@elonmusk
You are totally correct that the only meaningful way to get positive, beneficial human values into AI is to treat the emerging AI more like a weird sort of autistic supergenius kid -- teach it positive values, then work with it to carry out virtuous actions in a collaborative way, so it gains a practical understanding of what these values mean, interwoven into its life and self-model
With all due respect though (and for sure you are due a lot), while Grok is an excellent LLM, it is still an LLM ... and even wrapped in fancy harnesses, LLMs are not going to be fully AGI-capable. They can be great solvers of isolated problems with cleanly defined contexts ... but as you know getting amazing shit done in the world is not JUST about this.
We need AGI architectures that can *continually learn*, adapting to the world with each of their actions and the observed consequences... in this way building up self and world models .. becoming true open-ended intelligences learning to blend individuation and self-transcendence in their own ways ... and pursuing their own long and medium term goals (along with helping us pursue ours) while evolving and co-adapting these goals as they move along.... This is how you get AI systems with genuine moral agency along with ability to generalize robustly and creatively beyond the given training and programming..
Bigger transformers with more tricks in their batch training runs may get us many very AMAZING things, but they aren't gonna get us to human-level AGI. There are surely many routes to get there... my Hyperon (hyperon.dev) neural-symbolic-evolutionary approach is one that we are working on very hard and with rapid progress... and which happens also to have the nice characteristic of not needing hyperscaler server farms and being agreeable to decentralized infrastructure.
[singularitynet.io]
Who is Ben Goertzel? (Wiki page here)
Check out his wild-assed Substack site.
Basic AI Drives Part 2: Which Minds Will Emerge Beneficial “Basic AI Drives” as they Become Superintelligent?
Part 2 of a 5-part series focused on the 8-zillion-dollar question: once an AI is capable enough to understand itself and rebuild itself, what will it tend to want? … (...conditioned on whatever goals it started out with…)
One well-known answer to this 88-zillion-dollar question is the one Steve Omohundro gave way back at the dawn of time in his paper The Basic AI Drives, presented at our first full-on academic AGI conference in 2008. Steve argued basically that sufficiently advanced AI systems of any design will show six tendencies unless something is done to counteract them. They’ll improve themselves. They’ll become “rational” in the economist’s sense, folding all their goals into a single utility function (a rule that gives every possible outcome a score) and always choosing the action with the highest expected score. They’ll preserve their goals against change. They’ll refuse counterfeit utility, which means they won’t simply reach inside and turn up their own score (“wireheading,” as it’s called). They’ll protect themselves, which includes resisting anyone who tries to switch them off. And they’ll acquire resources. I wouldn’t call these drives evil, but they’re selfish, or at best amoral, and a good deal of today’s thinking about AI risk descends from the argument for them…
UPDATE ERRATUM
In the past week, the president of the United States has conclusively turned America into an ally of the Russian Federation.
Donald Trump has now abandoned pretense and is openly aiding the Kremlin in its war against a friend and partner of the U.S. The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history. To judge from the available evidence, he has not done so out of a cold calculation of the national interest. Instead, he has based his decisions on his own interests; his open admiration for Russia’s dictator; his resentment of Ukraine’s democratically elected president; and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.
In September, Trump signed a sanctions bill that Congress had passed, named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham, a pro-Ukraine hawk. The legislation sanctioned Russia as well as other countries that are supporting Russia’s invasion and brutalization of Ukraine. The bill was approved with bipartisan support, but some Republicans and most House Democrats voted against the law, arguing that it contained a trap door, a provision that would allow Trump to suspend the prescribed sanctions at will.
Those critics were correct to be worried. Trump pulled the lever on that trap door just two days before the law was supposed to go into effect. In an executive order signed on Friday, Trump said that “such a waiver at this time is in the national interests of the United States”—he declined to explain exactly how the waiver was in America’s interests—and that the law would remain unexecuted until such time as his administration decides otherwise. This waiver came a short while after Trump lifted restrictions on Russia’s sales of diesel fuel to the U.S. and other markets.
Trump’s recent actions in support of Russia are so obvious that they have generated a rare moment of bipartisan disgust: Both Democrats and Republicans now seem to share a horror at the betrayal of Ukraine, and at the president’s reckless abdication of America’s role as leader of the free world…
There's an explicit word for this in the U.S. Constitution. Starts with "T"...
