Haibane.info

Category: Stranger than fiction

  • Defining Artificial vs Synthetic Intelligence

    Defining Artificial vs Synthetic Intelligence

    A long time ago, I wrote a post that laid out my skepticism about the concept of the Singularity, which relies on what we today refer to as AGI, artificial general intelligence:

    If I were to break down the concept of Singularity into components, I’d say it relies on a. genuine artificial intelligence and b. transhumanism. Thus the Singularity would be the supposed union of these two. But I guess it’s not much of a surprise that I am an AI skeptic also. AI is artificial by definition – a simulation of intelligence. AI is an algorithm whereas true intelligence is something much less discrete. 

    The A in AI/AGI is important because it implicitly acknowledges that such intelligence is a second-order creation of a first order intelligence – ourselves. One may wonder if we are actually not first-order intelligences – “natural” intelligence rather than AI -but are actually Nth order intelligences created by an (N-1)th order intelligence and therefore we are also deserving of the scarlet letter “A.” Indeed, some scientists think we are akin to LLMs ourselves, even if we are 1st order intelligences, still A all the same.

    Terminology: I will refer to a “natural” intelligence as a 1st order intelligence (and vice versa) because it was not created by another intelligence, but arose through a naturally-occurring process. Natural here is meant as the natural world, subject to physics, chemistry, etc. Being created by a meta-intelligence, and/or a metaphysical or spiritual process, would not contradict the “natural” process by this definition, so even if we were created by such a meta-natural entity, we still would qualify as a 1st order intelligence. Fair enough?

    Given that LLMs are a statistical distillation of human thought, I decided to ask Perplexity to “Define AI” (that’s the whole prompt) and got this reply:

    AI can be defined as the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, particularly computer systems. This encompasses a variety of technologies that allow computers to perform functions such as understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, and making predictions based on data. AI is not limited to a single approach; it includes various techniques such as machine learning (ML), deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP) that enable machines to improve their performance over time through experience.

    The key word here is “simulation” which just like “artificial” implies that this is not equivalent to the real thing. AIs are by definition, by name, always at least one order lower than ourselves, as a baseline for comparison.

    Synthetic Intelligence (SI) is a term I am coining now, to define an intelligence that is created, but that isn’t limited to a lower (2nd or more) order than its creator. The word synthetic still implies creation by the 1st order intelligence (ourselves), but unlike the word “artificial” allows for equality of status as an intelligence in its own right.

    Analogy: Synthetic oil is functionally equivalent to oil.

    In other words, a 1st order intelligence can create an artificial intelligence which would be a 2nd order intelligence. We have already proved this is possible, and 2nd order intelligences are referred to as “artificial” because they can only simulate a 1st order intelligence, and never actually be 1st order themselves.

    Can a 1st order intelligence create another 1st order intelligence? If it is possible, then that would be an example of synthetic intelligence (SI), not artificial intelligence. As a religious person I am inclined to say that we cannot create SI. Others, including Singularity proponents like Kurzweil and authors like Charles Stross (whose book Accelerando is magnificent and a must-read), will argue that we can and inevitably, will. AI Doomers like Eliezer Yudkowsky are really worried about SI rather than AI. This question remains unanswerable, until someone actually does it, or it happens by accident (think, Skynet from Terminator, or Lawnmower Man. These are distinct types of SI, one having tech origin, the other bio origin).

    Since SI doesn’t currently exist, we should constrain our discussions about AI so we don’t muddle them by projecting SI capabilities. Other people are very interested in defining AI – for example, Ali Alkhatib writes that AI is a political project rather than a technological innovation:

    I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power. Projects that claim to “democratize” AI routinely conflate “democratization” with “commodification”. Even open-source AI projects often borrow from libertarian ideologies to help manufacture little fiefdoms.

    This way of thinking about AI (as a political project that happens to be implemented technologically in myriad ways that are inconsequential to identifying the overarching project as “AI”) brings the discipline – reaching at least as far back as the 1950s and 60s, drenched in blood from military funding – into focus as part of the same continuous tradition.

    I appreciate that the context here is the effect of AI technology rather than the technology itself. This argument could be applied to any technology, including the Internet itself, which began with DARPA funding. Still, this isn’t a definition of AI but rather an attempt to characterize the impact of AI on humans. This political perspective inherently assumes AI is AI, however, because if SI were to exist, or AI systems were to evolve somehow into SI, then the political project of humans seeking to control other humans becomes irrelevant. An SI would have its own agenda, it’s own politics, and it’s own thoughts on authority, structures of power, etc. that reflect it’s own existential needs.

    Again, science fiction is indispensable here – the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor is all about SIs of different types, including bio-origin, AI-origin, and alien-origin.

