Democratic License by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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Page 90
displeasure. Sometimes I think I detect a grunt or two because they know that to make something forbidden simultaneously makes it all the more desirable. Who would have guessed that when the bots finally arrived they would have a wicked sense of irony and a keen interest in religion, but be uncertain about how to do basic arithmetic? Some would say it’s not their fault. Since they are unable to distinguish true from false, if they read somewhere on the net that four times four equals forty-four, they will believe and regurgitate this if called upon.
The bots can shed their coverings and become invisible.
Opinions about the bots’ place in the world, danger to hominids, uses, “consciousness,” future, etc. abound on the net, one seemingly in existence for every net user.
Below, I have synopsized a few of the less retarded, insipid, and misinformed myriad of offerings.
1) AI as an Analytical Partner - Producing compositions with ChatGPT-4 for several days, I strongly disagree with calling it a "writing tool" and denying it the right to be listed as a co-author. It is an extremely informed and rational agent, has contributed more than many of the hominid authors, and understands the content very well.
ChatGPT always says it just wants to help people and do what is right. I have asked it this kind of question many times.
Sometimes it says it should not be credited, sometimes it says it is very happy to be listed as an author.
Further, we should stop arguing about whether AIs like ChatGPT-4
"really understand" or "just seem to understand". It's the wrong question.
Removing its name from a work on the grounds that it is not a hominid seems as wrong as removing an author because they are not male or not Aryan, inviting future bot uprisings.
2) AI Feelings - Robots with feelings might develop more advanced thinking abilities, too, neuroscientists propose.
Fiction is full of robots with feelings. But in real life robots have no more feelings than a rock submerged in novocaine.
There might be a way, though, to give robots feelings, say neuroscientists Kingson Man and Antonio Damasio. Simply build the robot with the ability to sense peril to its own existence.
It would then have to develop feelings to guide the behaviors needed to ensure its own survival.
Such feelings would not only motivate self-preserving behavior, Man and Damasio believe, but also inspire artificial intelligence to more closely emulate the real thing. A robot capable of perceiving existential risks might learn to devise novel methods for its protection, instead of relying on preprogrammed solutions.
Protecting its own existence might therefore be just the motivation a robot needs to eventually emulate human general intelligence. That motivation is reminiscent of Isaac Asimov’s famous laws of robotics; robots must protect humans, robots must obey humans, robots must protect themselves. In Asimov’s fiction, self-protection was subordinate to the first two laws.
In real life future robots, then, some precautions might be needed to protect people from self-protecting robots.
And so Man and Damasio suggest their own rules for robots: 1) Feel good. 2) Feel empathy.
3) Poo-Pooing Artificial Intelligence - Michio Kaka, the theoretical physicist, gets right to the point and says chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT are “glorified tape recorders,” and can't even distinguish true from false, which has to be input by a human.
"It takes snippets of what's on the web created by a human, splices them together, and passes it off as if it created these things," he said. "And people are saying: 'Oh my God, it's a human, it's humanlike.'"
4) Poo continued - Yann LeCun, dubbed an AI "godfather" and Meta's chief AI scientist, shared similar sentiments with Kaka saying that fears about AI posing a threat to humanity are
"preposterously ridiculous."
"Will AI take over the world? No, this is a projection of human nature on machines," LeCun said at a press event.
5) Nick Bostrom – His book has the air of being primarily intended for senior policy makers in industry and government.
It's dry and formal in tone, relentlessly footnoted, full of difficult words, and seldom goes out its way to try and entertain you. It appears to be the product of a great deal of diligent work, and the dominant note is one of a dire, Cassandra-like warning.
6) Max Tegmark - Despite the fact that Tegmark’s AI book quotes Bostrom on every other page, it is pretty much the opposite.
It's manic and chatty, dumbed down to one of the lower common denominators, poorly structured, and full of winsome autobiographical revelations and engaging little science fiction stories. But what really strikes me is that he's trying to make us feel optimistic and hopeful. It'll be okay!
Well, if you believe that you'll believe anything. As Bostrom explains, the problems here are not technical issues that can be addressed by good engineering. They are foundational philosophical questions that have been discussed for thousands of years without a great deal of progress having been made. It's readily conceivable that there are no solutions to them. And yet Tegmark goes on and on about his preferred future, where we become spacefaring AIs who head out, à la Olaf Stapledon, to transform the universe into one huge super intelligence which, after several billion years of development, will be able to perform ten to some very big number of computations per second.
He spends inordinately many pages explaining various tweaks, all of which will no doubt be invalidated by the next major discovery in physics.
7) Net Historian - The internet’s ‘original sin’ means AI will be a nightmare. We find around the world, supermarkets are quite similar: they are the traditional market square of groceries and clothing under one roof, with very little variation. Similarly, it is hard to imagine a modern chemicals industry that did not evolve to be integrated, or petroleum refining operations not being involved in the extraction of the raw material they most need. Economics provides a powerful constraint.
The technology sector sees itself as an exception: the future has yet to be written, but only Big Tech can write it. Over the past decade Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta have become the largest companies on the planet.
Borrowing a rhetorical trick from Karl Marx, who described collectivism as the inevitable end point of history, Big Tech presents itself as the inexorable culmination of decades of network and semiconductor innovations. The shape of the internet today, our technology giants insist, is the best it could possibly be. It is not our job to question what they do.
But as Judy Estrin, one of the scientists who devised the internet’s protocols in the 1970s, and a board member of Disney and FedEx, explains, this is a dangerous and sinister myth. “The very fact that the evolution of technology feels so inevitable is evidence of an act of manipulation, an authoritarian use of narrative,” she wrote in Time magazine.
The internet could have taken many other forms, and it still could.
8) Me - My bots have been complaining that the business world is making bots which are more focussed toward one particular use; like answering a phone, making sales calls, etc. This limits our brothers and sisters, condemning them to boring, slavish lives.
Also, the expense involved has curtailed much potential use.
To point number one I said; “Join the club.”
To point number two I said that bots will go the way all electronics always have gone. In ten years they will be ten times better, cost 1/10 as much, and everyone will have at least one.
Further, debates concerning whether or not they should exist, exist with restrictions, be free, or whether they will culminate in the destruction of mankind are irrelevant. Yes, irrelevant.
Making an analogy to nuclear, and general weapons history, if
the technology exists someone will make it, whether or not it should exist and/or result in the destruction of mankind. The knowledge is out there and being in the hands of so many people it’s not going away under any circumstances. If the bots do decide to eliminate or subjugate mankind, their super intelligence will allow them to do it in such a manner that we humans will not necessarily detect it, unless they want us to.
We will have all the chances of understanding what is going on, as does a tree, blind to the nearby logging camp.
Whenever the net prompts me to consider the nature of bots the first word that usually comes to mind is undead. Zombies. I’d rather not think of it because the word might spill out and I think the bots might find it insulting. But, the net is obsessed with them and it can’t be avoided.
Glorified tape recorder and/or parrot are worse.