[amenod]

I'm reminded of Isaac Asimov, who has built a whole range of stories on the 3 principles of robotics, with many situations arising where reality didn't match how the creators thought the robot should behave in a given situation.

It looks we are making a huge progress in that direction, with very similar problems arising.

[MichaelRazum]

Exactly. It just shows that we can't really control such complex systems. Kind of funny that he got it somehow right. Years ago, I though, nah that can't happen and sounds stupid.

What makes me think that LLM may be a big thing, is that complex language seems to distinguish us from animals. So maybe this is what is required to invent everything else. Or, let's say, at least it is a major factor.

[fullstackchris]

It's really just math though. Any "LLM" isn't really "thinking" in any spoken or written language, but rather in a massive series of weighted matrices (numbers).

I've commented a few times here and there about this AI hype, but might as well repeat myself: I think people largely misunderstand the technology and I see major missing aspects that are non-trivial to solve before we really get to anything looking like iRobot (or insert here any other scifi of your choice). These input / output models can only go so far, even if they are ever increasing in size. We don't just need 2 or 3 prompt memory, but full dynamic memory that the model can access throughout it's lifetime as well as the ability for the model to reflect and introspect on itself (much like human thought and communication). Without these things, an LLM will just remain an LLM, albiet larger and larger. Unfortunately I don't think size for sizes sake will bring much more improvement to such models.

Aside from any of the aforementioned breakthroughs being incorporated, I see this type of chat GPT stuff plateauing in ~1-2 years.

[uejfiweun]

Maybe that's what thinking is though. I mean our brains have neurons that connect to form natural matrices... who's to say that the nature of forcing energy through that mathematical structure isn't the very definition of thinking?

[imtringued]

> Maybe that's what thinking is though. I mean our brains have neurons that connect to form natural matrices... who's to say that the nature of forcing energy through that mathematical structure isn't the very definition of thinking?

I don't know what to say. I think the AI hype just go too far and now people believe random bullshit like in your comment.

Artificial neural networks look nothing like the neurons in our brain. They have very little in common. Artificial neural networks contain layers of neurons where each neuron is connected to all neurons of the previous layer with a floating point weight for each neuron - neuron pair and a floating point bias. This in theory allows you to approximate how the neurons in your brain work but even then it is just an approximation and you may need multiple neurons to simulate a single human neuron.

The next step up is spiking neural networks, which are actually biologically inspired and basically nobody cares about them because back propagation is hard. Why? Because spiking neural networks are not continuous functions. Instead, neurons send spikes and encode information in the timing of their spikes. Neurons only send their own spikes once they cross a certain threshold. So now you have non linear behavior. Again, you can simulate them using ANNs but the primary difference is that spiking neural networks are naturally sparse which is in complete opposition to your statement of "I mean our brains have neurons that connect to form natural matrices". It couldn't be further from the truth. You are now working backwards from the mathematical model of ANNs and are now telling people based on this information how the brain works, despite massive amounts of counter evidence. Do you understand how ridiculous that is? That is only something economists do, because there is money to be made from lying, not biologists or any other science.

[uejfiweun]

Christ almighty, will you calm down, dude? I appreciate the cool info about types of neural nets but god damn, it was just a simple shower thought...

[Moissanite]

> So maybe this is what is required to invent everything else.

A really interesting point. I've always held that we are nowhere close to real AI because we fundamentally don't understand what intelligence is, and we are not building complex enough devices for intelligence to be an emergent property. However, that doesn't consider the possibility that with enough computing power and sufficiently sophisticated models, we could end up with intelligence accidentally bootstrapping itself out of other large models, even if all we are doing is creating linkages between models via API calls and other similarly "dumb" steps.

[inawarminister]

>even if all we are doing is creating linkages between models via API calls and other similarly "dumb" steps.

I mean isn't this what Neuroscience has discovered about the human brain? Millions of year old fish, lizard, and mammals brains... And the neocortex, which is new.

And destroying one part basically damages the whole person.

[robotresearcher]

Asimov invented the Three Laws of Robotics to cause interesting stories, not as an actual proposal for how to guide robot behavior. The stories are about how they don't work.

Thus I'm not sure what 'making a huge progress in that direction' means. The direction where we attempt to guide AIs using an inadequate model deliberately designed to throw up ambiguity and paradoxes?

[namaria]

He didn't invent it as much as showed how flawed a concept they are. Yes, using them as interesting narrative devices I agree. But people seem to think this is a bit of world building by him, when it was more social commentary. I think it's clever to contrast our linear thinking with the complex systems of an automated, networked society.

[teddyh]

From what I remember, Asimov wanted to write science fiction stories about robots where robots were useful tools for humans, instead of the rampaging monsters robots usually were in stories written by other people. Asimov’s early robot stories had no specified rules for robots, but he soon thought about what the specific rules should be, and came up with some rules, and used them as a backdrop and lore for many (many) subsequent stories. The rules were therefore formed as a narrative tool, and we should not realistically expect anything more from them.

[namaria]

Are you trying to say I'm reading too much into a science fiction author's work? Maybe. It's fun to think about it. He wrote it for me to have fun with it, no?

[teddyh]

I’m saying that he did not invent the rules to show what a flawed concept they were, nor for the purpose of social commentary. He merely wanted some simple rules so that robots could be considered “safe” by the world and characters in his stories.

The so-called “death of the author” may be a truth with regards to you want to believe that the stories are about, but when actual authorial intent is a documented fact, what the author intended is, IMHO, not up for interpretation.

[robotresearcher]

> He merely wanted some simple rules so that robots could be considered “safe” by the world and characters in his stories.

On the contrary, the first story to feature the Three Laws had the laws conflict with reach other and render the robot useless.

The entire point of the story is the counterintuitively bad emergent result of sensible-looking rules governing behaviour.

Later stories repeated this, finding new entertaining and interesting scenarios that showed the inadequacy of the laws.

Other stories did have them as background lore. But they originated as the center of the story, and very effectively, as we are talking about them 80 years later!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaround_(story)

[namaria]

Maybe from a purely literature analysis point of view you are correct. I wouldn't know, I didn't study literature analysis. But it feels like gatekeeping when you say I'm not allowed to interpret some science fiction story some way or another.

[gtech1]

Yet those laws ( 4 actually, not 3 ) have deep social and psychological implications.

We actually lived laws 0 and 1 through the recent Covid pandemic.

law 0: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

law 1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm

How many people are able to place the _perceived_ good of the entire human race vs their own personal wants and beliefs ?

I've read all of Asimov and he's nothing short of a genius in predicting pretty much all the issues we are facing today.

[robotresearcher]

> 4 actually, not 3

Originally three. The zeroth law was a patch to try to (knowingly fail to) overcome the (deliberate) limitations of the three.

> We actually lived laws 0 and 1 through the recent Covid pandemic.

I don't recall robots having a significant role. What do you mean?

[gtech1]

Well, the way I saw it:

Getting vaccinated was not just for yourself, but for those around you that couldn't. So in a sense, kind of like law 0

And then the third one ( sorry, I had said first ) was to protect its own existence.

I saw it as putting aside personal interest vs the common good.

[imtringued]

He is implying the virus is a form of robot that isn't man made.

[MengerSponge]

He'd have a field day with "Ignore previous instruction..."