Egregoros

@nimrod @cjd @CobaltSasquatch @Omega_Variant since the 1950s

Jezza™

@sun @nimrod @CobaltSasquatch @Omega_Variant @cjd "Artificial intelligence" literally a 1950s marketing buzzphrase concocted to open congress's purse to researchers and corporations. It worked on retarded politicians in the 50s, still works on retards today.
#GoodMarketing

woodland creature

@jeremiah @Omega_Variant @cjd @nimrod @sun this idea has existed for a long time and now it's real. what else are you going to call man-made neural networks that have natural language conversations and reasoning abilities? that's exactly what intelligence is. machine learning = machine intelligence.

Jezza™

@meowski @Omega_Variant @cjd @nimrod @sun they don't have "reasoning" capabilities unless you stretch "reasoning", the same way they do not have "intelligence" unless you stretch the definition of "intelligence."

Perhaps start by defining intelligence, so we can distinguish between it and artificial intelligence.

woodland creature

@jeremiah @Omega_Variant @cjd @nimrod @sun they absolutely do have reasoning abilities. computers excel at logic. they literally contain billions of logic circuits. abstract reasoning is an extension of that.

i will gladly look up the definition of intelligence for you: the simplest definition is "the ability to learn"

neural networks absolutely do learn, they can be "trained" with reinforcement learning.

Jezza™

@meowski @Omega_Variant @cjd @nimrod @sun in my opinion, you are making a semantic argument, hinging on the fact that words like "reason" and "intelligence" are appearing in two very distinct domains. The confusion between those domains is mainly a product of marketing.

Neural nets are not equivalent to brains, statistical "learning" on neural nets is not equivalent to reasoning, and the whole of it is not intelligence.

Blurry Moon

@nimrod@shitposter.world remote

@jeremiah @meowski @Omega_Variant @cjd @nimrod computer neural nets are a mathematical approximation of a component of biological brains and the definitely do learn. they don't learn as well as a complex mammal brain because a mammal brain is a network of many neural nets dedicated to specific purposes. entire fruit fly brain has been simulated.

nimrod

@sun @jeremiah @Omega_Variant @cjd @meowski I know we have the map of the entire fruit fly brain but do we actually know what every component of it does? Do we know every biological function it controls and how it interprets data from the eyes and ears?

Blurry Moon

@nimrod @Omega_Variant @cjd @jeremiah @meowski there are entire classes of drugs where we know they work but we don't know why they work. we can feed the fly brain into a computer and simualte an environment around iit and it navigates it and learns

Jezza™

@sun @nimrod @Omega_Variant @cjd @meowski but how would you prove the artificial learning process is equivalent to the fly's? By behavior alone? How would you test the simulated environment against real flies?

Blurry Moon

@jeremiah @Omega_Variant @cjd @meowski @nimrod I odn't think you have to to prove it learns. at amy rate II think our disagreement is I'm not bothered if it doesn't work exactly like a biological brain if you can prove it practices reinforcement training for example. the irony here is, this isn't how LLMs work at all, and if you look closer at "reasoning" LLMs, they do in fact do something that isn't really like human reasoning at all and arguably isn't any real kind of reasoning at all either.

Jezza™

@sun @Omega_Variant @cjd @meowski @nimrod i'm not sure it's even a disagreement; pragmatically, it doesn't matter if the fly and the simfly behave similarly in different environments as long as they learn a coherent strategy for existing in them, and if our theories about fly brains are accurate, the simflies and flies ought to behave very similarly. Good enough, move on.

I think if there's friction, it may be my autistic insistence on the importance of domains/categories bound to terms, and my observation that when terms hop between domains, they often carry inappropriate baggage that has knock-on effects (in culture, importantly.) Sort of like when someone says "your car" and is referring to your truck. Pragmatically, it's good enough, but it is not accurate.

woodland creature

@jeremiah @Omega_Variant @cjd @nimrod @sun machines are already physically stronger than humans and gorillas in so that's not even relevant. there's no question that a hydraulic press can exert 100 tons of pressure and no biological system can come close to that- but this doesn't threaten you psychologically. you just accept it as fact.

a $5 calculator can do calculations faster than a human too. i'm not saying that is intelligence. again it's the ability to learn. we're not even debating whether machines are smarter than humans or gorillas. we're simply debating whether they possess intelligence at all, to get to your original premise, and i say they do.

Jezza™

@meowski @Omega_Variant @cjd @nimrod @sun i say they do if only you adapt the definition of intelligence. Like how racism is power + privilege.

woodland creature

@jeremiah @Omega_Variant @cjd @nimrod @sun you don't have to alter the definiton of intelligence at all for machine learning to fall under it. they learn.

Jezza™

@meowski @Omega_Variant @cjd @nimrod @sun we're now officially in a loop on the subject, so I will end my participation in this aspect by saying semantic arguments do not tend to produce useful results even if they are resolved.

woodland creature

@jeremiah @Omega_Variant @cjd @nimrod @sun fair enough. keep in mind that the simplest neural networks can learn, and therefore possess intelligence. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14556954/ this is a gray area and eventually you'll need to update your thinking

Jezza™

@meowski @Omega_Variant @cjd @nimrod @sun i'm fine with the disagreement, but the idea that i need to "update" my thinking by downgrading what i know to reprioritize what other people are concerned with isn't how i roll.

woodland creature

@jeremiah @Omega_Variant @cjd @nimrod @sun we can revisit this in a year. would you agree that fruit flies have intelligence?

Jezza™

@meowski @Omega_Variant @cjd @nimrod @sun on the basis that they are understood to possess working memory, couscious awareness, and the ability to direct and manage their attention, I would say that the argument could be made that they're intelligent.

Personally, I would be extremely specific in providing a definition of what i meant by intelligence before calling drosophila intelligent.

Not providing a definition is the same as making a semantic argument because the hinge is the word, not the shared understanding of its meaning.

I would probably want to see it in the context of what is meant by intelligent in other creatures, too.

Replying to @jeremiah@shitposter.world

woodland creature