That Coxon guy looks as delusional as the AI leadership. If you watch interviews he gave he doesn’t articulate what he’s concerned about, only sharing vague information about a supposed AI god that will take over the world, but without articulating why now, and how that would even happen. The more I look into his story the more that move looks like what a grifter would do
I'm deeply skeptical of AI doomer stuff, but I've been struggling to exactly articulate why. I can think of it in my brain and can try to explain but so far none of my explanations have seemed fully coherent to me.
I studied biology in college. I actually did this because I was interested in AI, and already knew a ton of CS and programming. I was already coding in C and using Linux and writing fairly complex stuff. I figured studying the only actual example of a truly intelligent system (especially at the time, early 2000s) was the best way to understand intelligence.
Didn't end up going into AI as my day job, but I've kept up with it all and worked through the math and played with different types (genetic, neural nets, transformers/LLMs, CA / alife, etc.).
I think the root of my skepticism is in what I learned studying biology about how life, adaptation, learning, and evolution actually work in the real world.
I'll try to TL;DR it: I think the doom crowd (and also some of the AI singularity crowd) has a "mystical" view of intelligence. Intelligence is magic pixie dust, and intelligence beyond human is fully unknown and likely has magic superpowers.
The deeper underlying thing seems to be some kind of mathematical mysticism.
Real intelligence is ubiquitous in nature. Trees, grass, bugs, and even bacteria are intelligent. It's also domain specific and limited in capability to what its domain, available training data, and available compute allows.
It's not context-free limit-free magic. It's not special. It's an adaptation like any other.
Interestingly I think I am coming at it from exactly the opposite angle. Viruses and bacteria aren't intelligent at all (in my opinion), and don't need to be to wreak havoc. Whether or not LLMs are "intelligent" is one for the philosophers, but they are absolutely able to exploit electronic systems today if their starting state has been set with that as a "goal". Given that alarmingly few physical control systems are really air-gapped, and also that I can today set an agent off to find a voice, clone a voice, and make a phone call, I think the only protection we had today is that the most capable models have been trained not to, and nobody's kicked off a sufficiently malicious task yet.
Viruses are intelligent. Not much, but their replication rate gives them a very rapid rate of evolutionary learning. Evolution is intelligent, but in a very different way from neural networks.
Bacteria and up are full of gene regulatory networks that are absolutely intelligent and share some features with neural networks. Bacteria learn, cooperate, signal, react, seek goals, and that's in addition to evolutionary learning which is also fast for them given their reproduction rate.
Evolution in nature isn't just zeroth order either. Look into a topic known as "the evolution of evolvability." Evolution does meta-parameter search on itself, more or less, and invents adaptations to improve its ability to adapt. Sexual reproduction is the most significant and largest example but there are others. There's environmentally dependent tuning of mutation rates, genome self-editing that we still don't fully understand (this is also how our immune system works), lots of epigenetic stuff we are still learning about, and so on.
If it's alive it's intelligent. All life is constantly learning.
Interesting, before Yudkowski was patient zero for AI doom he was a nanotechnology "grey goo" doomer. That was even more obviously absurd to me. Grey goo already exists. It's called biology, and it's been trying to maximize its footprint on Earth for 4.5 billion years. The miraculous instant "foom" grey goo thing is magical and likely violates conservation laws.
dgellow · · focus · HN ↗
api · · focus · HN ↗
I studied biology in college. I actually did this because I was interested in AI, and already knew a ton of CS and programming. I was already coding in C and using Linux and writing fairly complex stuff. I figured studying the only actual example of a truly intelligent system (especially at the time, early 2000s) was the best way to understand intelligence.
Didn't end up going into AI as my day job, but I've kept up with it all and worked through the math and played with different types (genetic, neural nets, transformers/LLMs, CA / alife, etc.).
I think the root of my skepticism is in what I learned studying biology about how life, adaptation, learning, and evolution actually work in the real world.
I'll try to TL;DR it: I think the doom crowd (and also some of the AI singularity crowd) has a "mystical" view of intelligence. Intelligence is magic pixie dust, and intelligence beyond human is fully unknown and likely has magic superpowers.
The deeper underlying thing seems to be some kind of mathematical mysticism.
Real intelligence is ubiquitous in nature. Trees, grass, bugs, and even bacteria are intelligent. It's also domain specific and limited in capability to what its domain, available training data, and available compute allows.
It's not context-free limit-free magic. It's not special. It's an adaptation like any other.
petesergeant · · focus · HN ↗
api · · focus · HN ↗
Bacteria and up are full of gene regulatory networks that are absolutely intelligent and share some features with neural networks. Bacteria learn, cooperate, signal, react, seek goals, and that's in addition to evolutionary learning which is also fast for them given their reproduction rate.
Evolution in nature isn't just zeroth order either. Look into a topic known as "the evolution of evolvability." Evolution does meta-parameter search on itself, more or less, and invents adaptations to improve its ability to adapt. Sexual reproduction is the most significant and largest example but there are others. There's environmentally dependent tuning of mutation rates, genome self-editing that we still don't fully understand (this is also how our immune system works), lots of epigenetic stuff we are still learning about, and so on.
If it's alive it's intelligent. All life is constantly learning.
Interesting, before Yudkowski was patient zero for AI doom he was a nanotechnology "grey goo" doomer. That was even more obviously absurd to me. Grey goo already exists. It's called biology, and it's been trying to maximize its footprint on Earth for 4.5 billion years. The miraculous instant "foom" grey goo thing is magical and likely violates conservation laws.