this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
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Idk if we can ever see eye to eye here.. if we were to somehow make major advances in scanning and computer hardware to the point where we could simulate everything that biologists currently consider relevant to neuron behavior and we used that to simulate a real person's entire brain and body would you say that A) it wouldn't work at all, the simulation would fail to capture anything about human behavior, B) it would partly work, the brain would do some brain like stuff but would fail to capture our full intelligence, C) it would capture human behaviors we can measure such as the ability to converse but it wouldn't be conscious, or D) something else?
Personally I'm a hard core materialist and also believe the weak version of the church turing thesis, I'm quite strongly wedded to this opinion, so the idea that being made of one thing vs another or being informational vs material says anything about the nature of a mind is quite foreign. I'm aware that this isn't shared by everyone but I do believe it's the most common perspective inside the hard sciences, though not universal, Roger Penrose is a brilliant physicist who doesn't see this way.
I understand your perspective, and I don't necessarily disagree or think that there's anything innately spiritual or unique about biological intelligence. I do also agree that you could hypothetically scan every aspect of a brain or build a system that exactly mimics the behavior of neurons and probably pretty accurately recreate human intelligence.
I really think our only disconnect is that I don't think the current LLM model is anything close to complex or developed enough to be considered that.
That's a perfectly reasonable position, the question of how complex a human brain is compared with the largest NNs is hard to answer but I think we can agree it's a big gap. I happen to think we'll get to AGI before we get to human brain complexity, parameter wise, but we'll probably also need at least a couple architectural paradigms on top of transformers to compose one. Regardless, we don't need to achieve AGI or even approach it for these things to become a lot more dangerous, and we have seen nothing but accelerating capability gains for more than a decade. I'm very strongly of the opinion that this trend will continue for at least another decade, there's are just so many promising but unexplored avenues for progress. The lowest of the low hanging fruit has been, while lacking in nutrients, so delicious that we haven't bothered to do much climbing.
Would love to see more development in this field, but it's clear that you don't need to have complex or biologically accurate systems to manipulate other humans. This fact alone means that machine learning models will never be advanced beyond that basic goal under capitalism.
They've been used for economic modeling and stock forecasting for decades now, since the 80s, and the modern implementations of these systems is nothing more than the application of those failed financial modeling systems on human social interactions. Something that wasn't possible before because until the widespread adoption of the internet, there just wasn't enough digital communication data to feed into them.
Since these systems are not capable of self development that isn't a negative feedback loop, they literally can't improve without more and more data from different human activity being fed to them.
That alone shows that they aren't a new form of intelligence, but instead a titular interface for the same type of information you used to be able to get with "dumb" indexing engines.
There's a reason that search engine companies are the primary adopters of this technology, and it's because they already have been using it for 20+ years in some form, and they have access finally to enough indexed information to make them appear intelligent.