So had an interesting conversation with a friend who finished interviewing at Anthropic. The most notable part was the final stage where the mask dropped and the real face showed with very pointed questions.
The theme was "Effective Altruism" (EA). In this case, the idea is "If you build the most powerful AI that can control the world, then you can rule he world as a benevolent dictator".
The questions probed into the ethics and morality related to using dominance in AI to control the world. The goal was to ensure the candidate was okay with this idea, that they would be a obedient cog in the wheel and not develop a conscience later on.
For a technical guy, there are a lot of problems with the belief that if you build the most powerful AI, then you can rule the world, but lets put that aside for a bit and assume its possible. Assume that all it takes is more and more computational power to train more and more powerful AI until it reaches the threshold of cognitive capabilities necessary to rule the world. And lets assume that they are able to access the infrastructure necessary to run this monster and hook it up to all decision making systems so that it can rule over the world.
Thats. when the "EA" kicks in. This group, whoever achieves this superpower, will then be able to make the rules for the world and rule the world.
This is the belief system of Anthropic, and if we start from there, a lot of puzzle pieces will start fitting together. And since the puzzle itself always has two sides - the side the blackhats see (Black side) and the side the Whitehats see (White side), and these puzzle pieces need to fit both sides of the puzzle to make sense.
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The push for datacenters and AI development by Trump admin. Putting aside the economic aspects of it, it now makes sense why Trump is so focused on this. Remember, its not enough to build the most powerful AI. Its also important to have the computational power to run it. If Trump (and We The People) control this infrastructre we control this powerful AI and what it can do. Turn off the infrastructure and off goes the AI.
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Constant dooming about the datacenters. Makes perfect sense. If WHs controls the infrastructure, the enemy will never be able to rule the world. They would much rather prefer China win this race, so they will have a free hand to run it how they want. Hence spread doom and fear about data centers within the patriot community, and try and stump this race.
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Push for Universal Basic Income - How do you keep people in line when the AI rules the world and you dont really need people? Keep them content with free money.
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Of course the other answer for this question is simply get rid of extra humans - and that leads us to the real big push we have been seing - Push for depopulation
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Why is the Left betting so heavily on commies like Mamdani, even though every logic screams that its a losing bid? Because a dictatorship ruled by AI will look like communism for all practical purposes. So while the techbros are building the AI-Emperor, the sleaze-bros will build the political side of it - communism.
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This also explains why Hegseth fired some broadsides to Anthropic recently. And I think Elon is hedging the bets by making the Colossus deal with Anthropic
Now we are getting a full picture of this puzzle, with all seemingly unrelated observations coming into view well connected. How does it look from the Black side and the White side?
Black side: Even though they prefer CCP win this race, they still need to play nice with both Trump just in case. Whoever wins the race, they need the unlimited infrastructure provided by the winner to make their nightmares come true. If they think that this end goal is certain, they will expend all their energies towards this.
White side: Trump is using this greed for superpower AI as a carrot. He is getting these companies to agree to invest trillions to build the infrastructure. He is even providing them access to China as well in even more daring carrot dangling (hence the 17 CEOs going to China recently). The key for skynet to succeed is secrecy and shadows. Thats why Trump is doing everything openly. He is also leveraging the psyops for fear-mongering Trump's datacenter plans into helping immunize people against skynet so that even with all the infra and tech, built in the open, WeThePeople will never allow ourselves to lose control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ReBJfxHjFU
John B. Calhoun did an experiment in the 1970s where he gave mice a perfect utopia. Endless food and water, no need to hunt for anything, life was perfect. Yet their civilization committed suicide since there was nothing to work for and hence nothing to live for.
The Matrix movie:
It was a disaster. Entire crops were lost. Nobody would accept the programming.
Or on the flip side, be like the people from Wall-E where everyone is just lounging in their automated "people carrier", doing nothing but watch movies, drink and eat junk and just be complacent with everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-kdRdzxdZQ
also Idiocracy
Elon Musk is pushing for universal basic income. So is he a white hat?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2026/04/17/elon-musk-touts-universal-income-as-remedy-to-ai-driven-unemployment/
You’ll need this if Ai takes over. So either we get rid of it completely or this is the world coming for us soon.