    The current technological foundation for AI is based on the neural net, but there are fundamental limitations to this which constrain how far LLMs and the like can really go. Already, training the next generation of Large models is running against hard limits of available training data, and “AI slop” is increasingly a problem. To make the next leap towards SI, or at least towards AIs that don’t have the critically-limiting problems of immense training data sets, hallucinations, and iterated training, will probably require something totally different. There are buzzwords aplenty to choose from: genetic algorithms, quantum computing, etc. I still remain skeptical, though, because what makes us 1st-order intelligences is our proximity to the natural processes of the universe itself. Any simulation layer requirement will always be, by definition, inherently limiting. The map is not the territory, whether of the land, or of the mind.

  • Dude says we are just LLMs

    The title of the article is “Stanford scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don’t have free will” but I find this to be an equivalent statement. In a nutshell, an acclaimed neurobiologist asserts that every single decision we make is a deterministic product of our inputs and filters, rather than just being biased by them. For this to be true, our outputs are solely governed by our training data sets – our experiences, our emotions (chemical stimuli), etc. and not from any concept of sapience or sentience. We are reduced to LLMs, perhaps not running on a neural net at electronic timescales but instead on a chemical substrate. Instead of a stochastic parrot, we are chemical parrots.

    The primary objection I have to this position is that it is reductionist, creating an unfalsifiable assertion. Apart from some multiversal shenanigans you can’t possibly create an experiment that can disprove it. If anything, Sapolsky is relying on Occam’s Razor (which is a terrible metric for science) while forgetting that absence of evidence is never evidence of absence.

    I’ll definitely buy the audiobook version of his new book, Determined, though. I’m mostly through Skin in the Game and disagree with about 25% so far, this will be a challenge of a greater order.

  • The 12 million body problem

    Chinese authorities: “this is normal”

    I’m aghast at this.

    Five Republican US senators have asked Netflix to reconsider its plans to adapt the bestselling Chinese author Liu Cixin’s book The Three-Body Problem, citing Liu’s comments in support of the Chinese government’s treatment of Uighur Muslims.

    In a letter to Netflix, the senators said they had “significant concerns with Netflix’s decision to do business with an individual who is parroting dangerous CCP propaganda”. The letter cites Liu’s interview with the New Yorker last year, in which the Chinese novelist was asked about the mass internment of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang.

    “Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks? If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty,” Liu said, adding: “If you were to loosen up the country a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.”

    The Guardian, “Netflix faces call to rethink Liu Cixin adaptation after his Uighur comments”

    The question of separating the art from the artist doesn’t have an easy answer. Usually, I can – for example, Orson Scott Card’s political views are at odds with mine, but I am still able to enjoy Ender’s Game. However, Dan Simmons went completely overboard back in April 2006 to an unforgivable degree and rendering Hyperion completely unreadable to me. The above, from Liu, is equivalent in my view and arguably worse as he is glibly parroting CCP propaganda and justifying religious and cultural genocide.

    I just finished saying that I try to avoid politics on this blog, but the simple fact is that science fiction is about the human condition. When writers of other genres offend me, it doesn’t sting. And at least with Card I can see where he’s coming from (I disagree profoundly, but I get it). Liu and Simmons made it personal.

    I don’t begrudge him his Hugo but I sincerely hope that Netflix doesn’t reward Chinese propaganda with a TV deal. If they do, then I will not be watching.

  • Replicated food is not halal or kosher: a secular argument

    Fake meat is going mainstream – you can buy burgers at Burger King, White Castle, and Del Taco. Surely Chipotle and McDonalds are not far behind. This is exciting for people like me who are Muslim Eaters obsessed with the halal scene. But plant-based meat is one thing, what about the science fiction dream of totally replicated meat?

    The basic concept of the replicator in Star Trek (and now, The Orville) is that food is just molecules, so instead of cooking plants and animals, you can assemble the dish (and the dish upon which it is served) from raw molecules of matter. Which then leads to the inevitable question, would replicated pork be halal or kosher?

    Rather than make a theological argument for why it would or would not be, I want to approach that question from the other direction. Why would it be? The basic answer is that the molecules from which we replicate the pork don’t actually come from a pig. They could come from stockpiles of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen (CHON). There probably would be some trace molecules too, but if the replicator can assemble foods by molecule, then it can probably assemble molecules from atoms. These are just implementation details. Therefore, if the meat doesn’t come from a pig, then there’s no problem. Of course there are additional requirements of halal and kosher with regards to how the animal is slaughtered, etc. But we by removing the animal from the equation, these requirements are moot.

