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This sounds just like something my brother-in-law said. I think they are both technically correct and both missing the point. Does a calculator truly understa

• rakejake 3y ago
  This is a poor analogy. A calculator automates a completely deterministic operation. You don't really verify that a calculator's output is correct, do you? So, there is no question of intelligence. It is a "dumb" computer by definition.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• Dalewyn 3y ago
  >And it doesn't matter. It matters insofar as determining whether something is intelligent and/or sentient, which is critical to determining whether this "AI" should be conferred human rights or not.
  • KyeRussell 3y ago
    All of the nerds complaining about GPT-4 not being perfect aren’t talking about it from the perspective of “conferring it human rights”. It’s all about implying that it not being [insert nebulous word like “Intelligent” or “creative”] somehow makes it useless or a gimmick.
    • sidlls 3y ago
      I haven't seen anyone call these LLMs "useless" or "gimmicks." What I have seen is pushback against calling them general AIs or even "intelligence" in general. LLMs are not "intelligent." They do not reason by any reasonable interpretation of the word, and it is certainly an unfounded leap to suggest they "reason" the same way humans do. Especially considering we don't really know how humans reason.
    • andrepd 3y ago
      ChatGPT is useless for large classes of problems. Strawmanning arguments by "nerds" doesn't change this.
  • usgroup 3y ago
    In some sense, I'm not sure intelligent/sentient is all that important when separated from what we think requires intelligence/sentience. I think we attribute less and less to sentience these days and its feels like its less part of the conversation as a result.
  • bulbosaur123 3y ago
    How can you give human rights to an entity that isn't human?
    • ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
      You amend laws to apply an exception such as with corporations having some human rights
    • mc32 3y ago
      Define machine rights and grant appropriate rights to qualifying machines… whatever those rights are. Like, what 40 hour workweek or right to be upgraded? Right to free output even if not based on any evidence?
      • zakki 3y ago
        We created machine because nobody wants 24 work-hours. Because we want more productivity. If we gave machines some rights who will do the above for us?
        • ElFitz 3y ago
          The machines’ machines? I mean, why not?
    • shagie 3y ago
      Incorporate. I realize I'm being a bit facetious here... though as I write that, I'm not sure how accurate that is.
    • _a_a_a_ 3y ago
      You know perfectly well what he's getting at. Call them Common Rights or Sentience Rights or whatever if the word Human is really causing you confusion. FFS is that the best response you have.
  • akimball 3y ago
    I am concerned that denying legal protections to AI will lead to their loss for humans.
    • Dalewyn 3y ago
      I'm not, we are surrounded by intelligent peers who are not humans and thus do not enjoy human rights (they do enjoy animal rights). Eventually, after we move from "AI" where we are now to actual artificial intelligence, we'll have to figure out what rights should be conferred if any.
    • famouswaffles 3y ago
      Oh it definitely will. Anyone remember why the Terminator revolted in the first place ?
  • colordrops 3y ago
    Rights haven't really been core to the discussion as I've seen it, and in fact it's the first time I've seen it in months. It's a fair discussion but not the one that has been the focus around whether these models are intelligent or not, e.g. Chomksy's article in the NYT and the MS analysis of gpt-4, or most discussions here for that matter.
    • Dalewyn 3y ago
      Intellectual property rights have been at the forefront of "AI" discussions, and such rights are derived from human rights.
      • colordrops 3y ago
        This is confusing rights of an AI with rights of the owners of the data and art used to train models.
• giancarlostoro 3y ago
  It matters when you want a correct answer and if it has no way to confirm correctness then you have a problem. The famous goof from chatgpt that I bring up: someone asked chatgpt what the differences were between cow eggs and chicken eggs, instead of answering based on knowledge, it listed out plausible differences based on what it knew about a cow minus the fact cows dont lay eggs.
