Kara Bell • 4 months ago
Anyone who believes artificial intelligence is quickly approaching, or even succeeding, human consciousness, has severely underrated human consciousness.
Snowskeeper Kara Bell • 9 hours ago
I see this sort of post floating around a lot. You're entitled to your opinion, but keep in mind that the human mind is basically an incredibly complex computer, in the same way that the human body is an incredibly complex machine. It's not impossible to build a computer that's better than another computer. It's not even particularly difficult, once you know how. And we're getting to the point where we know how.
Being a SW programmer for 20+, analyst and architect for 10+ years, I guess I have some right to ask: how much have you thought about this opinion? Or on the question: how a bucket of grey goo, those 86bn neurons come to what we call human thinking?
I have done pretty much and I would say NO. A properly working human mind is not a complex computer by definition, by hardware, by how we use it. And about the difficulty, you'd better ask an expert, not an evangelist... If you care reading mine, you may start here: Popular fears, Taste of Luck.
On the other hand, you are partly right, according to my favourite quote about this:
I suppose one way for a machine to pass the Turing test is to wait until the quality of actual human conversation is so bad that a bot could be an improvement. This seems to be happening here.
(Patrick Joiner on LinkedIn)
:-D Snowskeeper 9 hours ago
Kinda like the idea raised in the AI revolution series that there's a sort of technological singularity where a species is suddenly significantly more likely to pull a black stone out of the bag and wipe itself out. Mostly because it gives us a chance of survival, whereas, say, a giant wave of psychic radiation regularly pulsing out from the center of the universe and killing everything with a mind leaves us kind of fucked no matter what we do. The whole scientific/medical/whatever idea of "let's assume it's a problem we can manage because if it isn't then what's even the point of talking about it".
No, it's Occam's razor. If you can see how a civilization kills itself without any magic "psychic radiation wave", then you have a real problem to deal with, regardless of any voodoo. If you can't - well, that's not my problem.
This is in progress today: the drastic decrease of human thinking level, because we are not able to process the gigantic amount of information we constantly receive.
This is how we got from Lincoln and Gandhi to Donald Trump, Putin, or our prime minister; from von Neumann to Zuckerberg (and sorry, to Elon Musk); from Einstein to the Big Bang Theory; from Asimov, Lem (and the Apollo program) to Marvel fairy tales or the Star Trek "moo-views".
Now we are just waiting for the next nuclear accidents, or the results of climate change, or the increasing social tensions, or an idiot who tries to solve it with a biological weapon (most likely not a muslim "terrorist", but an idiot racist from a "developed country"), or simply a serious Sun flare, to finish the job we have done.
And, after 10+ years of desperate fight and search for a single person whom I could call "grown up", I am giving up. You know, it's like having a person with internal bleeding. He feels bad, but your don't give him a massage or measure the temperature - but get a knife, cut him up, locate and fix the bleeding, regardless of what he would prefer. But after some time, the same person is DEAD, even if he can breathe and talk, because it's too late to cut him up and save his life. Now, give him a massage, because there is no reason to cause any more pain before he dies.
Good luck to all of us - as chances are too close to zero.