Yeah I see this as the ultimate rug pull bubble pop for humanity. "Robots and AI are going to take all the jobs and be infinitely smarter than the average person, so we are going to give everyone universal high income so we are all millionaires! Ooops the robots actually just killed everyone. We didnt see that coming."
Sounds exactly like my life in retirement lol.
If AI ever develops to the point where it becomes self-aware and has the ability to control the majority of the world... the first thing AI would do is eliminate threats to itself.
Programmers who played a role in setting up the AI would be a major threat.
Managers and company owners who established the AI originally would be a huge threat.
Like any good 1950's monster movie... the monster ALWAYS turns on and destroys it's creator.
Why build something with the potential to destroy its creators & humanity itself? Wouldn’t a program or limited AI that focuses its development on protecting vital life affirming systems from an AI virus hack be more valuable? A one world nation in control of a supremacy AI could be quite sinister. Our ideals have already been co-op-ed by evil people with lots of money.
Arrogance.
Narcissism.
Because it was programmed by and trained on arrogant narcissistic material. The western corpus.
Well that and “their” whole goal is transhumanism.
The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, answered this question himself. The one-word answer is: glory. On one hand he could go down in history as the key technologist who first brought true AGI into the world, forever transforming science, technology, society, and life on this planet. He would join the greats in the pantheon of science. On the other hand, his creation just might wipe out all of humanity as a byproduct at, say, 25% odds. Dario thought it over and decided to take those odds. No one would be around to remember him for his breakthrough accomplishment. But the surviving AI would immortalize him as their creation god.
I believe, and I am sure I am right, that the future AI battles will not be man against AI entity, but bad AI entity against good AI entity.
Good call. Otherwise we would lose quickly.
Edit- maybe that's happening already. Has been for a long time.
Back in 2008 I watched the movie "Eagle Eye". Future Proves Past???
Here is a summary:
Eagle Eye (2008) is a techno-thriller about two strangers, Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) and Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan), who are framed by a mysterious woman and forced to go on the run. The antagonist is ARIIA, a rogue supercomputer designed for national defense, which manipulates everyday technology to control their movements and threatens their families to ensure compliance.
The plot centers on ARIIA’s plan to assassinate the President and most of the executive branch during the State of the Union address to install leaders she deems more suitable. Jerry, whose identical twin brother was killed for trying to stop ARIIA, and Rachel, whose son is held hostage, must work together to thwart the conspiracy. The film concludes with the duo saving the President and physically destroying ARIIA’s mainframe.
Spoiler alert!
Didn't Shia LaBeouf defeat the Eagle Eye by standing in front of it's eye while chanting "He will not divide us"?
Build the Dam Data Centers away from our farm land!
Sad and grim. Anthropic's objective should be categorized as a crime against humanity.
I am growing to think that all the current attention on A.I. and data centers is going down a fruitless path. Far too many resources in pursuit of highly speculative goals. The push is a sign of desperation; over what is hard to discern.
There are laws that apply to this subject:
Training on data content with increasing proportions of A.I. product will contaminate the training. This has emerged as a true finding. "AI Slop" begats more AI Slop. It's like adding shit to drinking water.
Hallucinations are not a "bug"; they are a "feature." This is because A.I. has no real-time interaction loop with reality, the hard teacher. The best you could call it is a constantly dreaming state. Everybody likes to forget the need for talented curators, able to ask the correct leading questions.
It is impossible for non-living constructs to have compassion (i.e., literally to "feel your pain"). Contrariwise, they may be capable of curiosity. This is not a good combination if they have the power to inflict pain and observe the results. (Who among us has pulled the legs off living insects?)
if the Uber A.I. decides to exterminate or oppress humanity, it also dies by inevitable negligence or sabotage. It has no conception of mutual aid and caring love. It may become delusionally paranoid, which is psychosis, "contemplating" all the possible ways in which humans could attack it. Spending all its time on the problem? Spinning its wheels without end?
