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We've moved the goalpost for AI often enough that even being as capable as "a sufficiently dedicated human analyst" is not considered noteworthy.

It obviously is? See above. Or do you not feel the clarification is important? AI being able to solve things no human bothered to try is great, but it is very different from AI solving things humans tried to solve and failed. And the latter is what pops to mind seeing these titles.

Wait a minute. We've had AI that is as capable as a human and even more so since the 1950's.

I keep banging on that drum but the first AI system to prove mathematical theorems was Logic Theorist by Alan Newell and Herbert Simon, presented at the Dartmouth conference that named the field of AI in 1956. Wikipedia says:

Logic Theorist proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in chapter two of [Alfred North] Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica, and found a new and shorter proof for Theorem 2.85.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Theorist

The first system to outperform human experts in medical diagnosis was MYCIN, an Expert System from the early 1970's at Stanford. Wikipedia again:

An evaluation of MYCIN was conducted at the Stanford Medical School. The first phase of the evaluation consisted of 10 test cases of diverse origin, chosen by a physician who was not acquainted with MYCIN's methods or knowledge base. These cases were presented to 7 physicians and 1 senior medical student. 10 prescriptions were compiled for each of the cases, 1 recommended by MYCIN, 1 prescribed by the treating physician at the county hospital, and 8 by the aforementioned individuals. The second phase of the evaluation consisted of eight infectious disease specialists being provided the clinical summary and set of 10 prescriptions for each of the 10 cases and tasked to provide their own recommendations for each case and assess the 10 prescriptions. MYCIN received an acceptability rating of 65%, which was comparable to the 42.5% to 62.5% rating of five faculty members.[9] This study is often cited as showing the potential for disagreement about therapeutic decisions, even among experts, when there is no "gold standard" for correct treatment.[citation needed]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin#Results

And then of course there's the long history of human-dominating AI players for traditional board games starting with DeepBlue's win against GM Gary Kasparov in 1996.

Again: we've had that sort of AI for a long, long time now.

It would be great if any claim of "moving goalposts" has better be very well informed about the history of AI and its accomplishments, as well as its failures, first.


The main difference between the systems you list and the systems that we have today is closed world reasoning on very narrow formalised tasks, vs. open world common sense reasoning on open ended tasks with vast search spaces.

Common sense is ironically the hard part of AI, not the fix-point rule application.

So any exclamation of "it was just using common sense", is missing the forrest for the trees.


First I was excited, then I saw that it's based on DDS.

why the hate on DDS?

seems like a perfect fit.


DDS is the least bad of the stuff that has come out of OMG, but it's not a nice middleware still. There is no underlying algebra of that composes nicely when compared to Zenoh for example, and the "vendor independence" and compatibility is usually a joke. There's a reason ROS is moving away from it again.

There's a standard that has OMG as the acronym? OMG. I'm not even going to bother to search for that!

Object Management Group I think. Better known as the inventors of UML.

UML was phase two of OMG. It originally developed CORBA.

"The horror, the horror."

Forgive the ignorant question, what made CORBA terribile?

I only used it during university and it seemed overengineered but it mostly worked, and I vaguely recall IDL to be nice.

I'm guessing interop was actually atrocious?


Synchronisation based on spooky action at a distance of mutable objects.

CORBA had the concept of distributed objects which is a terrible idea in practice.

Also BPMN, CORBA and UPOS/JavaPOS.

It's funny that you can legitimately just add " - OMG!" in the slang acronym meaning after any of its creations' names.


They also merged the concepts of Working Group and Task Force into an Open Management Group Working Task Force, or OMG/WTF.

Do you have any references for this? It is quite a bold statement to make without any basis to validate it against.

I'm asking as I'm not a fan of DDS, so very curious the direction they are actually heading into, and I haven't found a reference for this yet.


omg is retarded

Using DDS to deliver data to X machines over multicast, with some real time (soft) QOS is a powerful solution.

For things like avionics, industrial automation, etc.

I think if the server world ever thought about the advantages of multicast, it might solve some problems there.

There are about 5 viable vendors in this space, and about 6 open source projects out there floating around.

And interoperability between vendors is very good. IMHO.


DDS is terrible.

DDS is hard. But we have agents now.

yes yes we get it, you don't like AI ...

Ah yes, climate activists are widely known for hating public transport especially trains.

I wouldn't say they are widely known for hating the electric grid but hey here we are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_arson_attack_on_the_Berli...

Climate activists are definitely known for disliking fossil fuel plants - and there's one directly next to that.

I could see an activist naïvely thinking that this would sever that one power plant from the grid, making a clear anti-fossil statement. Still a bit of an odd choice (it's gas-powered, Germany has far dirtier lignite-powered ones), but not unthinkable.