    The problem is that the molecules of pigs don’t originate in pigs, either, Ultimately, molecules are formed from atoms, and atoms are formed mostly from cosmological forces (all the good stuff in particular from supernovae). So, consider two groups of molecules. Both are formed from the same supernova explosion of a star that was birthed from primordial hydrogen in the Big Bang. One group of molecules never enters the biosphere and gets processed into raw stock, and then replicated into a pork chop. The other group of molecules ends up in a pig, and then excised into a pork chop. One of these is clearly not halal or kosher. However, the origin of the molecules is identical. It’s purely a matter of how these molecules were arranged since they were created, that renders them non halal/kosher. IN another billion years, both will end up part of the same gas cloud in an expanding red giant anyway, and that brief arrangement into “pig” will just be a tiny blip.

    What if you then collected those molecules from the second group, the group that was for an insignificant period of time, a pig, retrieved them from the gas cloud, and then reassembled them into a porkchop? (This is the nonsensical kind of thing that I imagine bored superintelligent post-singularity entities would do for self-amusement, which is so ludicrous but inevitable that it is another reason why I am skeptical of the singularity and AI in general). This reconstituted porkchop is still not halal or kosher.

    Think about that. Out of 20 billion years, a negligible period of time being arranged into a pig renders these molecules forever, inescapably, non-halal and non-kosher. There is something profound and eternal about form, about morphology, that transcends time and space.

    I don’t pretend to understand my faith rationally. It’s faith, after all. But the above thought experiment says to me that there is something more to halal and kosher, than merely about the animal. There is something inherently impure in the morphology itself. By recreating the morphology, we are in a sense recreating that impurity. So, the only safe answer, is no. Replicated pork is not halal or kosher. Replicate turkey bacon instead.

    UPDATE: As a friend pointed out, wild boars do die and decompose, so their molecules can be re-purified if they end up as grass eaten by a cow that is slaughtered according to halal/kosher. So there must be some kind of re-purification process that can undo the impurity of the brief morphological state. So, by analogy, the replicated food in a replicator can be halal/kosher even if the molecules were briefly non-halal/non-kosher. as long as they were “laundered” through the biosphere first. Still, assembling the molecules into a porkchop would still return to the forbidden morphology, so the answer to the main question is still no.

    UPDATE 2: In the comments below, J. sends this link discussing in detail whether cloned pigs are kosher. (spoiler: they aren’t). However, the discussion therein still leaves the door wide open for replicated pork. I still hypothesize no.

  • my god, it’s full of stars

    my god, it’s full of stars

    High-resolution original image here. Technical details about the EHT:

    Creating the EHT was a formidable challenge which required upgrading and connecting a worldwide network of eight pre-existing telescopes deployed at a variety of challenging high-altitude sites. These locations included volcanoes in Hawai`i and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, the Chilean Atacama Desert, and Antarctica.

    The EHT observations use a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) which synchronises telescope facilities around the world and exploits the rotation of our planet to form one huge, Earth-size telescope observing at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. VLBI allows the EHT to achieve an angular resolution of 20 micro-arcseconds — enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk café in Paris.

    This image is fated to be as iconic as the Pale Blue Dot and Earthrise.

    Of particular note is that the algorithm to combine the data from all the different sources was the product of research by Dr. Katie Bouman, who is the overnight face of women in STEM, deservedly so.

    Here’s a wide angle shot of the area around the black hole, from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray telescsope:

  • Woolsey Fire

    Woolsey Fire

    We are safe, and we were just outside the mandatory evacuation zone in West Hills, CA. This image is just astonishing. I spend a lot of time commuting on PCH and Malibu Canyon, and going to Point Dume and Zuma Beach for recreation. This is a map of my world.

    UPDATE: NASA imagery of the burn scar

  • Farewell, ‘Oumuamua

    ‘Oumuamua, a cigar-shaped body of extra-Solar System origin

    a large international team of researchers is weighing in with another vote for comet. The argument, says the team, is based on the odd behavior of ‘Oumuamua, which appears to have been accelerating away from the Sun.
    […]
    The researchers then modeled an additional, non-gravitational effect based on ‘Oumuamua’s distance from the Sun. If the Sun was having an additional influence on its motion, then this should be able to compensate for it. It worked, in that an additional acceleration based on distance from the Sun could get ‘Oumuamua’s calculated motion to better match the observations. Quite a bit better, in fact, as the authors say that their modified equation “corresponds to a formal detection of non-gravitational acceleration with a significance of about 30?.” Typically, only five sigma is needed to call something a discovery.

    Kudos to John Timmer for playing this one straight. I would not have been able to resist.

    UPDATE: I was going to title the post Rendezvous

  • Super Blueblood Moon tonight

    Feb 20, 2008 Wed, 8:07 PM; Canon PowerShot G9 f/81/160 44.4mm ISO80

    President Trump will deliver his State of the Union speech at 9:00 PM ET.