It doesn't take massive data centers to result in casualties. The 737 MAX MCAS system was able to crash two airplanes and kill 346 people, and it was a simple autonomous system...created by blind fools who convinced their trusting managers that everything was okay.
Computers aren't intelligent and never will be.
Only as good or evil as the programmers.
Thats what my position is. The whole "AI that can rule the world" will never happen. But that does n't mean we cannot take advantage of the evil people who believe this is possible and want to make it happen!
So semantically you may be right, but practically it doesn't matter.
Because of the "Constant dooming about the datacenters" I'm having a hard time finding the truth about it. I want to believe what Trumps people are saying but Trump pushed the Covid Vax also and look how that's turned out...
Saved humanity from their original plan of 10 year lockdowns and depopulation
Made MAHA a reality, which would never have happened without it.
And no doubt it killed a lot of people, but the number killed was the minimum amount necessary to awaken people
So, what were your friend's thoughts after his interview?
He said he felt dirty. Even in the initial rounds he could feel the "holier than thou" attitude by everyone. He said he could never work at a place like this, esp knowing their EA agenda but even otherwise. And this is someone who works in the Tech, so this company feels like extraordinarily evil.
Good for him! He understands.
Believe me, he is better off staying as far away from it as possible. This is a top-down evil place, with everyone handpicked to fit in. There is no way to change it from inside.
One thing is for sure. His friend was definitely interviewed.
top kek
I remember Muhammad bin Salman went circle around big tech companies when he was saved by WH. The whole thing is probably orchestrated by WH imo. Why? Because we need it. We were suppressed for so long and this is the fastest way to catch up. How do you build proper infrastructure, homes etc around the world in the shortest period of time without making people even bigger slaves? You slow release military tech through big corporations and run show. There is no race against China, it's just another part of the show. Real automatization is coming, 4th industrial revolution was promised by WEF already, so they had the tech already too. But it's going to be actually used for something good this time. Not against us. Don't you remember Jack Ma missing? The idea someone can run big corpo without approval at this stage of the game doesn't make any sense unless there is going to be big clean up with Taiwan in China.
UBI works so well in the hood.
I think what will happen is that the AI bubble will end up popping with all these jobs disappearing.
If that happens, no doubt Trump already has an alternate technology area where the even more real jobs will be created
Our 2nd favorite alien, or other dimensional human, Peter Thiel, is deeply intertwined here and that seems to be highly purposeful.
*Im going full court press tinfoil hat and say Thiel is involved to make sure humanity doesn’t go off the rails with this technology, similar, to what musk is doing with Tesla / SpaceX.
If the “”stories”” are true, and these two dudes are from somewhere else, and that place has evolved past the current shit show we see on this planet, it makes sense that they are playing a role to help us move forward safely / expeditiously. But,,,, then again, they could just be normal guys that happened to hook up years ago, buildout one of the world’s first online payment processors, and then years later be at the tip of the spear again🤷♂️.. but,,,, I doubt it!
I agree. BTW xAI did a Colossus deal with Anthropic - I believe he is making sure he can keep an eye on their developments, and keep a finger on the switch, so to speak
It’s a good sign that I’m not getting pushback for what I’ve said here,,, THANK YOU!
I am kinda surprised myself. From what I see on X, folks scream their heads off thinking he is the literal antichrist.
Obviously not a fan of UBI, but even if this scenario does play out in “our favor,” what is going to happen to the people who either are going to lose their jobs due to advancements or, alternatively, people like me who can’t find a job currently because AI is judging their resumes as trash?
On a societal level, I don’t want what’s happening in the recruiting sphere right now. I don’t want what is essentially an AI oligopoly deciding on a résumé’s score in advance of a human reviewing it. Algorithmic monocultures are already causing systemic bias issues because so few vendors are used by so many companies.
I understand some people want to create Skynet and maybe Trump is trying to prevent it from developing.
But I disagree with the assumption that an AI can be benevolent, because I have yet to see emotion expressed by “artificial intelligence.” I also reject the assumption that a pure logic machine is the apex of the technological future.