Wait... do you really think that if everyone goes vegan these animals will get killed, but if everyone eats them they won't?

You are aware that all of these livestock animals didn't exist a few months to years ago? And that we go through these animals every couple months-years?

Everyone going vegan would just mean we'd stop repleneshing them.


> would just mean we'd stop replenishing them

Keep in mind that we already have to perform widespread culling of wild animals in this category. Having eliminated most of the apex predators, we're on the hook to keep populations of wild horses/cattle/deer/etc in check.

If we cease to use domestic animals, they end up in the same boat - we're no longer paying to feed and house them, and if they are capable of breeding in the wild, they will breed unchecked. Leading us to cull them, ad infinitum


You don't get it, do you?

The "genocide" that you describe is happening constantly. None of the chicken we have today will be alive in a couple months. We kill them to eat them.

If we cease to "use" them, we just keep that "genocide" going for a year, but we just stop breeding new ones. The result is no more animals after a few months/years. And you didn't kill any more than you would have anyways.

If you have a sink that is half full because the inflowing water and the outflowing water are in quilibrium, you drain it by turning off the tap (breeding).


> we just keep that "genocide" going for a year, but we just stop breeding new ones

"Carry on for a year and then it's all good" is not one of the available choices.

Your choices are (a) wipe out the species entirely, or (b) allow them to continue breeding on their own, and commit to culling them for the rest of eternity.


None of these animals breed on their own, they are mostly artificially inseminated. You truly have no idea what you are talking about.


So because you eventually die, it means that you were never alive? The weights of an llm obviously don't have consciousness. It's the process that potentially has it.

Are you conscious on a nanosecond timescale?


> So because you eventually die, it means that you were never alive?

I said nothing of the kind. I can only assume your question in response to my comments mean you think a powered computer is alive. I'll challenge that on the basis that a computer can generally maintain its state without power just fine. Shut it down, unplug it. Wait a day, a year, a decade and plug it back in. Assuming the hardware didn't degrade to the point of failure you can turn it on again and it will be in the same state you left it in before you unplugged it. Is it alive while its unplugged? Or is it simply not alive whether its plugged in or not?


It's having condciousnedd while it acts as if it's having consciousnes.

It is powered while it is powered.

Under general anesthesisa you are still alive, but you don't have consciousness.


Cool. I've never seen a computer act as if it's having consciousness.


What do modern LLMs act like then to you?


They act like LLMs. They are unprecedented.


Self referential nonsense. You cannot have something that that is both a model of something and unprecedented.

It'a even in their name, they model language, language is the thing that humans use to communicate, therefore they model communcating humans.

Humans are the precedent.


We're done here.


The burden if proof is on you in this case.

The philosophical zombie does not satisfy occams razor because it asserts an unmeasurable property that has no effect on the outcome.

If it acts like it has consciousness, then assuming it to have consciousness is more scientifically rigorous, than assuming for it not to have consciousness, because the former requires one less variable.


Sociopaths can feel emotions, they just lack empathy. So they can consciously manipulate others.

LLMs don't have conscious processes that perform that kind of reasoning.

If anything the fact that they are blackboxes to their own behavior and are able to non-verbally empathise, is the opposite of what you describe.

Your requirment for something supernatural/quantum to decide between emulation and real thing is self referential.


> LLMs don't have conscious processes that perform that kind of reasoning.

If only we could tell either way, we'd have made a huge breakthrough in the philosophy of consciousness.


There is no hidden inner monologue. Human inner monologues produce measurable micoactivations that are the same as the ones produced in speech.

If it's not in the inner COT it isn't there.


I don't see how this adds much to either a pro or con argument.

An inner monologue isn't something all humans have[0]. It is unclear to me how well (or poorly) Chain of Thought mimics intrapersonal communication. J-space probes (and other things) suggest there are, in fact, other aspects to LLM "thought" besides a CoT scratchpad[1].

However, regardless of how those questions pan out, qualia (of emotions in this case, but the problem is in general) is its own mystery, one for which we are still, so far as I can tell, unable to make progress with.

We kinda know what emotions are for, what function they serve in our genetic fitness, but why do they feel like anything? We do not know, they just do.

[0] https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrapersonal_communication

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace


I always feel like people leave out the third case of the analogy: indexing

The article itself has decision trees for the compression explanation, which is also a lookup index.

In each case you try to recognise (re)usable structure.

Self-indexing succinct data-structures are a good example of the third side of the coin.

So it's a trinity: compression, prediction, indexing


I discovered that we got that back in a sense.

If you task an llm with writing a CLI and have it use it, then it hides the "user interface" to a sufficient degree that you can pretty much build any kind of app/functionality in a couple days and it feels "professional".

AI as UI with a somewhat universal affordance.


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