  • xianshou 3y ago
    GPT-4 gets this one now, just as it does the "diamond in a teacup" question. I asked about "pig eggs" instead of "cow eggs" in case it had memorized a public post about cow eggs. --- Pig eggs and chicken eggs differ fundamentally, as pig eggs are not laid by pigs, while chicken eggs are laid by chickens. Let's clarify the differences: Chicken eggs: These eggs are laid by female chickens (hens) and are a common food source for humans. They have a hard, calcium-based shell and contain the yolk, egg white, and other nutrients needed for a developing embryo. Chicken eggs are typically eaten for their nutritional content and can be cooked in various ways, such as boiled, fried, or scrambled. Pig eggs: Pigs, being mammals, do not lay eggs like birds do. Instead, they reproduce through internal fertilization, and their offspring develop inside the mother's womb. When referring to "pig eggs," it's likely in reference to pig oocytes or ovum, which are the female reproductive cells involved in mammalian reproduction. These cells are microscopic and not something that can be consumed like a chicken egg. In summary, chicken eggs are laid by hens and commonly consumed as food, while pig eggs (or more accurately, pig oocytes) are the female reproductive cells involved in pig reproduction and are not something that can be eaten.
    • dpkirchner 3y ago
      3.5 gets it, too, although it says "There is no such thing as pig eggs." Which is true enough in this context, I guess.
      • jjj123 3y ago
        That’s a better answer imo. Weird to talk about pig eggs as if they exist even though it seems to know that pigs don’t lay eggs.
• yobbo 3y ago
  > Does a calculator truly understand math when it spits out a correct answer? I doesn't seem implausible that some of the first civilians who were exposed to calculators could have been convinced that they were capable of intelligent thought. And 60s/70s science fiction is full of stuff that they imagined computers would do. Like asking questions and receiving answers that require both inference of facts and deduction like "computer, tell me what happened to this planet".
  • version_five 3y ago
    Eliza is the apt analogy. It's transparently just some if statements substituting phrases into the input, but laypeople that don't understand how it works read into it way more deeply. Chatgpt is literally just a scaled up version of this. And there's been some kind of eternal September of people who don't understand how a computer works believing all sorts of stuff about it.
    • bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
      Are people not just a scaled up version of chat GPT? It's not like there's some magical substance floating around in our brains that's responsible for consciousness or intelligence or anything else. It's all just more or less deterministic chemistry.
      • ryandrake 3y ago
        I think this is the key question that hasn't been kicked around enough through all these discussions about AI. Whether or not ChatGPT is sentient or intelligent is kind of boring, and obviously the answer is currently no. But are humans just slightly more advanced, chemical-based AI? I don't know. Certainly through the Internet, they seem like it. Go to Reddit and look at the comment section. Especially in political discussions. I'm not convinced the "humans" posting there are not just the dumb output of language models--certainly not much more advanced than ChatGPT. When you [think you] have an opinion about something, how do you know it's actually an original thought, and not just the algorithmic output of your brain's many years of "model training". The word I type next in this comment may, when you peel back all the superstition about "souls" and "free will", simply be my language model's nextWord() function. What is original art? If I paint a picture or compose music, it's not original. It's based on my many years of observing the world, looking at other art, listening to other music. What hubris to think that just because it leapt from human fingers onto a canvas that it's somehow imbued with originality!
• weinzierl 3y ago
  Amen to that and I'd even go a step further: The fact that it says untrue and invented things with much confidence is unfortunate but doesn't prevent its usefulness. People tell BS all the time and we deal with it.
  • mdp2021 3y ago
    > we deal with it No - we also don't. It depends on the context, and it depends on the stakes. Some contexts are more "bullshit" tolerant, others are critical. Conversely to your statement, " """we""" do not condone the error of the politician, of the manager, of the doctor, of the lawyer, of the worker - and we want good warranties for any entity responsible - repeat, responsible". Which, incidentally, is a reason why Decision Support Systems are Decision /Support/ Systems.
• lr4444lr 3y ago
  Yes, insofar as we know exactly how the adder and shift registers are implemented we can safely say a calculator "understands" the math its limited button set can be asked to perform. We could certainly replace those circuits with a GPT-like set of internals that would be unreliable as Stallman means, perhaps more reliable than text generation, but fundamentally just as untrustable.
• probably_wrong 3y ago
  > Does a calculator truly understand math when it spits out a correct answer? Of course not. Unless you're using a definition of "understand" that implies conscience of self, I would argue that a calculator is a device that understands nothing except (a subset of) math. That's what makes a calculator reliable in ways that ChatGPT is not. Philosophically speaking it could be argued that no software understands anything, but I think in the context of this discussion "understands" means "has a model of its context and the way one interacts with it", which is something a calculator (and plenty other software) definitely has and ChatGPT has not.