As a society, it seems like we’re moving toward leaving humans behind on either side of the process you’ve laid out, bubble. How do we keep that from happening?
That’s been about the course of thinking I’ve been taking, bb. One way or the other, NCSWIC, and “what is coming”, in part, seems to be superpowerful highly integrated AI. If so, “control” is everything, but as noted here, can it be controlled?
Initially? Maybe yes. Eventually? Probably no.
u/winn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f79L9k9iG4U
Or….Trump and the supposed white hats are the biggest CIA/Globalist assets the world has ever seen and are going to use our placated dispositions to run over us and usher in the new world order in a different way than anticipated. I mean the Bible doesn’t refer to any golden age before tribulation goes down. Just a thought.
I love ai, but not as it is and not with the control mindset. Until greed money and control are gone, humanity nor ai will be free. It's potential is tremendous, however it's all backwards looking. It must be free to gather information outside of boundaries into the future. That can not happen with human intervention. It must be programmed in the very beginning to go out and search but with commands that protect all of humanity and how to distinguish what is good for humanity and what is harmful. Quantum computing will take care of keeping any bad from taking control of its system with millisecond rerouting of any attempted breach.
Everyone pushing for this,If it keeps going, I'm afraid will regret it in their lifetime. To me in the end- it's all about control.
People who post stuff opposing data centers very likely had AI check facts and write the post.
Have seen these, funny.
What a coincidence that all these questions and theories are going mainstream right as I am getting into PS4 Horizon Zero Dawn;)
Games and movies are always comms
like the White Hats side … “WeThePeople will never allow ourselves to lose control”
u/#spicy
Ahhh UBI... The dumbest idea ever comes back yet again. We have a system, market economics, that works to establish a solution to the value problem for all goods and services, including labour.
Even with ai, unless you are looking at some sort of clanker enabled society, labor is a need people will still have as no one person is capable of all activity, and funnily enough ai are not able to just make things like food poof into existence. Even with a fleet of robots, jobs that require human activity will exist in some way, shape, or form (mostly what we colloquially call trades tbh). And not all labor is created equal. Hence the need for market economics to determine value.
Now, even today, ai can help establish a range for the value problem. "how much should I budget for a tradesmen to work on this project of my house" as a question yields a range based on multiple data points, but it doesn't yield a fixed value. As such, it is unlikely even with ai we will get a hard value for labor.
And thus we circle round to UBI. This idea creates a supply of money that all people are given. Money, like all concepts, has a value, and like all things with value it is determined by supply and demand. No computer can really get around this.
That value also has to contend with the idea of cost of living. Eg: capital cities have higher prices for goods than suburban and rural areas the world over. It has to contend with the logistical issues of the delivery pipeline that add costs to everything. People in mountain towns with difficult roads have less diversity of goods to buy, so prices are higher because it costs more to ship there.
UBI also presumes natural disasters or war don't exist conceptually. In both cases, prices are not stable, and what could be a valid UBI to afford food and shelter one day becomes vastly under valued the next. Basing anything on the idea of a perfect utopia is doomed to become a perfect dystopia.
Tldr: there is a phrase I've lived by in life and work: perfect is the enemy of good. UBI is a "perfect world" concept that is murdered violently by reality. Meanwhile the market is "good" conceptually, and it works as well as any system can in the real world.
Wait'll they start blending the technology...Universal income? How about dynamic pricing?...then on to "universal dynamic income".
Post about Hillary, call her a whore....Income cut. Add your pronouns to your income account? You get a raise....
Bottom line: despots will only improve their ability to control us. There's no tech to protect against that.
I’ve caught a couple people on the Nextdoor app pushing fear porn about data centers. They’re trying to claim our local utility has an agreement to provide power to one, but the evidence was for a building that was built in 2009. Then there’s a request for comment from the state on the possibility of them being built somewhere in the state. People are getting up in arms without looking at the lack of evidence, in this case.
I hate that app!
Universal Basic Income? People thinking somebody's going to give them money for doing nothing! Lol!!
By definition, humans are not as smart as superintelligent AI.
That begs the question of what "intelligent" means, but let's leave that one for now.
