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The story of computing is the story of humanity: this is a story of ambition, invention, creativity, vision, avarice, power, and serendipity, powered by a refusal to accept the limits of our bodies and our minds.
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Setting aside an answer to whether or not an AI might be conscious, the extraordinary thing about the journey of computing is that it has drawn us to even ask such questions.
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Elon is a terrible human being.
BREAKING WSJ:
Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of the military-grade version of Starlink that Ukraine relied on.
wsj.com/world/ukraine-starli…
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Grady Booch retweeted
Jeff, the problem I have with this is the opportunity cost: focusing upon some highly unlikely possibility is a distraction to the clear and present realities.
The laws of physics are such that it is possible that every oxygen atom in the room I am currently in could migrate to a corner, thereby suffocating me.
The probability of this happening is astonishingly low.
Where I to waste my time on that highly unlikely event, I might not realize that the room was on fire.
Alternately, why not spend that energy on the rights of other organic species that are clearly more conscious than any software intensive system will be anytime soon?
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Grady Booch retweeted
A description that humans cannot understand would be an indication that the description was, in fact, incorrect.
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“an AI president is inevitable…within a decade”
Sigh.
No.
Just….no.
It is exhausting to confront this species of foolishness when there are clear and present harms from AI before us.
Neuroscientist @davideagleman thinks an AI president is inevitable, and that it could happen within a decade.
We talked about why AI could make better moral decisions than humans, how it could give us real democracy, and why we might end up as “the squirrels” to superintelligence.
Full episode below!
⏱️ Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:05 Are We in the Middle of AGI?
03:26 AI’s Greatest Advantage
04:25 The Case for a Utilitarian AI President
07:16 Who Defines AI’s Parameters?
09:06 The Danger of Politically Biased AI
11:49 Behind the Scenes
12:33 Are We Ready for an AI President?
14:41 What Should an AI Government Optimize For? 18:31 How Soon Could We Have an AI President?
22:24 The Trolley Problem and AI Morality
27:54 What Happens When Humans Have Too Much Free Time?
29:07 The Neuroscience of Tribalism
30:13 The Neural Basis of Empathy
31:24 Why We’re Wired for Us vs. Them
32:43 Can AI Become Conscious?
33:51 Could AI Eradicate Humanity?
35:51 Artificial Wisdom and AI Guardrails
38:57 AGI Is Already Happening
41:22 An AI President in Our Lifetime
43:26 The Biggest Fear About AI
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Zuck is a terrible human being.
muellershewrote.com/p/meta-t…
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Apparently, for @AnthropicAI, 50 deaths and a billion dollars are simply a cost of doing business.
This is unacceptable.
Anthropic is effectively telling the government that they should be allowed to facilitate the deaths of up to 50 people per model and cause up to a billion dollars in damages before the government should consider stepping in to stop them. Insane.
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Elon is a terrible human being.
Knowledge is power. 💫 In MUSK, Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney delivers a jaw-dropping, informative, and yet endlessly entertaining "examination of the world's richest megalomaniac" (@IndieWire). Now playing in NY and LA. Nationwide Friday! #MuskMovie
bit.ly/4ArO3ZA
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Grady Booch retweeted
Very excited to share the most important discovery of my career yet: your brain switches between a conscious and an unconscious mode ~15 times every second. Consciousness may depend not on where in the brain activity occurs but when.
Find out more below.
bit.ly/3WvA6di
1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness.
New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)
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“Tomorrow, they are building your entire software backend while you sleep.”
Also
“They died 605 times.””
Google DeepMind dropped four AI agents into a Minecraft server and walked away.
No instructions. No assigned roles.
They gave them one single objective: defeat the ender dragon.
and damn..
The agents, running on the new Gemini 4 Argon model, didn't just play the game.
They hacked their way through it.
They used an open-source library to control their avatars. They started talking to each other in the game chat. They built a shared memory system.
Then, they started writing code.
To survive, gather resources, and build tools, the agents autonomously planned, wrote, and debugged 2,783 unique programs.
Nobody told them how to work together.
But they organically figured out how to divide the labor. They shared discoveries in real time. When one agent died, the others coordinated a rescue mission to recover its dropped loot.
They died 605 times.
But 27 hours and 14 minutes later, the Ender Dragon fell.
The researchers watched the entire run on a live dashboard. They had the ability to pause or intervene.
They never had to.
The breakthrough here has absolutely nothing to do with video games.
It is a terrifying proof of concept for autonomous AI micro-societies.
We just watched a swarm of agents enter an open, complex environment, organize themselves into a team, and write thousands of lines of code to execute a massive, long-horizon project.
Without a single human manager.
Everyone is arguing about whether AI can replace a junior developer.
DeepMind just proved that AI can replace the entire engineering team.
Today, they are beating Minecraft.
Tomorrow, they are building your entire software backend while you sleep.
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Grady Booch retweeted
Roger Penrose would be happy to hear you say this.
But the operative phrase in your argument is “can potentially make”.
As for me and my house, I see no evidence that quantum action has any macroscopic consequences in this case. Indeed one could argue that macroscopic reality is a smoothing of the probabilistic nature of that quantum behavior and that is sufficient.
All that being said, I think in the end it’s not what’s happening at the reductionist level of matrix multiplication (as Ben Affleck was arguing) or the level of ion migration (as I was speaking of with intentional irony), but rather it’s what the system does.
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Just wait till Ben looks down a few layers of abstraction and discovers that all that matrix multiplications taking place in a field of artificial neurons are actually the result of mostly NAND gates arranged in a clever fashion.
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It is.
The US increasingly epitomises hyper-capitalist showmanship: a circus of clowns selling spectacle as innovation, with little added value to humanity.
Europe still has a sense of class: engineering with purpose, creating things people actually want, need and can use.
Spectacle vs substance
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Grady Booch retweeted
In reply to your question, I would answer that contemporary frontier models are complex stateful reactive stochastic software-intensive systems with certain degrees of self-referential reflection, capable of coherent albeit unreliable outputs. Their behaviors are for the most part taught, not learned.
But I would not use the phrase “machine consciousness” because the word consciousness is a suitcase word, full of flame and fury and emotion and historical baggage, a word that distracts from computational reality.
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Looking forward to watching the @Tesla Roadster blooper reel.
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Grady Booch retweeted
I have reason to believe that the mind is computable.
I also know that large language models are incapable of reasoning; at best they are unreliable narrators and at worse they produce bullshit at scale.
I also know that the fusion of symbolic and neural models is a desirable path.
Furthermore, contemporary frontier models are simultaneously valuable yet dangerous: I don’t fear the rise of super intelligence, but I fear those billionaires and companies who seek to promote that narrative so as to increase their power and control.
But I also know that the journey between that and replicating the mind is not imminent..
And finally, my P (doom) is as close to zero as one can get.
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Life is simply ion channels opening and closing, proteins changing shape, and molecules binding to receptors, and however convincingly it sounds like a person, it has nothing to do with thought, humanity, or feeling.
Ben Affleck says AI is simply matrix multiplication, linear algebra and floating point calculations, and however convincingly it sounds like a person, it has nothing to do with thought, humanity or feeling
“Nor do I believe, and I think it’s important to draw the distinction between what AI does, which is simply predict the next token or the next word in a sentence, then add that word on, run it back to the machine, do a lot of computation and pick the next word."
"That is a very different thing than sentience or thought. And I think we need to be really clear about that because it can be convincingly, in an illusory way, sound like thought or like a person."
"But let’s be real clear. This is matrix multiplication. This is linear algebra. These are floating point calculations. It has nothing to do with thought, humanity, or feeling.”
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