If you want to get a good understanding of this whole thing read the following:

"Sapiens", "Home Deus" by Yuval Noah Harari

"Life 3.0" by Max Tegmark

'Human Compatible" by Stuart Russell

"Superintelligence" by Nick Bostrom

"A thousand brains" by Jeff Hawkins, Richard Dawkins

And of course on this subreddit you must at least glance at "Singularity is near" by Ray Kurzwail

There's a bunch of optimists, pessimists and everything in between mixed in here for a good balanced perspective.

All of these are insanely smart people and deserve every bit of attention to what they are saying.

You can also get a short version of all of the above by reading Tim Urban blogpost on waitbutwhy dot com called "super intelligence"

It's very close to done tho.

I don't have links so this is purely anecdotal and you can chose to believe me, or not.

During our last visit of my brother in Spain, we met his neighbor who works for a company that specializes on text-to-speech and speech recognition technology. Their biggest investor, is Spain's largest telecom company.

They are training their AI with live calls, Spanish TV-Shows, Movies etc. The telecom company is hoping to replace their entire lvl1 support and partially lvl2 support, as well as E-Mail services with AI which will be indistinguishable from a normal supporter and is much faster as well.

It has access to live network data, can monitor traffic, reset routers, check for specific APP status and much more, eg. caller says internet is not working, but there wasn't any mention of this from other callers, it will reset the router hoping it fixes the issue.

If many calls come in simultaneously, but the traffic is fine, it'll check the connectivity to Cloud Flare, Facebook, YouTube, Whats App, Instagram, Tik Tok etc.

He also mentioned, they're not the only company working on this and a lot of people will lose their jobs to AI.

I strongly believe that legislation must step in and protect the workforce for now, letting them use AI as a tool for the employee, but not to entirely replace a position. I'm all for progress, but this will again make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

I can't remember when I first thought about it. I think the first time I really conceptualized the idea of truly Advanced, self-improving AI and its implications was the first time I read The Last Question by Issac Asimov sometime between 2004 and 2006 as an early teenager.

Years ago. Like 2014-2015 or somewhere along those lines.

In 2006 I watched the movie Waking Life and saw Eamonn Healy talking about the telescopic nature of evolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJHXDfVFlZs I was excited and looked up "neohumans" (which he mentions), which led me to transhumanism and then the technological singularity. I have been hooked on the idea ever since.

I believe my first time hearing about it was 2012. My buddy and me both found out about it together. Ray kurzweil is a very convincing person. Ever since I'm been screaming it to everyone

i feel like that's dangerously close to opening the gates to interspecies relationships 😬

Long time to see it coming

When did this happen

Well said!

Everyone on this sub clearly has no idea what the distinctions are between sentience, consciousness, intelligence, and personal identity and or how to use them in discussions concerning the mind.

A squirrel is sentient… but it can’t use language.

A language model can give you appropriate outputs to inputs, but it can never be sentient.

Have you had any luck setting up a restful api and calling to it by chance?

About 2001. My dad use to talk about it all the time.

Years ago I used to go on Google and search up the latest technology advancements (just cause I thought some of the stuff was really cool.) This eventually led me to stumble across futurism/AI focused websites. Which is where I was first introduced to the concept iirc.

That VALL-E is uncanny.

> Ok, fair enough. I still think using any sort of mirror analogy breaks down rapidly though. If the “mirror” is so good at reflecting that its showing perfectly plausible scenes that respond in perfectly plausible ways to whatever is aimed into it…is it really even any sort of mirror at all any more?

Do you see above where I use the words:

>> These language models are obviously not mirrors but they actually are mirrors if you understand them.

Later on in that comment I describe them as “fantastically shaped mirrors”. I used those words because much like the surface of a mirror once trained LLM’s are “frozen” — given the same inputs they always yield the same outputs.

The static LLM weights are a multidimensional manifold that defines this the mirror shape. If when we switch away from electrons to photons to represent the static LLM weights they may indeed be represented by elementary components that act like mirrors. How else might the paths of photons be affected?

Another analogy for LLMs comes from the Chinese room thought experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room Notice however that fantastically shaped mirror surfaces can implement look up tables and the process of computation at a fundemental level involves the repeated use of look up tables — when silicon is etched to make microchips we are etching it with circuits that implement look up tables.

LLM’s weights are a set of look up tables (optimized during training to best predict human language) which when given some new input always map it to the same output. Under the hood there is nothing but vector math yet to our our eyes it looks like human langauge and human thinking. And when you can not tell A from B how can you argue they are different? That is what the Turing test is all about.

For a long time now transhumansts have speculated about uploading minds into computers. I contend that these these LLM’s are partial “mind uploads”. We are uploading “language patterns” of all the minds that generated what the models are being trained on. The harder it is to judge LLM output from what it is trained on the higher fidelity of this “upload”.

When DNA was first sequenced most of the DNA was common person to person and we learned that fraction of DNA that makes you a unique person (vs other people) is rather small. It could be that with language and thinking the fraction that makes any one of us unique is similarly rather small. The better LLM get at imitating individual people the more will will know how large / small these personality differences are.

Also other people, that's why I always say thanks to alexa

Perfect answer. Yet you have too many people trying to tell us something is not sentient when we have no understanding of what sentience is. Truly baffling

What you've said is true about ALL new technologies.

More people were killed by motorcars than by buggies; obviously the internal combustion engine was a mistake. Airplanes can crash from great heights: mankind obviously wasn't meant for altitudes in excess of the nearest climbable mountain, and ALSO: bombs. And no one was ever electrocuted until mass electrification occurred; piping lightning directly into our homes is just asking for fires.

Movies are awesome! Also, they can be used for mass propaganda. As can that dang printing press. No printing presses, no Mein Kampf, so maybe that ought to be looked into.

My point is that yes, all new technology has a potential for causing damage and for being misused. We should definitely be conscious of those things. But that doesn't mean we need to stop development. What we need to be is aware.

1. No one knows
2. No one knows

A tool becomes a friend.

The first time I heard the word “singularity” was actually in a movie called “Transcendence” starring Johnny Depp.

There was a scene where Depp gave a comical speech of what happens when computers have the brainpower of the entire human race.

It looked interesting to me as a rebellious high school student and as a result in my free time I looked up advanced technologies and came across lectures made by some well known futurists like Peter Diamandis and obviously Ray Kurzweil.

They strongly believe that it will happen by 2045 and I thought to myself in 2014 “that’s only 30 years from now”.

scholastic book fair during 5th grade

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Waitbutwhy circa 2012