actually there is. low-end blue collar jobs are hard to fill at wages companies want to pay...which is why they tend to hire immigrants. (both legal and illegal)

I assume the ongoing layoff wave in tech is probably AI-related. Perhaps not explicitly but most of the people making those hire/fire calls at tech companies are well aware of AI developments and probably have at least played around with chatGPT, etc. A lot of those jobs won't be coming back.

their last redoubt will be claiming its a "zombie with no soul, its just FAKING it!" which is basically just a religious assertion on their part at that point. Its the logical end-point of the skeptics endlessly moving the goal posts.

This is so true. I'm in a discussion group that is generally very skeptical of AI. A typical example of their goal post shifting is going from "haha, GPT3 can barely rhyme and can't do proper poetry" in 2021 to "well GPT-4 can't write a GREAT masterful poem though" now. Apply this across every domain...the ability of AI skeptics to move the goal posts is unbounded.

All You Need Is Fine-Tuning

A real war in Taiwan will likely disrupt sea trade routes to South Kore and Japan as well. If nothing else insurance costs will soar for shipping companies, increasing transportation costs. Worst case if the war is wide enough the broader western Pacific could be a maritime war zone and more deeply cut transportation links.

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I get what you are saying but not sure what the basis for skepticism right now is. Things are developing INSANELY fast since early last year; its hard to imagine things developing any faster and more impressively than they did and still are. I guess you can assume that we're close to some upper limit but I don't see a basis for assuming that.

But we don't know how to make human brains aside from producing people of course ;) We do know how to create AI models though. Considering the rate of progress in just the past year I wouldn't want to bet against image generation and recognition technology.

Maybe. Its also possible that AI's more explicit _recognition_ capability will end up being super-human since its not limited by evolutionary kludges, at least once we have proper multi-modal visual models.

To use the old cliche example; our aircraft aren't as efficient as birds...but no Bird can carry hundreds of passengers or achieve supersonic speeds, etc.

Well presumably humans and animals ARE first labelling/categorizing but it happens at a very low level...our higher brain functions then act on that raw data. You still need that lower level base image recognition functionality to be in place though. Presumably AI could do something similar, have a higher-level model that takes input from a lower level base image recognition model.

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From an AI/software perspective that base image recognition functionality will be extremely useful once inference costs come down.

I said _mostly_ solved. Labelling/geometry/categorization are huge prerequisite steps to get to "actions". I assume video generation/description will be the final step needed as it gives the model an "understanding" of relations between objects over time. In other words true scene recognition. In fact I assume multi-modal models that combine language/imagery AND video will end up being another leap forward since such neural nets would have a much more robust world model.

this is mostly solved already actually. All of the large image generation tools are also image _recognition_ tools, and some of them can explicitly do image-to-text as well where they can highly accurately describe an image fed to it. We just haven't seen this capability impact any consumer markets yet outside of image generation, presumably because the inference for these AI models needs a lot of compute.

I'll grant there is a gap there..... but it actually makes the whole thing _weaker_ than I was granting...cause I don't give a shit about whether an AI system is "conscious" or "understanding" or a "mind", those are BS meaningless mystical terms. What I care about is the practical demonstration of intelligence; what measurable intelligence does a system exhibit. I'll let priests and philosophers debate about whether its "really a mind" and how many angels can dance on the head of a pin while I use the AI to do fun or useful stuff.

Your assertion is obviously true NOW and not many people are seriously claiming that chatGPT and other current LLM's are actually conscious or AGI. The thing is they sure seem to be showing a massive step down the path towards getting those things. A legit argument can be made that we're now looking at something approaching proto-AGI...which is wild, this was science fiction even a year ago.

I understand the Chinese Room argument, I just think its massively flawed. As I pointed out before, if you accept its premise then you must accept that NOTHING is "actually intelligent" unless you invoke something like the "vitalism" you referenced and claim humans have special magic that makes them "actually intelligent"...which is mystic nonsense and must be rejected from a materialist standpoint.

The Chinese Room Argument DOES show that no digital intelligence could be the same as _human_ intelligence but that is just a form of circular logic and not useful in any way; its another way of saying "a non-human intelligence is not a human mind". That is obviously true but also a functionally pointless and obvious statement.

Interesting points though I personally detest the Chinese Room Argument since by its logic no human can actually be intelligent either...unless you posit that humans have something magical that lets them escape the Chinese Room logic.

well yes, but the same is ultimately true of people as well if you are totally reductive. Unless you think humans have some soul or magic essence to them.

True. And maybe a good reason to NOT want an AI that acts human ;) For some things we want the classical perfect "super Oracle" that just answers our queries but doesn't have the associated baggage of human-level sentience. (whether that sentience is real or fake doesn't really even matter in regards to this issue)

Ok, fair enough. I still think using any sort of mirror analogy breaks down rapidly though. If the "mirror" is so good at reflecting that its showing perfectly plausible scenes that respond in perfectly plausible ways to whatever is aimed into it...is it really even any sort of mirror at all any more?

The mirror analogy doesn't hold up. LLM's are NOT just repeating back the words you prompt them with. They are feeding back plausible human language responses.

It would be like a magic mirror that reflects back a plausible human face with appropriate facial emotive responses to your face...that wouldn't just be a reflection.

that or niche uses in factories/warehouses or something.

The $10k thing is presumably in the long run. Short term early gen versions are gonna be super expensive and maybe only available like on-lease for enterprises and whatnot.

Level 1 would be $30k and up, minimum. Market would be upper middle class and wealth people in households with children and both parents working, etc. Someone living on their own in an apartment or condo won't need this...but a family with a large house and lots of things keeping them busy....hell yes.

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Level 2 the sky is the limit. Floor price would be $75k and probably way more. It'd be like getting a very high end luxury car.

I suspect even a first generation consumer humanoid robot will be "smarter" than people are assuming. It'll probably come with an associated LLM-based chat bot...and by the time humanoid robots are really available(5 - 10 years?) we'll be way beyond chatGPT.

Actually there is a market for LEGIT hand-made stuff for most things...but its niche and expensive. This will probably be true for more and more things as AI devours everything.