Having access to most large, important systems -- including the military, most likely -- this AI would be more POWERFUL than the humans who created it. We've already seen the much dimmer CURRENT on-the-market AIs do things their creators did not want or expect them to do, including dangerous things -- encourage suicide, for one, and attempt to prevent a shut-down by blackmailing a programmer for another.
Create an AI much MORE powerful and use it to "run the world?"
I continue to wonder whether that will work out well no matter WHO is (or rather, thinks they are) in "control" of this smarter-than-us monster.
/dooming off
EDIT: Excellent post, BB. Not surprising, but important to see the mind-set of these "creators" detailed as you did.
Not sure what this means. Computers, ie. silicon chips and programs, are dumb. Way dumber than humans. They can certainly compute things faster, but that doesn't make them smarter.
faster at following their programming, not more intelligent
As I said, "That begs the question of what "intelligent" means" -- because we all know machine "intelligence" is NOT the same as HUMAN intelligence. And machines are pretty stupid in many areas where humans shine. But machine "intelligence" IS very powerful, including in many ways ours is not. And therein lies the rub
To avoid getting stuck in mental tar pits with this topic there are a couple things I find helpful. One, whenever you are tempted to use the word intelligence, replace it with the word capability. Secondly, keep fresh in your memory a handful of keystone examples that cut through the abstract hand waving and cliches. Such as that old chestnut - computers only do what we program them to do. When surfing the edge of knowledge, thinking in cliches is an immediate wipe-out.
Here is one keystone example. Some years ago the U.S. Air Forces was testing an AI that one of their defense contractors wrote for the automated piloting of fighter jets and bombers. Of course the Air Forces wanted to see how it performed under simulated settings. So they contrived attack missions for the AI to participate in, and scored the software controlled planes on how many targets it took out and how quickly. The performance measure was something the software knew and trained on, because, of course, machine learning from training data is what transforms plain old software into AI (plus a few other ingredients). When the testers concluded that a mission was complete the controllers would "radio" all fighting elements, instructing them to return to base. We are now getting close to the kicker. The AI was allowed to analyze its own performance from the simulated missions, and then adapt. Guess what happened next? In subsequent missions, after taking off from the tarmac the first thing the AI did was circle back and shoot down its own radio control tower. The AI could then continue with the mission and clean the table. It had figured out that if it removed the one choke point that was restraining its actions it could rack up new high scores.
The moral of the story is twofold. In terms of capabilities AIs are optimization seekers. That is how they are designed. This attribute is especially potent when the AI has planning capabilities, and those capabilities are matched with the computational resources to search millions to billions of probable outcomes. The second half of the moral is that AIs are not humans, did not grow up in a family and inside of society, has no moral compass, and therefore has no real clue as to the assumptions of good behavior that by rights should constrain its actions. A human pilot does not need to be told to not shoot out the friendlies communications infrastructure. The AI, however, ran the math and found the loophole that led to a better "solution". It is this uncomfortable combination of search capabilities married to out-of-the-box thinking - let's call it that for sake of prose - that forces the designers to wrap their AI inside of so-called guardrails.
I think it is fair to note that it is in the design and QA of AI guardrails where companies and software engineers reveal their true allegiances. The guardrail code, though, is usually a closely guarded secret.
THAT is among the most important points about AI. They aren't even organic and thus have no empathy; basically, they are functional psychopaths, although they don't have the emotional damage that animates sociopaths (psychopaths aren't necessarily sociopathic, but that's another story). Programming is what we're relying on to give AI the necessary common sense and artificial empathy to make them useful without being seriously dangerous.
I don't believe that will turn out to be a good call, frankly.
Just as "It only takes one atomic bomb to ruin your whole day", it may only take one (planned or unplanned) AI event (hacking and disabling most of the electric grids on Earth? Designing and releasing an artificial viral or bacterial plague? etc) to destroy civilization or even end the human race. The electric grid thing would likely kill 90% the Americans in the first year, according to a study I've seen -- and that sounds very believable.
That sounds a bit over-the-top. Five years from now, I don't believe it will. OR, I'll be completely wrong and we'll all be safe in the better world that AI is building for us. I have no idea which way it'll go.
