a big advantage of not needing train stations or ports, as long as you have a decent road. Some of the larger strip mining operations fill a truck per minute.
- Comment on Last year China generated almost 3 times as much solar power as the EU did, and it's close to overtaking all OECD countries put together (whose combined population is 1.38 billion people) 5 months ago:
China effectively seems to be playing Factorio. They have a solar/wind production rate of X/day and X keeps going up faster and faster.
They’ll sell those panels and turbines to whoever will take them. They’re cheap but the sheer volume means that you need a huge economy to take any significant share of that inventory. With the US effectively out of the picture the biggest remaining economy is China. On top of that the EU does have some tariffs on Chinese renewables and that skews the deployments even more towards China.
- Comment on Last year China generated almost 3 times as much solar power as the EU did, and it's close to overtaking all OECD countries put together (whose combined population is 1.38 billion people) 5 months ago:
Unreliable may have been a poor choice of words.
You can’t move coal around with pipes or wires. Someone needs to drive trucks full of coal to a power plant.The pollution from coal tends to have a lot of externalities that drag on the economy. Lost work days, faster equipment degradation, etc.
They use coal but they have practical reasons to want to reduce reliance on coal.
- Comment on Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not 5 months ago:
That’s a very emphatic restatement of your initial claim.
I can’t help but notice that, for all the fancy formatting, that wall of text doesn’t contain a single line which actually defines the difference between “learning” and “statistical optimization”. It just repeats the claim that they are different without supporting that claim in any way.
Nothing in there, precludes the alternative hypothesis; that human learning is entirely (or almost entirely) an emergent property of “statistical optimization”. Without some definition of what the difference would be we can’t even theorize a test
- Comment on Last year China generated almost 3 times as much solar power as the EU did, and it's close to overtaking all OECD countries put together (whose combined population is 1.38 billion people) 5 months ago:
GDP is total production net of total consumption. It would be cool to compare it to those factors independently but don’t know of anyone who reports that data.
I’m not looking to bestow sainthood upon any country. Just looking for the most accurate metric.
- Comment on Last year China generated almost 3 times as much solar power as the EU did, and it's close to overtaking all OECD countries put together (whose combined population is 1.38 billion people) 5 months ago:
95% of the world’s new coal construction (2023)
China had the largest new coal construction in 2023 but it was far below 95%. I didn’t do all the math but it drops below 50% when you compare it to just the growth of the next three biggest coal producers.
They build most of our solar but we’ve effectively banned it now. They’re not only growing capacity to produce renewables, they’re taking the outputs that were planned for sale here and installing them locally.
- Comment on Last year China generated almost 3 times as much solar power as the EU did, and it's close to overtaking all OECD countries put together (whose combined population is 1.38 billion people) 5 months ago:
Yes. And go check the percentage of coal use over time. Coal is going up. Renewables are going up much faster.
- Comment on Last year China generated almost 3 times as much solar power as the EU did, and it's close to overtaking all OECD countries put together (whose combined population is 1.38 billion people) 5 months ago:
You should be pretty happy with China then. They have a replacement rate just over one. That’s lower than the US or Europe.
- Comment on Last year China generated almost 3 times as much solar power as the EU did, and it's close to overtaking all OECD countries put together (whose combined population is 1.38 billion people) 5 months ago:
This has been going on for years and will continue.
China really really really needs a robust and diverse energy infrastructure. Industry needs huge amounts of energy. AI needs huge amounts of energy. The military needs huge amounts of energy.
Coal is unreliable and dirty. Oil can be blocked at the Straight of Malacca and a few pipelines.
China is also the world’s factory. They own the entire logistics chain for producing renewable generators; from raw materials to final assembly. They have all the infrastructure to not only build solar panels and wind turbines at scale, they’ve scaled up building the machines that build them.
- Comment on Last year China generated almost 3 times as much solar power as the EU did, and it's close to overtaking all OECD countries put together (whose combined population is 1.38 billion people) 5 months ago:
Pollution per GDP is a better measure. ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity Pollution per GNP would be even better but I can’t find it.
Individuals don’t pollution much, it’s mostly industry. Really poor countries often don’t pollution much because they can’t afford to. Sometimes they pollute prodigiously because the only thing they can afford to do is destructive resource extraction. Rich countries can often outsource their pollution to poorer countries.
China has been making mind boggling investments in renewables. They have been expanding all their energy sources but their renewables have the lions share of the growth.
They’ve been building roads and all kinds of infrastructure. That’s what the BRI is all about, even if they’re being a bit quieter about saying the phrase. They like to build their long haul roads on elevated columns; not only because it’s less disruptive to wildlife but because it lets them use giant road laying robots to place prefab highway segments.
They dropped the one-child policy a while back but they’re having some trouble getting people to have more babies. That said, there’s some research that suggests that rural populations around the world are severely undercounted, so they may have a bunch more subsistence farmers than they, or anyone else, realizes.
- Comment on Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not 5 months ago:
So you’re confident that human learning involves “understanding” which is distinct from “statistical optimization”. Is this something you feel in your soul or can you define the difference?
- Comment on Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not 5 months ago:
Human learning requires understanding, which AI is not capable of.
How could anyone know this?
Is there some test of understanding that humans can pass and AIs can’t? And if there are humans who can’t pass it, do we consider then unintelligent?
We don’t even need to set the bar that high. Is there some definition of “understanding” that humans meet and AIs don’t?