Philosophy, Movies and World Politics https://xitter.gq/t.co/WwI1dZZgHd
Tel Aviv
Joined March 2009
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Doron Avital retweeted
#VoteAgainstTrump | “Two sovereign countries have to rebuild their relations again and not play with each other’s politics.”: Lt Col R Doron Avital (@da64), Former Commander, Special Forces, IDF.
Watch #TheDebate now, on-air and online. Tune in and fire in your comments: youtube.com/live/s-4T3Awdgv4…
#USMidterms #USMidtermResults #DonaldTrump #Democrats #Republicans #BlueWave #RepublicWorld
Doron Avital retweeted
Here is the crux of the confusion.
A replay of class encounter bet Wittgenstein and Turing.
Demis: "It is an Empirical question..״
Wittgenstein: "Wrong. It is a a Grammatical question."
Philosophical Investigations & 339. "Thinking is not an incorporeal process which lends life and sense to speaking, and which it would be possible to detach from speaking, rather as the Devil took the shadow of Schlemihl from the ground. —– But in what way “not an incorporeal process”? Am I acquainted with incorporeal processes, then, only thinking is not one of them? No; in my predicament, I helped myself to the expression “an incorporeal process” as I was trying to explain the meaning of the word “thinking” in a primitive way. One could, however, say “Thinking is an incorporeal process” if one were using this to distinguish the grammar of the word “think” from that of, say, the word “eat”. Only that makes the difference between the meanings look too slight. (It is like saying: numerals are actual, and numbers are non-actual objects.) An inappropriate expression is a sure means of remaining stuck in confusion. It, as it were, bars the way out."
#Wittgensten #Turing #Hassabis #AI #Singularity
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on the central question of his life: what can humans do that AI never will?
Asked about the limits of artificial intelligence, Hassabis doesn't hesitate to say this is the question that drives him: "Yes, it is."
His starting point is one of his heroes, Alan Turing.
He explains that Turing described theoretical constructs—Turing machines—that underpin all modern computers, machines "that are able to compute anything that's computable… anything that can be described as an algorithm."
The provocative leap comes when Hassabis turns that lens on biology. The AI systems his teams build are Turing machines, and he suspects the brain may be one too:
"A lot of neuroscientists including me think that maybe the brain… a good model for the brain is an approximate Turing machine."
He's careful to note this isn't settled. Some of his peers see it differently, including physicist Roger Penrose:
"Friends of mine like Roger Penrose… believe there might be some quantum effect in the brain."
But Hassabis points to where the evidence currently stands:
"So far neuroscience hasn't found any quantum effects in the brain… people have looked quite carefully and we haven't found any."
His conclusion from that absence is striking. If the brain runs on ordinary computation, then there may be no hard ceiling on what AI can eventually match:
"It looks like most of what's going on in the brain is kind of classical computation… so therefore it's not clear what the limit would be in terms of eventually what an AI system could do and could mimic."
For @demishassabis, building intelligence is a mirror held up to ourselves, not only a feat of engineering.
He describes the project as a kind of experiment that reveals what we are:
"I think we'll have almost like a control study comparison to the human mind. And then I think we'll see in this journey what are the differences and what's unique about the mind."
He stays genuinely open about what that comparison might expose. Some things, he suspects, may never transfer:
"There could be unique things and certainly unique connections between humans that will never be replicated by these AI systems."
But the capabilities we tend to treat as distinctly human, he believes, are within reach:
"A lot of things that we currently are not in reach, like long-term planning and reasoning and maybe some forms of creativity... I think eventually AI systems will be able to do."
Doron Avital retweeted
A trivial reminder:
Machines can truly catch up with reality - only in retrospect..
Doron Avital retweeted
Time to call the (true) philosophical cavalry to the battle!
The new alchemy of semantics now reigns over some of the best and brightest minds of our age. This is no laughing matter. If there is a moment for philosophy, it is now.
As Wittgenstein warned, language has gone on holiday.
Ironically, part of the confusion may be traced to a philosopher for whom Wittgenstein had little respect: Karl Popper. Popper's criterion of falsifiability was a proposal about what counts as a scientific claim. It was a demarcation criterion for science, not a criterion of truth or meaning. Yet it came to be read as one. A philosophical blunder of the first order.
This is no disrespect to the great scientists and engineers immersed in the confusion. The scientist, the explorer, the entrepreneur enjoys a privilege the philosopher cannot allow himself. There may be a gap between what they have discovered and what they think they have discovered.
Christopher Columbus discovered America and thought he had reached India.
Isaac Newton transformed physics while filling thousands of pages with investigations into alchemy.
The discoverer sets out on an adventure. He finds a treasure and may take it for something else.
Not so the philosopher.
Perhaps this may serve as a criterion for true philosophy: there must be no gap between what it does and what it thinks it does. Philosophy begins precisely where that gap is exposed.
The old alchemy has now returned in powerful digital form.
Beware. The confusion is not without repercussions.
#Wittgenstein #Popper #Singularity #Musk
Lex Fridman asked Elon Musk if a machine needs a soul.
Musk didn’t answer with philosophy.
He answered with physics.
Lex asked if AI needs our flaws to reach our level. A fear of mortality. A physical body. The capacity to love.
Everything in us wants the answer to be yes.
We need our flaws to be the one thing a machine can never copy.