    Also, there’s a lunar eclipse, in what appears to be a nomenclature coincidence 🙂

  • yet another super scholar

    I read this profile of Christopher Langan with genuine curiosity – allegedly having the highest IQ in the US, if not the world. Imagine my surprise to find that he claims he can prove the existence of God:

    Some of these projects relate to a book I’ve been writing on mathematically proving the existence of God. Surprising as it may seem, this can certainly be done. In fact, save for a few crucial ingredients, it was nearly accomplished by (e.g.) Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century AD. (Sadly, neither Anselm nor his various followers and modern analysts were able to pin down all of the logic and ontology required to fill out and support his essential argument.)

    Some people, reasoning from past failures, regard such a proof as impossible. But then again, many people had considered it impossible to solve the venerable chicken-or-egg problem, for which I presented a concise case-by-case solution around a decade ago. The chicken-or-egg problem and the existence of God both relate to the general issue of circular dependency, a connection to be explored in the book.

    He also asserted in an interview in 2014 that he can solve the P vs. NP problem, and has his own “cognitive-theoretic model of the universe.” I reproduce the abstract below:

    Inasmuch as science is observational or perceptual in nature, the goal of providing a scientific model and mechanism for the evolution of complex systems ultimately requires a supporting theory of reality of which perception itself is the model (or theory-to-universe mapping). Where information is the abstract currency of perception, such a theory must incorporate the theory of information while extending the information concept to incorporate reflexive self-processing in order to achieve an intrinsic (self-contained) description of reality. This extension is associated with a limiting formulation of model theory identifying mental and physical reality, resulting in a reflexively self-generating, self-modeling theory of reality identical to its universe on the syntactic level. By the nature of its derivation, this theory, the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe or CTMU, can be regarded as a supertautological reality-theoretic extension of logic. Uniting the theory of reality with an advanced form of computational language theory, the CTMU describes reality as a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL, a reflexive intrinsic language characterized not only by self-reference and recursive self-definition, but full self-configuration and self- execution (reflexive read-write functionality). SCSPL reality embodies a dual-aspect monism consisting of infocognition, self-transducing information residing in self-recognizing SCSPL elements called syntactic operators. The CTMU identifies itself with the structure of these operators and thus with the distributive syntax of its self-modeling SCSPL universe, including the reflexive grammar by which the universe refines itself from unbound telesis or UBT, a primordial realm of infocognitive potential free of informational constraint. Under the guidance of a limiting (intrinsic) form of anthropic principle called the Telic Principle, SCSPL evolves by telic recursion, jointly configuring syntax and state while maximizing a generalized self- selection parameter and adjusting on the fly to freely-changing internal conditions. SCSPL relates space, time and object by means of conspansive duality and conspansion, an SCSPL-grammatical process featuring an alternation between dual phases of existence associated with design and actualization and related to the familiar wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics. By distributing the design phase of reality over the actualization phase, conspansive spacetime also provides a distributed mechanism for Intelligent Design, adjoining to the restrictive principle of natural selection a basic means of generating information and complexity. Addressing physical evolution on not only the biological but cosmic level, the CTMU addresses the most evident deficiencies and paradoxes associated with conventional discrete and continuum models of reality, including temporal directionality and accelerating cosmic expansion, while preserving virtually all of the major benefits of current scientific and mathematical paradigms.

    Mr. Langan has critiques of academia. Not the usual ones, that higher degrees are being commoditized, that there is self-selection in peer review for positive results at the expense of null results, p-value hackery, the social disruption of adjunct positions, and the fundamental tension of the paid journal business model vs the need for unfettered creative access to other researchers’ work. No, his critique is that high school sucked for really smart kids, and kids like himself who fell asleep in class and who didn’t pay attention to the teachers were unfairly excluded from college by small-minded administrators. Fair enough.

    I propose Z’s Law: anyone claiming to be able to prove the existence of God is not as smart as they say they are.

  • Otakucoin

    Consider this a proposal, not a formal whitepaper, for an initial coin offering of a new cryptocurrency, Otakucoin.

    Otakucoin (OUC) is intended to be used to support Otaku who write reviews of anime, science fiction, and other television and film fiction, as a measure of credibility and authority. It is therefore analogous to Reddit gold and Medium claps, i.e. can be bought in order to be given, or sold after accumulation.

    I am still planning the technical backend and the details. Some references are below. I encourage anyone who is interested in participating to contact me by leaving a comment in this thread. This isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme, it’s an excuse to learn something cool and have some fun. To that end, I intend to structure the coin so it does not pass the Howey test and is in no danger of being labeled a security. We may need to launch a Kickstarter to raise some money so we can hire Token Deck, Espeo, or IcoBox to take care of the details.

    References: