https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates!_In_an_Adventure_with_Scientists!

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (released outside the UK as The Pirates! Band of Misfits) is a 2012 stop-motion animated swashbuckler comedy film directed by Peter Lord and written by Gideon Defoe, based on his 2004 novel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates!_in_an_Adventure_with_Communists

The Pirates! in an Adventure with Communists is the third book in The Pirates! series by Gideon Defoe to feature his hapless pirate crew. It was published in 2006 by Orion Books (ISBN 0-297-84867-4).[1]

This book follows the adventures of the Pirate Captain and his crew through Paris and London—accompanied by Karl Marx and his sidekick Friedrich Engels—as they attempt to clear the communists’ good name after it is sullied by Richard Wagner and his malevolent benefactor, Friedrich Nietzsche. The fictionalized version of Nietzsche wears a large mechanical exoskeleton, and plots to take over Europe so he can get a girlfriend.

woaw

Pirates on an Adventure with Scientists

damn, that’s a better title than the US got

maybe i’m just old man yells at cloud here, but why can’t we just call a bad idea a bad idea?

The bigger picture in which the Iranian regime has had a top level ban on developing nuclear weapons for decades, and stayed compliant with the deal years after the US unilaterally ended it?

try Dvorak

I don’t see how there is anything disingenuous about calling computer programs artificially intelligent because that same term describes sci-fi computer programs which display intelligence.

In a vacuum, sure. But in the context where a small number of companies are circulating billions of dollars between each other and have a vested interest in overstating what their product is capable of? Very disingenuous. It’s the big financial bubble of the 21st century. We can have a conversation where we ignore the cultural and historical context, but frankly its not an interesting conversation.

I don’t think the Rushmore example… works? You’re trying to make an example where Occam Razor points to something we obviously know is wrong, but you’re first assuming a lack of context. Erosion is not the simplest explanation given everything we already know. I know Occam’s Razor is a rule of thumb. It doesn’t dismiss any other origin for life. But the same time, you cannot dismiss life emerging out of physics and chemistry just because you feel it is absurd.

I mean, you can dismiss it. Follow you gut and stick to what you believe. Quite a lot of good scientists have made important discoveries doing just that! But more than a gut feeling is needed to actually convince anyone else.

I think what this conversation is dancing around is that we have a colloquial definition of “Artificial Intelligence”, inherited from science fiction and broadly (albeit with much specific variation) understood as “conscious machine”…

…and then we have a set of computer programs that are - fundamentally - no different from any other program (one Turing machine can, in principle, run all the same algorithms as any other Turing machine). Yes, we can technically describe these programs with the words “artificial” and “intelligent”, but doing so is kind of disingenuous, given the cultural association that predates any use of the term in comp sci fields.

totally different conversation, but its also a fun one:

Even if we were delusional enough to think life came from non-life and developed intelligence by random chance and natural selection

yeah I won’t discount the possibility that life has other origins. At the same time, you gotta deal with Occam’s Razor: working with what we currently know about the history of the planet, life emerging from non-life requires fewer assumptions. It also cannot be discounted as a possibility.

So if the output looks intelligent then the process is intelligent regardless of how it works

Most every other computer program made will also meet this definition. Hell, this definition is so loose, you can use it to describe evolution as an intelligent process.

What if I push it one step further back the chain? In so far as these programs are recognizably intelligent, it is only because conscious people put a lot of time and work into making them. Into setting up the systems that statistically weighed the models. The model is intelligent, but it’s not artificially so. It’s just an expression of plain old human intelligence, obfuscated through sci-fi terminology.

A large language model is giving you the statistically most likely words to your prompt, weighted by prettymuch everything written online. You would describe that as “intelligent”?

So would you describe “statistically likely” to be the same as “intelligent”?

But you assume consciousness is just computation. What if it isn’t? We don’t understand how brains work. Why should a computer be capable of reproducing a phenomenon we don’t even understand?

When enough people go hungry.

Conditions have to be pretty severe for a crowd of people to make that kind of decision.

I suspect these useful applications will get a new name, when this is said and done. Statistical Compute Models. Something like that. “AI” is a marketer’s misdirection, not an actual description.

I’ve heard the underlying maths is good for doing statistical analysis of particle physics. It won’t “find” new physics, but it will point to models that are at least mathematically sound.

Of course, researchers will still have to test those models with real world experiments. Science is mostly establishing how the universe doesn’t work.

If they’d just let the graphics card bubble pop with crypto, by now we’d be in the recovery stage and regulating digital securities.

But that would require admitting to irrationality in the financial system and putting in the work to fix it, which would be mildly embarrassing. So instead, the bourgeoisie have chosen the maximally embarrassing thing of being delusional about a crummy computer program.

And the bubble is now so big, the pop won’t be a normal boom-bust. I half suspect its gonna end the dollar as reserve currency.

Plants need direct light to grow… most need full sun

Except for all the plants that evolved and thrive in the low light beneath tree foliage. Evolution is not so picky as a pretty houseplant.

One consequence is that you can’t actually respond to any of the points I’m making, you’ve offloaded your critical thinking skills.

I just think that those of you sticking your head in the sand when it comes to AI are misguided. If it’s a disinformation campaign to slow or stop its progress, I totally understand that there are valid reasons to do so, but I don’t think they will succeed in the end.

You sound like one of those Christians who cannot conceptualize atheists. They cannot consider a lack of belief, rather atheists must believe all the same things they do, they’re just mad at god. Similarly, you cannot countenance the idea that AI isn’t all its been promised to be, so I must secretly agree with you, but be fighting against the computer god.

No, I’m organic and “man made intellect” does not exist yet. I don’t think there’s anything magical about consciousness, it’s a physical phenomenon like any other.

But I am highly skeptical of the claim that all it takes is computation. We don’t have a firm understanding of consciousness. We do have a very extensive understanding of computers. It’s incredibly wishful thinking to just assume the thing we understand and are surround by also just happens to be capable of a phenomenon we don’t understand.

I’m sure one day some clever people will make some sort of machine that reproduces the phenomenon of consciousness. But I highly doubt it’s gonna be in our lifetimes.

Some wealthy people who get off on the idea of being the smartest person in the room heard Roko’s Basilisk, and because they devalue all humanities and have never considered a philsophical question in their lives, immediately fell into a secularized re-creation of protestant belief where AI is both God and the devil. There’s no progress there. Only an overcapacity in graphics chip production, waiting for a market correction.

You’re no different from a medieval peasant who projects a kingly father figure into the heavens. The only difference is, you’re familiar with a desktop computer, so that is what you project onto the great mysteries of life.

“That’s basically what humans do”. Bullshit. A computer makes no distinction between the bits it’s flipping. An LLM will not protest if you poison the training data and have it generate gigabytes upon gigabytes of gibberish. The computer runs the algorithm you give it, regardless of the output. The meaning comes from people, and you can’t automate that away.