Zompist Bboard Again

Weird article about chatGPT leading people to quasi-religious delirium.

The Australian Labor Party has been reëlected. (It will never not annoy and confuse me that their main right wing party is called the Liberals.)

Another election, another near heart attack. It looks like Canada has avoided catastrophe for now at least.

I think the word you’re looking for is ‘agentic’: the ability to act as an agent under one’s one volition. I agree that there is a fundamental difference between agentic technologies and non-agentic ones, and that prior to AIs we haven’t really seen any technologies with a significant amount of age...

(Along similar lines, they do define what they mean by ‘normal technology’. Note that they also define, e.g., the printing press and the Internet as ‘normal technologies’, despite their transformative impacts. It may be a poor choice of name, but the concept itself is reasonable.) Nonetheless, I ma...

you mean like how the world's richest people believed in the aether, or spent fortunes in pursuit of communication with ghosts? yeah, its shocking how rich people are a good barometer of what succeeds. Except that AGI is demonstrably possible given that intelligence arises from physical processes. ...

Just got a letter from my lawyer about the speeding ticket. They say that my charge was negotiated down to illegal parking and that I must pay $225 for the fine. Considering the alternative was six months in jail, that seems like an improvement. Unfortunately it still leaves me with a criminal recor...

Artificial intelligence by contrast aims to compete with humans at their one strength, matching or exceeding us in creativity, hasn't happened yet, won't happen any time soon. Meanwhile the world's richest people are investing billions into making AGI a reality. It may well turn out that they are a...

Artificial intelligence by contrast aims to compete with humans at their one strength, matching or exceeding us in creativity, reasoning, and other cognitive abilities. As of now, AI doesn't aim for anything, because, as you yourself admitted a few posts ago, it doesn't have agency. Fair enough. I ...

It hardly makes sense to treat AI as normal technology since intelligence itself is hardly a normal property. Intelligence is what allowed humans to take over the world despite being among the weakest and least durable animals relative to our size. Previous forms of technology have compensated for t...

alice wrote: ↑Tue Apr 15, 2025 3:03 pmDoes anybody else suffer from this kind of paralysing nonsense?

Yes, that has always been my problem as well. It has taken years for even my main project to progress and there are still plenty of things about it that leave me unsatisfied.

malloc: How would something that would still require human beings to tell it what to do all the time be intelligent? The machine in that case would have the intelligence necessary for any cognitive task while having no desires of its own, acting only when ordered. You could order the machine to inv...

malloc, you can claim we have AGI when we have AI's that can of their own will decide to learn chess from first principles and then go on and compete with humans at it -- or decide to play go and then go on and compete with humans at that, or decide that they don't like playing board games and reje...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Apr 09, 2025 4:42 pmAll the time, effort, and money put into producing these fake "dire wolves" would be far better put to use saving actual endangered species that exist in the wild from extinction.

Well yes, I was trying to make a joke. Certainly I'm not trying to glaze these tech-bros.

On the positive side, this does provide an alternative to the costly process of importing animals for our zoos from countries now under staggering tariffs. Instead of importing giraffes from Africa, we can simply engineer their closest American relative, the pronghorn, into passable facsimiles. Gran...

The matter is not anything about an immaterial soul or whatnot -- the matter is that not only are our most powerful AI's pathetic in their actual mental capacity compared to actual humans (where AI's can outperform humans, e.g. playing chess, folding proteins, or diagnosing cancer, turn out to be s...

Likewise I often see people on the Left claim that medieval peasants only worked four hours a day or that the Enlightenment invented racism. In their rush to critique capitalism, many people on the Left end up romanticizing pre-capitalist forms of exploitation and ideology.

With the possible exception of rotting bones, I don't think anyone in this thread would deny that AI bros are a bunch of wankers. It's you who constantly insists on taking their claims seriously. Many of their claims rest on uncontroversial principles like the basis of cognition in the material bra...

For instance, I try to be a universalist in a time when both the Left and the Right have their own preferred particularisms, and seem to disagree mainly on which particularisms should be supported. I try to be sceptical about tradition in a time when both the Left and the Right have their own prefe...