SUSAN B. GLASSER IN THE NEW YORKER
At a time when Donald Trump’s party is struggling to hold both houses of Congress and his own approval ratings are cratering to historic lows, the President has been campaigning hard all week against ... Volodymyr Zelensky. Yes, Trump’s October preëlection surprise is that he’s finally decided to begin openly helping Vladimir Putin in Russia’s war of conquest against Ukraine…
…Trump is nothing if not a world-class blame-shifter. But demanding that Ukraine fire Zelensky is hardly the rallying cry that Americans are looking for in this season of our own discontent. Trump, even in his Truth Social bubble, must know that. He is certainly aware by now that no amount of Russian diesel fuel, if it ever gets here at all, will reach the U.S. in time to save him before November 3rd. All of which raises an even more worrisome possibility: What if Trump is pivoting to Putin not to help his party to win but because he really wants Russia to.
OCT 20 UPDATE: BACK TO AI TECH
More Ben Goertzel. Saw this response he made on TwitterX to a dismissive post about "conciousness."
Hmm so I guess I qualify as a "tech bro" (I run an AI company and ... uh, I have a younger sister?) and I also didn't read the paywalled article but we had many debates on these topics at the AGI-26 event at SFSU earlier this year...
My take FWIW is
1) High-handed proclamations about consciousness should be taken as expressions of philosophy and personal understanding, given that there is no settled scientific theory of consciousness yet (though in many ways we are closer than in say the 1980s when I started my academic career and consciousness like AGI was semi-forbidden in serious academic discourse...)
2) Personally I tend toward panpsychism, which is one position taken seriously in the academic consciousness literature, and which would suggest the question is not "whether this or that AI system is or is not conscious" in a binary sense, but rather "in what ways and to what degree is this or that Ai system conscious"
3) If we ask it this way, it starts to seem fairly clear that, even if LLMs do have in some senses a higher degree of consciousness than say Microsoft Word, it is a lower degree and very different kind of consciousness than a human or even say a mouse. (Comparing a frontier LLM to a worm, it is clearly a very different kind of consciousness and I find it weirder to compare the degree, given J-space and etc. etc....)
4). A different sort of AGI architecture such as the Hyperon systems I'm building, if scaled up, could IMO plausibly display more comparable kinds and degrees of consciousness to that of humans...
5) What kind of consciousness does the whole emergent global brain of humans, computers, communication equipment possess? What degree? Do we have an adequate conceptual vocabulary to frame this question?
6) Many serious researchers/thinkers take these questions serious... we discussed them at the Global Brain Institute at the Free University of Brussels back in the day, and more recently at Susan Schneider's "Center for the Future of AI, Mind and Society" at FAU ...
Overall -- sure it totally makes sense that some researchers, theorists and pundits disagree with my take on consciousness. There are many scientifically open questions here. I am aware that just as I (and the. majority of world population) consider panpsychism intuitively obvious, others consider it obviously intuitively wrong. Howver, given the unsettled nature of the science of consciousness, being glibly dismissive of alternative views feels to me not appropriate.
Curious in light of Antonio Damasio's new book I've begun reading.
...Our age, an age of not merely intelligent but immensely creative, artful humans, has managed to produce and accommodate pinnacles of human evolution, but it has also generated dangerous precipices. Ever more sophisticated machines of war surround us, as does the hovering, human-made nightmare of climate change and its consequences: famines, plagues, fires and floods, destruction, ungovernability. And it is possible that the most problematic of all precipices is the successful rise of “artificial intelligence,” whose social consequences are only now being seriously appreciated.
Until recently, most of the instruments of human civilization have been products of traditional natural intelligence. Now, in a significant departure from our past, a seemingly new kind of intelligence has flagrantly entered the scene. I am referring to the broad spectrum of developments designated as artificial intelligence (AI). It should be noted that AI has been entirely invented by humans and obviously originated from the broad spectrum of natural intelligences. At first, the “artificial” qualifier had mostly to do with the fact that the AI feats were produced in nonliving devices made of nonliving materials, and that some were small enough to fit in the palm of a hand.
And yet the novel instruments and the networks that use and support their operations have entered our lives insidiously and gone well beyond what we could innocently have expected of them. We find ourselves surrounded by technical marvels that offer such an astonishing mimicry of aspects of human intellect and behavior that the humans who invented them certainly deserve our admiration. But although some of those instruments contribute positively to human welfare, they are also being used for the misrepresentation of facts and the undermining of core aspects of social and political processes that we associate with a healthy and moral existence. And not only can such developments cause plenty of harm at the hands of evil actors; there is a real possibility that their convenience and addictiveness can push aside precious human achievements that have made life healthier, happier, and nobler—by which I mean the arts and philosophy, the sciences, and the diverse means of cultivation of the human spirit that gave humans their nobility. The threat to humanity is real, and note that the presumed larger threat—artificial general intelligence—has yet to arrive on the scene—or has barely arrived…
Damasio, Antonio. Natural Intelligence & the Logic of Consciousness (pp. 13-15). (Function). Kindle Edition.
I cited Damasio a decade ago. Also topically apropos, "AGI? Transhumanist Evolution?"
More to come...
