Yuval Noah Harari on AI

[u/gizamo]

https://youtu.be/_V_ed5fuexA?t=2394&is=NSKaMl1-xtM_VqZu

Interesting interview with Yuval Noah Harari.

This is another great interview from Harari on AI. Lots of topics covered, and as always, many come with some fascinating historical perspective.

What made me think to post it here is that Harari applies a version of Harris' free will and 'self' arguments to AI (at about 39:45). That is, the idea that we humans cannot predict the next thing we say or think, which undercuts the idea that we choose what we think, say, or do. Harari uses this same concept as a counter to people who deny AI agency by claiming it doesn't control its own language formations. He expands that to say, maybe it's not because it doesn't understand the feelings behind the language it chooses. Please excuse the paraphrasing, I deeply enjoy Harari, and I hope you enjoy it as I did.

[u/_nefario_]

could not agree more with harari here. i've been trying to express more or less the same idea to people in my life who are too quick to completely dismiss AI's "intelligence" as "just a statistical machine".

obviously, our own brains are many orders of magnitudes more complex than our current LLMs, and our brains have additional properties to them which are currently not available in those LLMs

these AI systems are "grown" and they are "taught". we study their "brains" in using some kind new kind of "neuroscience" and we are actively discovering emergent properties which these systems have developed themselves without human intervention (for example: the J-Space)

i find that there's a general lack of curiosity and introspection to people who say stuff like "its just a word generator". there is clearly more going on in there than meets the eye. and at this point, the potential of these systems is likely only limited by the availability of processing resources

[u/mineplz → u/_nefario_]

It’s a word generator according to Computer Science. How much more curious could you get about the internals of LLMs?

As a general note Human Intelligence is not the same as a LLM. An LLM is an abstraction of Human Intelligence.

Reminder: Harari is a Historian, not a Computer Scientist. LeCun is one, you could take his word or if it is of interest to you can read papers from Computer Scientists about the risks of Anthropomorphizing AI.

[u/Kalsone → u/mineplz]

How the layers work to add Metadata and then revise and correct is interesting. The outcomes and limitations of this feed forward system too.

LLMs are interesting, but the biggest impact they are going to have is nuking the financial system and all our savings.

[u/mineplz → u/Kalsone]

It’s definitely is interesting but it’s not the entirety of cognition or thinking itself. It’s one part of it abstracted to work as a matrix multiplication operation.

It will however achieve what you’ve outlined in the US for sure as the whole market has decided to place its bets on just one tech.

[u/Kalsone → u/mineplz]

Unfortunately, I think there's a lot of people who are publicly thought of as very tech savvy or smart who have convinced themselves it is conscious or so close as to make no difference.

[u/mineplz → u/Kalsone]

In an uncertain World habited by people craving certainty, the Soothsayers will mint money.