noxfriend @ noxfriend @beehaw.org

In 1936 Alan Turing published "On Computable Numbers", proving that it was

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2 yr. ago

That is not an accurate description of witch hunting and witch trials. It was a distinct business that emerged from capitalism and misinformation, in which the properties of women could be stolen for profit. Witch hunters would travel from town to town looking for vulnerable women to legally rob and kill, and those that testified they'd witnessed withcraft got a cut of the profit too. As a result of this practice tens of thousands of women were killed. Carl Sagan dedicated an excellent chapter of his book Demon-Haunted World to the topic, if you're interested.

Anyway, that is a bit of a side bar to the point you're missing. Just as it would once have been very profitable but deeply unethical to be a witch hunter, crypto was certainly profitable at a time but only in deeply unethical ways. The late crypto fad was little more an MLM scheme rife with fraud, and any profit extracted was at the expense of whoever is holding the hot potato when the worthless tulip market crashes (if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor..).

if I had spent the time to mine just a few hundred BTC back when I first heard of them, I’d now be a millionaire 🤷

If I had lived in the 17th century it would have been very profitable to get involved in witch trials and witch hunting. But being profitable doesn't make it any less wrong.

We know more than you might realize

The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe. We are only scratching the surface of it right now. Discussions of consciousness and sentience are more a domain of philosophy than anything else. The true innovations in AI will come from neurologists and biologists, not from computer scientists or mathematicians.

It’s nice that you mentioned quantum effects, since the NN models all require a certain degree of randomness (“temperature”) to return the best results.

Quantum effects are not randomness. Emulating quantum effects is possible, they can be understood empirically, but it is very slow. If intelligence relies on quantum effects, then we will need to build whole new types of quantum computers to build AI.

the results speak for themselves.

Well, there we agree. In that the results are very limited I suppose that they do speak for themselves 😛

We have a new tool: LLMs. They are the glue needed to bring all the siloed AIs together, a radical change just like that from air flight to spaceflight.

This is what I mean by exaggeration. I'm an AI proponent, I want to see the field succeed. But this is nothing like the leap forward some people seem to think it is. It's a neat trick with some interesting if limited applications. It is not an AI. This is no different than when Minsky believed that by the end of the 70s we would have "a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being", which is exactly the sort of over-promising that led to the AI field having a terrible reputation and all the funding drying up.

I've seen a million of such demos but simulations like these are nothing like the real world. Moravec's paradox will make neural nets look like toddlers for a long time to come yet.

I wouldn't say 74k is consumer grade but Spot is very cool. I doubt that it is purely a neural net though, there is probably a fair bit of actionismnat work.

The difference is that calculators are deterministic and correct. If you get a wrong answer, it is you that made the mistake.

LLMs will frequently output nonsense answers. If you get a wrong answer, it is probably the machine that made the mistake.

We don't even know what consciousness or sentience is, or how the brain really works. Our hundreds of millions spent on trying to accurately simulate a rat's brain have not brought us much closer (Blue Brain), and there may yet be quantum effects in the brain that we are barely even beginning to recognise (https://phys.org/news/2022-10-brains-quantum.html).

I get that you are excited but it really does not help anyone to exaggerate the efficacy of the AI field today. You should read some of Brooks' enlightening writing like Elephants Don't Play Chess, or the airoplane analogy (https://rodneybrooks.com/an-analogy-for-the-state-of-ai/).

Anything a human can be trained to do, a neural network can be trained to do.

Come on. This is a gross exaggeration. Neural nets are incredibly limited. Try getting them to even open a door. If we someday come up with a true general AI that really can do what you say, it will be as similar to today's neural nets as a space shuttle is to a paper airoplane.

Don't give them so much credit. The GOP just see what the populus is riled up about, and promise them that to win votes. Sometimes they will join in generating misinformation, soweing division, pushing controversial narratives, etc but it is always for the sake of winning more votes in the short-term. They don't think ahead, they are very simple.

AI researchers disagree

https://m-cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/276268-can-llms-really-reason-and-plan/fulltext

https://medium.com/@spencertorene/do-llms-reason-d33fa885872f

I ain't reading all that. But I'm happy for you, or sorry that happened to you

Great news. This was always such bullshit, especially from airlines

The human brain can run on a hamburger once every day or two. Investing immense amounts of energy into statistical models is only taking us further away from true, meaningful AI, not closer.

You're talking about Jarusalem and most of what you say is true, but it isn't true of Gaza. Gaza has a known history going back 4,000 years starting as a Caananite settlement. Yes various different powers have controlled the region, it has been repeatedly fought over. But the geographic distinction has long been there and maintained some degree of cultural uniformity through numerous wars and other mass migrations.

You are talking about a guy who takes economic advice from a "psychic medium" who he believes is in turn talking psychically to his dogs, who he believes are clones of resurrected jesus-dog.

I love this song, it's hysterical. I rarely meet anyone else that's heard of it!

Organic typically has a higher carbon footprint because it requires more land and often even water resources and of course more labour.

Less pesticides, yeah, sure. But those pesticides allow us to grow crops much more efficiently. Everything is a trade-off I suppose, but I am very skeptical that the trade-offs of organic are worthwhile.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorganic-farming-is-actually-worse-for-climate-change/

Thanks for introducing me to this creator, I ended up watching his video on crypto games too and it was really good. Definitely a new subscribe.