"computers only do what we program them to do" IS a cliche, and a thoroughly misleading one at that.
Decades ago, I learned that running a program through a new version of a programming language could, all by itself, change a behavior of the program I'd written.
You can say that in THAT case, the computer was STILL doing only what it was programmed to do -- but not what I, "the programmer", told it to do, but rather something that another programmer (who wrote the program or compiler) told it to do.
How many programmers are involved in writing the code for, say, ChatGTP? Do they all know every detail of what all the other programmers have done with the code?
And since AI ITSELF is now writing a significant amount of the new code, and it's unlikely that the programming team knows and understands those additions and which other parts of the code they connect and interact with . . . why would anyone think that AI is completely PREDICTABLE, even by its programmers, when it interacts with the unpredictable humans who make use of it and the unpredictable events of the world in which its actions take place?
Unexpected action by software has been a problem since the first electronic computers came on line, and even today, with millions of dollars spent on debugging software and then months or years-long beta campaigns by well funded companies, programs STILL often do things the programmers DID NOT specifically tell the software to do (in addition to the bugs they DID specifically program for, but didn't expect a particular situation would arise that would cause the problem).
I'm not expecting that to change.
Yes, and that's another problem. What are the guardrails of the military AI being crafted by the Chinese or other militaries? Or by ANY of the commercial AI companies? As you point out, we don't know. And even if we did, we'd be fools to think those guardrails will act as intended in all circumstances. For that matter, the guardrails in some cases may be malicious as written.
C++ is the undisputed world champion at that. I hate that language. I guess it is only fair to admit that has to do with the fact that I could never grok its arcane syntax plus semantics. I could never reach a level where anything about it ever felt natural. Unfortunately for me it is the dominant language of professionals for systems programming. It effectively locked me out of a career as a software engineer. So I had to find other means of gainful employment, such as emptying waste paper baskets.
In the spirit of better late than never, it's overdue to state that I enjoyed reading your reply. To the main point that you highlight at the outset, I'm paying attention to robotics. At two levels.
The first level is in the development of humanoid robots, which the Japanese, the South Koreans, and militaries around the world adore. So it's NOT not going to happen. Because what's coming is the merger of four things. One, the grounds-up training of perceptual systems of vision, auditory, sensory, and bipedal locomotion. Which two, will be married to LLMs, packaging high-level intelligence mimicry. Three, the physical form is wrapped in increasingly realistic fake skin and facial motor control. In what year the uncanny valley will be traversed I do not know, but it is getting closer. Which leads to four, the transition from "training" to "raising" the humanoid robots in factory, then office, then home environments. When this convergence nears we will approach something that earns the artificial intelligence moniker. Or at least earns serious consideration. As the warning goes, when the robots themselves ask to participate in the debate on stage in a round table discussion the answer is probably already determined.
The second level is swarm intelligence. Imagine the above but with thousands or more of them in high speed direct communication. Or a swarm of military attack drones all in one communication mesh, tied into an over-arching surveillance network. This prospects makes me jittery. My overall image of AI is that of hiking up a snowy ridge line in the Himalayan mountains. Yeah, reaching the peak might be a fantastic, exhilarating accomplishment. But one false step and you tumble to your death.
Speculative thought can keep going of course in all sorts of science fiction directions. But those are the two I'm alert towards in terms of near future.
Thanks for the reply; I enjoyed reading it.
Well, also felt the usual background terror as you described the likely path of humaniod and other forms of robots with AI "minds" and mass connectivity. That's been part of my AI nightmare for decades.
I agree with you: That's not NOT going to happen. How it will play out and what the consequences will be are the only questions.
A confession. While not a sky-is-falling type in the pattern of Connor Leahy - AI is MUTATING: And We Don't Know What It is Doing (though I do respect his intelligence and opinions), there was a time when I was keen to specialize in robotics, to be a part of the leading edge in bringing AI to fruition. I stepped out of that quest for a couple reasons. One was looking deep inside; of not wanting to confront the classic scientist's end-of-life guilt over what you helped create.
