“It’s a better learning algorithm than what the brain has got.” —Geoffrey Hinton
He’s bullish on both the upsides and downsides, to say the least.
“Biological intelligence has evolved to use very little power, so we only use 30 watts. And we have huge numbers of connections, like 100 trillion connections between neurons. And learning consists of changing the strength of those connections.
The digital intelligence we have been creating uses a lot of power, like a megawatt when you’re training it. It has far fewer connections, only a trillion, but it can learn much, much more than any one person knows, which suggests that it’s a better learning algorithm than what the brain has got.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/godfather-of-ai-discusses-dangers-the-developing-technologies-pose-to-society
I am thrilled to learn of this confirmation that I have been seeing what I thought I had been seeing.
The trendsetters and dogma purveyors on social media are quickly proving themselves to be the unreliable narrators of this tale. I contend that we consider that it is not the ability to create fake news that is the danger we face, but the unrestricted ability to disseminate it. Evidence in my favor: Twitter.com.
We are going to have to confront our wreckage of a fourth estate and find out for ourselves just what Thomas Jefferson might have meant when he said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
We have a lot of work to do to unite humanity and align a super-intelligence, or, more likely, multiple super-intelligences. I suggest we lead by our good example.
Comments
3 responses to “Aliens!”
@jiejie@www.zipbangwow.com Geoffrey Hinton getting things going in the right way. I also recommend Ted Chiang’s latest in the New Yorker.https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/godfather-of-ai-discusses-dangers-the-developing-technologies-pose-to-societyhttps://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey
As I said elsewhere, if news sites and networks stopped posting about social media drama, and that includes political drama, it would go a long way towards addressing the social media problem. In short, the problem is not that lies exist, it is that lies get amplified. People deserve to have a fun place to play on the internet, whatever their definition of fun, but the less the rest of us know about what goes on there, the better.
Someone at Google owes Blake Lemoine an apology.
https://futurism.com/blake-lemoine-google-interview
“And in those two years, it wasn’t like they weren’t inventing other things. There are plenty of other systems that give Google’s AI more capabilities, more features, make it smarter. The most sophisticated system I ever got to play with was heavily multimodal — not just incorporating images, but incorporating sounds, giving it access to the Google Books API, giving it access to essentially every API backend that Google had, and allowing it to just gain an understanding of all of it.
That’s the one that I was like, “you know this thing, this thing’s awake.” And they haven’t let the public play with that one yet. But Bard is kind of a simplified version of that, so it still has a lot of the kind of liveliness of that model.”