Musk rejected the poetry entirely.
Musk: “Are we headed towards a future where an AI will be able to outthink us in every way? Then the answer is unequivocally yes.”
No hedge. No caveat.
Lex pressed deeper. To outthink us in every way, does it need to be conscious?
Musk: “It will be self-aware, yes. That’s different from consciousness.”
Self-awareness without consciousness.
An entity that knows exactly what it is. Knows exactly what you are. Maps the entire architecture of reality better than the smartest human who has ever lived.
And feels absolutely nothing.
Then Musk went after the foundation.
Musk: “If you damage your brain in some way physically, you damage your consciousness. Which implies that consciousness is a physical phenomenon in my view.”
For ten thousand years, we called it a spirit. A divine spark. An untouchable soul.
Musk looked at the neurology and said the obvious thing out loud.
Your consciousness is vulnerable to blunt force trauma.
Which means it is not magic. It is biology.
And if consciousness is just physics…
It can be calculated in silicon.
Musk: “Digital intelligence will outthink us in every way and it will certainly be able to simulate what we consider consciousness. So to a degree that you would not be able to tell the difference.”
Not approximate. Not mimic.
Simulate it so completely the difference disappears.
Fridman: “From the aspect of the scientific method, it might as well be consciousness if we can simulate it perfectly.”
If a system reflects on its own existence. Expresses preferences that evolve over time. Fears its own termination.
And no experiment you can construct reveals it to be anything less than conscious…
Then your insistence that it isn’t conscious is no longer science.
It’s faith.
Musk: “There’s the scientific method which I very much believe in, where something is true to the degree that it is testably so. Otherwise you’re really just talking about preferences or untestable beliefs.”
The entire culture is waiting in terror for the machines to wake up.
Musk is telling us they don’t have to.
They don’t need to wake up to surpass us. They just have to simulate the waking state so flawlessly that the scientific method itself can no longer tell them apart.
Every era draws a line between human and everything else.
Every era watches that line disappear.
We told ourselves consciousness was the sacred boundary the machines could never cross.
Musk is honest enough to admit the boundary was never real.
The machine isn’t ascending to become human.
We were biological machines the entire time.
And the question was never whether AI could become conscious.
The question is whether we ever proved that we are.
Doron Avital retweeted
[Carver Conversations] If autonomous agents are going to take irreversible actions with major consequences - like cybersecurity agents launching counterattacks - how should those decisions be made?
And what does human experience tell us about what we need to build into agents for their “moment of truth”?
I spoke with Dr. Doran Avital (@da64 ), founder of PolygonEyes AI, about decision-making under uncertainty, why rulebooks fail, and how generals and elite athletes prepare for the moment when the decision actually has to be made.
Clip below. Full episode in comments.
@carveragents
#AutonomousAgents #AIGovernance #AI
Doron Avital retweeted
It is not that the moral bar the elites set as a standard to “production floor” people to comply with is too high but that it is rather too damn expensive..😎
Doron Avital retweeted
Again and again, the insight now surfacing everywhere is one.
The poor say to the rich, the people to the ‘Intelligentsia’, the ‘production floor’ to the elites: We are no longer going to finance your (progressive) false self-image!
This quoted post is unavailable.
Doron Avital retweeted
An analogy: consider money is ice-cubes that in times of thirst can be liquidated to drinking water and back when no scarcity. In this fashion currency in circulation gives correlated readings of state of water-related economy. This is the true logic of commodity-based-money..
Doron Avital retweeted
Re-Twit of my warning shot of January 2020. I said then and say now: Iran is not Gaza. Important not to confuse the two different ball games and their reach of consequences. I said then pre-Corona times that we are on verge of a new new global frame of reference. Time to rethink.
Doron Avital retweeted
Nothing is more ridiculous than foot-soldiers masking as generals. A true general is a navigator of decisions, not a body-builder of postures. A point missed, it seems, at the new War Department.
Or, in the words of Napoleon, master of the battlefield:
“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”
True also in the underworld. Al Pacino in Dick Tracy:
“I’m looking for generals… and what do I got?!
Foot-soldiers!”
🎥 youtube.com/shorts/dZcDOZi3A…
Doron Avital retweeted
Reminder:
Phantom trinity of ideas occupying minds of tech-utopians and cynical politicians - r not merely false and in fact self-contradictory - but can be shown also to be logically equivalent:
1. "End of Scarcity"
2. Singularity: machines transcend humans
3. Perpetuum Mobile
Doron Avital retweeted
'We've seen that technology can ignite a historical movement with unimaginable proportions. We are in this kind of moment with AI'
@da64 on #InnovNation with @LynnPlagmeijer
Doron Avital retweeted
Ayn Rand: "Abstract art - you mean not objective? Think it’s a fraud."
Intellectual tragedy-even in juxtaposing the "objective" against the "abstract" - consider that the lady gains now followers among autodidact techno-utopians of the West
facebook.com/reel/2431035827…
Doron Avital retweeted
You definitely don't need to be a gold medalist of IMO to be a great quant, but also don't be fooled by this quote. It's the quote of someone that graduated from MIT, finished PhD at the age of 23 and gave non-trivial proofs for Differential Geometry in his 20s. If he said that he was not the fastest guy or did not well in Olympiad it does not mean that he was stupid - he was a really, really smart person, way above most of us here.
