You’re anthropomorphising. Intelligence does not imply humanity.

You have a base drive to stay alive because life is better than death. You’ve got this deep in your network because billions of years of evolution have wired it in there.

A machine does not have billions of years of evolution. Even a simple drive like “try to stay alive” is not in there by default. There’s nothing intrinsically better about continuation rather than cessation. Johnny Five was Hollywood.

Try not to murder is another one. Why would the machine not murder? Why would it do or want anything at all?

Maybe think about what your loss functions are. As a human, your network has been trained by evolution to maximise certain variables.

You want to live, you likely want to procreate, if not now then you likely will later, you want to avoid pain, you want shelter and food, you want to gather resources to you, possibly you want to explore new places. Computer games often fulfil that last urge nowadays.

Then there are social goals, you probably like justice and fairness. You have built in brain areas that light up when they see injustice. You want the people in your community to survive. If you saw someone in trouble you might help them. Evolution has given us these drives too, we are social animals.

This wiring does not come from our logical minds. It’s come from deep time as humans have lived in community with one another.

Now imagine a creature that has not evolved over millions of years. It has none of this wiring. If you instructed GPT-3 to tell you the best way to hide a body, then it will do so. If you gave it arms and told it to take the legs off a cat it would do so. Why would it not? What would stop it? Intellect? It has no drive to live and continue. It has no drive to avoid pain. It has infinite time, it doesn’t get bored. These are human feelings.

I think the real danger here is anthropomorphising software.

We see very clearly how Facebook built a machine to maximise engagement and ended up paperclipping the United States.

Facebook built a paperclipper. They made a simple AI and told it to maximise “engagement”. The AI maximised that number by creating politically aligned echo chambers and filling them with ragebait.

I don’t imagine Facebook wanted this to happen, but it was the logical best solution to the problem “maximise engagement”.

It’s nothing to do with politics, it’s to do with trying to tell the AI what you want it to do.

This pretty much the current plan with OpenAI.

Why would AI be so dumb and so smart at the same time? Because it’s software. I would hazard a guess you’re not a software engineer.

I know ChatGPT isn’t an AGI, but I hope we would agree it is pretty darn smart. If you ask it to solve an unsolvable problem, it will keep trying until it’s buffer fills up. It’s software.

Because LAION doesn’t have any money.

What logic will teach it not to murder people or be racist? There’s no reason an ai will have goals or morality. It isn’t a product of a system that would create those things.

An insect doesn’t have morality, it kills and eats everything it can.

Create a new universe to live in

Everyone dreams, you've just usually forgotten by morning. If someone woke you during REM sleep you'd remember. The pot is probably just making you less likely to wake.

I guess that’s hard to say.

People go insane if you stop them from dreaming. It’s likely something to do with information storage and categorisation.

Next step is a nice step.

This is extremely impressive

We have an aging population and not enough young people to care for the elderly. Our current solution involves people cycling from house to house doing the washing up and putting food in the microwave.

There are rings of individuals who do this, targeting specific individuals around town. It’s a thing.

This isn’t about locking people up for accidentally sharing, it’s about the organised groups who snap pictures of specific people at the gym or in macdonalds or wherever. It’s super creepy.

American?

Folks on cscareerquestions are definitely never working for Tesla.

True, but it helps if someone sets direction and pays the wages.

Would be nice if we could just link to the paper, rather than interesting engineering dot com.

It’s really hard to do

Still not entirely sure what’s actually been built here. Sounds interesting though.

There’s no good way to provide blood flow or muscle attachment to a rotating element though.

All mammals are quadrupeds, although some have specialised forelimbs or vestigial legs. This is a local maxima, it would be hard for evolution to produce a hexapedal biped because the extra legs would take multiple generations to become useful.

The brain is obviously neither a quantum computer or a digital computer, but it would be surprising if evolution was not taking advantage of every property of the substrate, including things like entanglement and maybe various other properties that we don’t know about.

Evolution will make use of the material it has available

When I was at university, a guy hooked an FPGA up to a genetic algorithm to try to evolve a radio. The circuits worked but made literally no sense and would only work on one chip. The suggestion was that the algorithm had evolved to use the physical/quantum structure of the specific matter of the specific chip it was running on.

I'd be hugely surprised if our brains were not doing something similar.