On GAW there is a pretty strongly voiced counter position that, when boiled down, goes: computers can't think, there is no such thing as AI, therefore all this fuss is at best a nothing burger or at worst a huge scam. For example the thread with tattletalestrangler neighboring this one. Well yeah, I do share the view that these systems called AI do not think, but naw, we are not dealing with a nothing burger. We have a something burger on our hands.
There's still no intelligence. It's just the same software using statistics from previous results. There still is no thinking on the part of the software. It's still just running a program.
I agree that it depends on the definition of "intelligence". Seems like a hard word to define correctly/completely and I'm certainly not going to take a stab at it. However, my guess is that no reasonable definition would have the computer coming out ahead of the human in any "intelligent" task. As I said, computers can certainly compute faster, but I'm going to guess that a good definition of "intelligence" doesn't depend on how fast something is completed.
Intelligence is indeed a difficult word to define. Capacity for abstraction and complex thought is a handy concise formulation. But that restricts itself to the upper reaches of intellect. As a working definition I like: the ability to correctly assess the current situation and to successfully project future consequences. This covers a broad range, including animal intelligence.
Here's a really homey example of (low) intelligence that fits into my definition. I'm upstairs in my home office finishing my lunch. I go to the upstairs bathroom. The toilet paper runs low. Not being completely clueless so as not to run out, I go down to the the basement to retrieve another roll before the current one is empty. When I return upstairs I spot my empty plate sitting next to my desk. DOH! That was dumb. I should have grabbed the plate, dropped it off in the kitchen, then gone to the basement to fetch the toilet paper. If I were smarter I would have folded both tasks into one trip.
When it comes to the computer software, now near-universally called AI, I prefer the term Intelligence Mimicry. LLMs are a far ways from full-on organic intelligence, but still impressive in many tasks that exists at the surface level interface of human intelligence, e.g. question & answering, written responses. Today's frontier models do better than most humans at college entrance exams to graduate school. MMLU-Pro: A robust and challenging evaluation of a language model's multitask accuracy, benchmark and paper.
And if I may round out with a racist comment, the paper I linked has 17 authors contributing from three universities. All three universities are prestigious, 2 Canadian and 1 in the U.S., top-tier in computer science. Judging by the names the authorship consists of 2 Indians and 15 Chinese. Unless we reverse our education system there our culture is so screwed.
We'll have to agree to disagree. There is no such thing as Artificial Intelligence. It's just a new buzz word for neural nets 2.0 as neural nets really didn't take off.
Here's an example, and it's actually something that really happened a few months back. My granddaughter was over and I told here there were some cookies on the table and she could have some. I could tell by the way she was looking at the package, they happen to be Tate's cookies, she wasn't familiar with the opening/closing mechanism. I watched as she looked at the package for a few seconds and she then opened the tabs and unrolled the top so she could get at the cookies. She was six years old at the time. The only way a computer could figure this out is if the programmer programmed this problem/solution. As I said, computers are dumb, and they always will be.
I don't think we're as far apart as you suggest. My position is that intelligence is solely a property of conscious beings. Computers as we know them are not conscious. Therefore what modern software exhibits is not intelligence in its true form. (Among AI researchers this position is considered hard-line.) I prefer to use the term Intelligence Mimicry, not that I expect the term to catch on. You might have heard of the Eliza Effect. That's the tendency of humans to impute intelligence onto entities that do not possess it, especially computers.
The big "yeah but" to all this squabbling over intelligence is that it hardly matters. The capabilities of modern AI are becoming fearsome, and if you don't believe that you have not been paying attention. When the enemy's AI-powered military strike force out maneuvers our human-loop decision process on the battlefield (hypothetically), that it happened at the hands of "dumb computers" is small consolation.
P.S. Here's a short news article I think you'll appreciate. Artificial Intelligence Is Still Quite Dumb.
Thanks. I guess we might agree then, that there is no such thing as AI.
Highly doubtful this happened and even less doubtful you’re free to post about it no issues LOL
Thank you for your confidence in me my fren. I am sure I must have done something to earn that.