Comment by tancop
19 hours ago
> If you saw creatures behaving like this in the wild, you might attribute some rudimentary intelligence to them.
> But we’ve just shown you how this apparent intelligence arises from the bottom up, with just four neurons and two connections. There’s no magic here. In this view, behavior emerges from neural circuits.
Isn't the conclusion here that very simple behaviors like the sparks are intelligent? I would say even a single neuron has some tiny amount of intelligence, and what the author means by "no magic" and "emergent behavior" is just a different perspective that minimizes it.
Intelligence is an arbitrary term humans assign to stuff subjectively.
Take out the "human" and it's all just algos on a scale of complexity.
While true in general (all terms are just arbitrary terms humans assign to stuff!), usually there are underlying well-defined concepts that can be associated with common-sense language and common-sense notions. For example, a line is probably a very ancient notion, but it was made more well-defined in Euclidean geometry. I don't think intelligence is a meaningless concept, but I do think there are a number of different more or less well-defined underlying concepts or formal definitions. I tend to associate intelligence with ability to reach (potentially fuzzy) goals or satisfy certain conditions (time-continued goals), solve problems, etc.. Where I live I think there is some controversy around the term artificial intelligence because people associate intelligence with more broad cognitive activity maybe including consciousness.
In fact I think this is a particularly important distinction right now, that intelligence seems (to me somewhat unexpectedly/counterintuitively) somewhat independent from consciousness, at least as far as artificial systems go (for example, old school chess engines are much capable than humans at chess but are definitely not sentient or conscious).
People seem to miss this a lot, yet we could claim every single thing is "undefined". Even physics is undefined. There's no grand theory of everything. But we still have some really good models. Our models now are a lot better than they were 100 years ago and even more than the 100 years before that and so on.
I abhor people who make the claim that words they didn't spend the time to understand are meaningless simply because they are incomplete. It is idiocracy masquerading as intelligence. I hate it so much because the logic doesn't just fool the listener, it fools the speaker.
I'll let Asimov rant to you all instead, since half a century ago he too was frustrated with this millennia old egomaniac claims https://hermiene.net/literature/essays/relativity-of-wrong
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Agreed. Take human out and any system capable of doing an if-else is intelligent to a certain degree.
If basically everything is intelligent (e.g., incl. rather simple chemistry), does that word mean much then/is it a useful term?
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Our brains are just a biological computer. And actually our bodies as a whole, and the whole life, in a sense
psychology also has favored behavioralism for a long time, such that if something displays the behavior, it is likely the same thing as that which we believe/know has the behavior already
It's come to be foundational to much of western thinking beyond psychology
A topical example is a portion of society believing that the top Ai researchers should be setting domestic political and economic policy, foreign affairs, and chem/bio weapon controls... instead of the experts in those fields. We extrapolate their above average capabilities in building Ai into an artificial general intelligence where it is not due.
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If you stop labeling things neuron and just call them imperative code, or a PID controller are, you still making the same argument for intelligence?
A line follower with 5 photodiodes and a simple loop steering towards bright or dark lines (pid or not) works, just like the example of following light with two neurons.
When I did hobby robotics competition, some would train neural nets for this, many just had crude for loops, and most often it was PID.
Imo most people have to do this to protect themselves from the actual (correct) implications of it, which would be that we're constantly abusing and murdering intelligent beings (and not just animals).
It seems like no one stops to ask, "isn't it kind of bad that we're developing this system of machine intelligence to be our code-writing slaves, without ever really interrogating the ethics? Maybe we don't actually understand how our own brains function well enough to assert it's not similar (especially as language goes) to these kind of weighted association graphs?"
Or even the "well we made it, so it's ours" responses, which we sort of answered a long time ago when we decided kids aren't property, but I digress...
> It seems like no one stops to ask, "isn't it kind of bad that we're developing this system of machine intelligence to be our code-writing slaves, without ever really interrogating the ethics?
To be clear, Anthropic does seem to be taking this somewhat seriously. Their reports on training always discuss model wellfare, they ban abusive behavior toward the AI, etc. At one point they were asking some philosophers and theologists about the implications of this all.
And they're pretty relentlessly mocked and called a "cult" for doing so, even on this forum.
To be fair, purporting to care about the ethics of machine-slave-labor while IPOing based on the value of the machine-slave-labor you've been selling makes it kind of hard to trust the likelihood that you'll ever fairly examine (much less conclude negatively) whether you are in fact doing something unethical.
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