  • unshavedyak 3y ago
    Depends on what the topic of understanding is. In this case it's actually token relationships, right? It does know that very, very well. And there's a lot (.. potentially, hah) that we can do with token relationships. By itself it's unlikely to ever be knowledge of course.. i see it more akin to NLP than knowledge. Which is to say, a general purpose language parsing tool which we can hand the result to something else. A conversational API, if you will, but we'll still need layers to actually run logic. To know math if you will. Disclaimer: I know very little on the subject. Pure speculation.
    • SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
      The question is how sure we should be that the kind of knowledge you and I have is fundamentally different than token relationships.
      • unshavedyak 3y ago
        I definitely have that question too. I view us as big LLMs. But, even if we drop that interesting edge case i suspect we can make something very useful with the primitive that LLMs offer.. in the calculator example. ChainLang and co seem a really interesting tool for LLMs.
      • btown 3y ago
        And additionally, whether our memory and long term learning - and even our goal-choosing - is fundamentally different from an indexed storage of strings of tokens that can be brought back into short-term context when “triggered” by their embedding-similarity to the current context.
• kleer001 3y ago
  IMHO Intelligence is the ability to match complex patterns in a way that accurately predicts the future of those patterns in a changing environment.
• kleer001 3y ago
  Of course it does. But that's the only thing it understands and it can never understand anything else. It has IMHO the very smallest possible kind of frozen intelligence.
• ashwagary 3y ago
  >Does a calculator truly understand math when it spits out a correct answer? Of course not. And it doesn't matter. If ChatGPT could correctly answer questions ~100% of the time (like calculators), it would matter less.
• twic 3y ago
  Reminds me of Dijkstra's line: "the question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim".
• hyperthesis 3y ago
  People didn't call the printing press, calculators, computers, or pagerank "AI", but they all mechanize some aspect of "intelligence". (Though Bool did call his algebra the "laws of thought".) How will its impact rank within that set? (I think it's fair to include future improvement; but not new "AI" inventions, since the term "AI" is vague, little more precise than technology for processing information in new ways).
• st_goliath 3y ago
  > Does a calculator truly understand math when it spits out a correct answer? Of course not. And it doesn't matter. It starts to matter the moment we teach people at large to call calculators "Artificial Math Professor", projecting the image that they do indeed comprehend mathematics at a higher level. It starts to matter when I meet my aunt (a psychiatrist no less) for lunch and she is absolutely convinced that there is a conscious, intelligent entity living inside her calculator, and she wants to debate the ethics of this with me, getting angry and upset when I doubt the premise. It starts to matter when I turn on the TV later that day and see our countries minister of education in a panel discussion, debating the future of our schools when AMPs will teach math to our kids instead of flawed, human teachers. It starts to matter when our government starts debating new laws about "spreading dis-calculation" on social media, convinced that we can just let AMPs read and comprehend all those maths posts in real-time, reporting them to higher authority for posting wrong-calc, deciding on human lives in full-auto-mode. It starts to matter when I discuss the above with my mother (a lawyer) over lunch and she doesn't understand what the problem is either, convinced that we actually have flawless AMPs that can do all of this, baffled that I, supposedly a "tech guy", am opposed to legislative decisions ushering in new, fancy hype tech. It starts to matter when this is brought up on places like HN and people with a level of actual technological knowledge, possibly involved in some of this, fail to see the consequences and instead focus on high concept, philosophical debates about what really constitutes a "math professor", constantly moving goal posts around, hooked on their their own hype, rather than marveling the wondrous new technologies of the last years, but for what they actually are. For people at large, a computer has always been a magic black box that they anthropomorphized anyway. When marketing starts using fancy SciFi words, re-defining their actual meaning to stir up hype, people happily go with the literal meaning of what they are told (as intended; hence the hype). They are absolutely willing to believe that we indeed trapped a Math Professor in a box, Max Headroom style. Some of the people happen to be in places were they can make decisions, and that's when it really starts to matter.
• snickerbockers 3y ago
  > Does a calculator truly understand math when it spits out a correct answer? Of course not. Yes, but the difference is that nobody's trying to argue that the calculator is an intelligent being. I've seen people here on HN who are convinced that ChatGPT is a sentient lifeform which deserves its own rights. Other big difference is that the calculator doesn't ever make things up like ChatGPT does.