Similarly, I’ve been thinking about how all our experience of things that are “intelligent” overlaps with things that are “alive,” and how AI breaks that connection which makes it hard to reason about.
On the one hand, if you asked what’s the most complex intelligence humans have created, or where ChatGPT falls on intelligence spectrum between bacteria and humans, the median HN response might be somewhere between chimps and humans.
On the other hand, if you asked what’s the most complex life humans have created… maybe an attenuated virus vaccine would qualify? We’ve mapped the entire brain of a nematode but have no idea how to get an artificial version of that to actually behave with the agency, goals, motivations, etc, of a nematode.
But most discussions about ASI assume that it’s both “intelligent” and “alive”. Are we really close to creating “human-level” “living” “intelligence”, or are we really far away? How many of the discussions that make analogies of ASI and humans to humans and chimps are conflating “intelligence” and “life”? Does it even make sense to do so?
We are about to start exploring just how deep the rabbit hole goes. We took the red pill when we embraced the emergent properties of LLMs, exposing that human intelligence is actually not structural or algorithmic, but rather encoded into the data of our memetic identity and may be accessed through simple inference algorithms either in a brain or on a computer.
This is the deep implication of data == calculation identity.
On the one hand, if you asked what’s the most complex intelligence humans have created, or where ChatGPT falls on intelligence spectrum between bacteria and humans, the median HN response might be somewhere between chimps and humans.
On the other hand, if you asked what’s the most complex life humans have created… maybe an attenuated virus vaccine would qualify? We’ve mapped the entire brain of a nematode but have no idea how to get an artificial version of that to actually behave with the agency, goals, motivations, etc, of a nematode.
But most discussions about ASI assume that it’s both “intelligent” and “alive”. Are we really close to creating “human-level” “living” “intelligence”, or are we really far away? How many of the discussions that make analogies of ASI and humans to humans and chimps are conflating “intelligence” and “life”? Does it even make sense to do so?