It is sucking away electricity from cities, making hardware costly for common user, pumping heat into global atmosphere, taking away jobs, creating massive amount of slop, killing human motivation for creativity, making academics and exams harder, creating fakes that are undetectable, filling internet with plastic content, pumping tons of unmaintainable code, wrecking websites ...
Coding agent itself an imposed layer. Now they are adding one more layer? Many times I think of coding agent as the vendor supervisor from the body shops of the 90's who promise the customer everything under the sky and thrash the poor contractor to deliver. Coding agents consume 10x more tokens just like how body shops charged their customers vs how they paid the contractors. For a simple test, the same task that makes the model to go out of context length when used via a coding agent, runs fine when prompted directly.
Layers are luxury and remove control and transparency.
Ah - that sounds natural. An infra and services company, with the knowledge of the security gaps on their hosted stuff would ofcourse ask for banning of tools that can expose the weaknesses of it's infra, services and apps. But the only issue is, the same level of tools might be available from other places. I could see AWS becoming unexpected target of AI.
Probably they should start by NOT treating the consciousness as a non-physical special thing. Maybe it's not a thing to search for at all. At what point did it become a thing? Separate from chemical and physical interactions between elements?
When you redefine consciousness as just any other chemical, electrical or physical thing, suddenly it's everywhere. You don't need to search for it. The river which finds its way to ocean, has it. The earthquake which decides when to erupt has it. The electrons which decide to jump across orbitals have it.
The confusion is around cause and effect. The standard notion is that a conscious agent can initiate an effect without a cause. A boulder doesn't roll over and hit another unless someone moved it in the first place. It doesn't decide to move and hit another. However this distinction barely survives on the temporal sequencing of cause and effect. That temporal sequence is only valid in a very narrow context and range.
However consciousness is defined its evidently an emergent phenomenon. Emergent properties are real even if they are not a "thing" in themselves. Being rooted in a material reality doesn't prevent emergence of something else/additional that has qualities not easily understood by just understanding the individual mechanisms that give rise to it.
It became a thing due to the experience of self-reflection. The million dollar question is how come humans (and few other organisms) are able to self reflect on their biology, life situations, logic, math and even consciousness itself? However complex and sophisticated a machine's brain is, be it biological or mechanical (AI/AGI), no known laws of science allows it to self-reflect. This is famously called "the hard problem of consciousness" in philosophy which remains unresolved to this day.
Self-reflecting may not be the distinct enough feature. Any physical/chemical/electrical reaction can be termed as self-reflecting, as it reflects on what just happened and then responds with an effect. AI is already able to reflect on it's outputs and refine them, and distinguish between the user and it's own identity. Living things have evolved senses and long-term memory to help them with faster macro-responses beyond the usual physical reactions.
When a ball hits a bat, the ball also has a short-term memory and sense in the forms of how the inter-molecular forces detect and respond to the event of getting too close to the molecules of the bat and react with a repelling force. A more evolved form would be your consciousness.
Further, a lot of living things on earth might not have self-awareness.
It doesn't reflect itself, we only see the UI of a complex process, not the real thing. We don't understand what happened in our brains any better for being able to feel conscious. We can only be conscious of what is cost effective and cost necessary to feel, in order to persist and survive. Animals for example and primitive humans could reproduce without understanding reproduction mechanisms, just the operational side.
> However complex and sophisticated a machine's brain is, be it biological or mechanical (AI/AGI), no known laws of science allows it to self-reflect.
...What? If a human brain can, that's quite literally proof a machine can? We are made out of matter that obeys the laws of physics.
And we have never made a machine remotely complicated enough to mimick a human brain. LLMs are the closest we've ever come, and they're not even close. Nor are the even made in a way condusive to doing so (focused on generating requested output, not postulating randomly). So as to the mechanical machine specifically, nothing exists to even be capable of being observed to make such a claim!
But its also pretty hard to observe in others, which makes it hard to come up with a satisfying definition. Without a concrete definition, you can't really do science with it.
Agreed, what’s much more interesting is to focus on being able to model the world around you, play out scenarios in that model and make better predictions, and consequently, decisions because of that ability. (Of course “better” is still a term up for scrutiny.)
I feel that this is what we will ultimately conclude is the thing that makes us feel “conscious”. We model the world, but with ourselves in it. We need some sense of self to do this. Doesn’t mean this can’t be done in (probably) a million different ways.
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of information.
I do think the last 100 years' assumption of "it's physical material or it doesn't exist" should not be so easily accepted as fact.
It's like saying love, or nation states, or music doesn't exist. These things exist as much as it can matter to human experience, but you can't explain them by materiality alone.
Adding fake data (noise) officially to an important data such census, is the height of weirdness of the West. The nations are totally confused between privacy and visibility requirements. The privacy and freedom is effectively working against the very foundations of the nation, as the binding force between elements of a nation is directly affected by privacy.
Excessive obsession with equality is another thing that works to erase any cognitive abilities of the people to recognize differences in gender, race, age, culture etc. Equality is good to a reasonable extent but it shouldn't be forced to an extent to erase the cognitive capabilities gained through evolution.
> run a ton of agents in parallel most of the time
What makes you think everyone (and government) should play along and align with your way of dependency on AI? Not even 1% of the people use AI the way you do. Fable model is not a basic need. Government represents the average Joe. You could also say "I make a ton of nuke weapons and this government has stopped the public sharing of how to make them!".
I think you are missing the bigger picture that is around the "bigger picture" you are seeing. AI proliferation is more dangerous than nukes proliferation, as any highly capable tech would enable destructive usecases as well. If nukes related material and knowledge was safeguarded, then AI requires it as well.
nobody ever raised money for nukes from public/private markets on the premise that nukes will bring the world into an age of abundance. AI companies have done that. This comparison of AI and nukes is so silly.
Raising money has nothing to do with the bad usecase for tech. Tech companies never said that their tech can't be used against the nation or against the good of people.
That's not correct. If human attention requires human effort, that forces human effort all the way down the chain, with no machine output being possible.
You can't say "you can't feed me machine output directly". Machine output is meant to reduce the cognitive load for human processing.
If your colleague is forwarding AI output directly to you, that means they think the AI has reduced the cognitive load for you, and also you are the best person to process that output, instead of them.
You just need to change your perception about the purpose of AI.
Still - AI is a great achievement?
reply