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I think once we get off LLM's and find something that more closely maps to how humans think, which is still not known afaik. So either never or once the brain is figured out.

I'd agree that LLMs are a dead end to AGI, but I don't think that AI needs to mirror our own brains very closely to work. It'd be really helpful to know how our brains work if we wanted to replicate them, but it's possible that we could find a solution for AI that is entirely different from human brains while still having the ability to truly think/learn for itself.

> ... I don't think that AI needs to mirror our own brains very closely to work.

Mostly agree, with the caveat that I haven't thought this through in much depth. But the brain uses many different neurotransmitter chemicals (dopamine, serotonin, and so on) as part of its processing, it's not just binary on/off signals traveling through the "wires" made of neurons. Neural networks as an AI system are only reproducing a tiny fraction of how the brain works, and I suspect that's a big part of why even though people have been playing around with neural networks since the 1960's, they haven't had much success in replicating how the human mind works. Because those neurotransmitters are key in how we feel emotion, and even how we learn and remember things. Since neural networks lack a system to replicate how the brain feels emotion, I strongly suspect that they'll never be able to replicate even a fraction of what the human brain can do.

For example, the "simple" act of reaching up to catch a ball doesn't involve doing the math in one's head. Rather, it's strongly involved with muscle memory, which is strongly connected with neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine and others. The eye sees the image of the ball changing in direction and subtly changing in size, the brain rapidly predicts where it's going to be when it reaches you, and the muscles trigger to raise the hands into the ball's path. All this happens without any conscious thought beyond "I want to catch that ball": you're not calculating the parabolic arc, you're just moving your hands to where you already know the ball will be, because your brain trained for this since you were a small child playing catch in the yard. Any attempt to replicate this without the neurotransmitters that were deeply involved in training your brain and your muscles to work together is, I strongly suspect, doomed to failure because it has left out a vital part of the system, without which the system does not work.

Of course, there are many other things AIs are being trained for, many of which (as you said, and I agree) do not require mimicking the way the human brain works. I just want to point out that the human brain is way more complex than most people realize (it's not merely a network of neurons, there's so much more going on than that) and we just don't have the ability to replicate it with current computer tech.


This is where it’s a mistake to conflate sentience and intelligence. We don’t need to figure out sentience, just intelligence.

Is there intelligence without sentience ?

Nobody can know, but I think it is fairly clearly possible without signs of sentience that we would consider obvious and indisputable. The definition of 'intelligence' is bearing a lot of weight here, though, and some people seem to favour a definition that makes 'non-sentient intelligence' a contradiction.

As far as I know, and I'm no expert in the field, there is no known example of intelligence without sentience. Actual AI is basically algorithm and statistics simulating intelligence.

Can you spell out your definition of 'intelligence'? (I'm not looking to be ultra pedantic and pick holes in it -- just to understand where you're coming from in a bit more detail.) The way I think of it, there's not really a hard line between true intelligence and a sufficiently good simulation of intelligence.

I would say that "true" intelligence will allow someone/something to build a tool that never existed before while intelligence simulation will only allow someone/something to reproduce tools that already known. I would make a difference between someone able to use all his knowledge to find a solution to a problem using tools he knows of and someone able to discover a new tool while solving the same problem. I'm not sure the latter exists without sentience.

I honestly don't think humans fit your definition of intelligent. Or at least not that much better than LLMs.

Look at human technology history...it is all people doing minor tweaks on what other people did. Innovation isn't the result of individual humans so much as it is the result of the collective of humanity over history.

If humans were truly innovative, should we not have invented for instance at least a way of society and economics that was stable, by now? If anything surprise me about humans it is how "stuck" we are in the mold of what others humans do.

Circulate all the knowledge we have over and over, throw in some chance, some reasoning skills of the kind LLMs demonstrate every day in coding, have millions of instances most of whom never innovate anything but some do, and a feedback mechanism -- that seems like human innovation history to me, and does not seem like demonstrating anything LLMs clearly do not possess. Except of course not being plugged into history and the world the way humans are.


We have those eureka moments, whene good idea appears out of nowhere. I would say this "nowhere" is intelligence without sentience.

You were loose with a gun at age 7?!


Some kids grow up in families who hunt. It’s not super common but also isn’t unheard of.


One of my uncles was asked to stop bringing his rifle to highschool because him and one of the teachers kept talking about hunting in the parking lot and getting to class late. The principle felt they were likely to at least make it in the building on time if they weren't chatting in the parking lot about their rifles/hunts/etc.

People used to have an insane amount of freedom and things generally went better.


I was in Cub Scouts in the early 90s and got a Swiss Army knife. I thought it would be cool to show it off to the kids on the bus. It got confiscated by the principal and I was suspended for one day. I think I got off light. I can’t imagine what would happen these days.


Absolutely, I would also walk down the public roads also to get from one field to another, nobody said anything. It was quite normal in the rural Midwest. You'll probably find lots of true stories online as well about kids arriving to school and checking their rifle with the principal at the beginning of class and then getting them back at the end of the day.


Check the gun with the principal?! No, you leave it on the gun rack in the back of the pickup, and lock the truck door like normal people at my high school. :-)

(Also rural Midwest, and a long time ago).


We did that stuff too in rural Washington. The vast vast majority of people don't mess with anyone, let alone children.


Dang, seems like a completely different world than the one I live in. Honestly I would prefer it if we were able to teach our kids personal responsibility to this level, I actually believe people can be that mature by age 7 and you know whether a kid is a rule breaker or not by that point.


Adobe works


I win again, Lews Therin..


I rly like construction site one. Spotting the lil red bird became a game for us.


You know what OS doesn’t handle the notch? OSX. It happily throws the system tray icons right back there, with an obscure work around to bring them back. Software quality at Apple these days…


Nitpick: it’s called macOS since 2016.


I was a big fan of NH until 3.6, now it is too difficult so I switched to Evilhack which has been a breath of fresh air.


There have been various improvements over 3.6.0 during the development of the 3.6 branch. If you haven't you should give the not yet released 3.7 version a try. It's on hardfought.org for online play if you don't want to compile it yourself.

But you can't be claiming that 3.6 is too difficult if you're comfortable playing EvilHack. EvilHack is clearly more difficult than vanilla. :D

But I get the breath of fresh air. I was always playing Valkyries or Wizards and when I first entered the Tourist quest, I was hooked on getting more different levels and that was one of my main focus when developing UnNetHack.


Ha, well I figured if I was going to die a lot, may as well be having a fresh experience. I play primarily Wizard and my favorite part is, I don't have to carry 100 daggers, and quarterstaff seems actually useful.

Like you said, that feeling of seeing a totally unknown level is a real rush. Now I am downloading and trying UnNethack :)


None of those ideas you listed were legit. But it would take much longer to refute than it did to simply list them off


That’s cool. We obviously don’t agree philosophically and any refutation you could possibly provide would be just like mine - with respect, an opinion.


The 529 is coming from inside the house?!


Can't black holes explain Dark Energy? Supposedly there was an experiment showing Black Holes are growing faster than expected. If this is because they are tied to the expansion of the universe (univ. expands -> mass grows), and that tie goes both ways (mass grows -> universe expands), boom, dark energy. I also think that inside the black holes they have their own universes which are expanding (and that we're probably inside one too). If this expansion exerts a pressure on the event horizon which transfers out, it still lines up.


No.


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