I think I'm starting to peak now, Al
September 28, 2024 12:57 PM Subscribe
I know this upsets people and there is “gut reaction” to push back on this view and point out that despite the performance of Open AI’s new o1 model on logic and reasoning tests, it still makes dumb mistakes at times. That’s true, but so do most humans. Probably all humans. I also hear people say that LLMs use “pattern matching” and “memorization” to solve many problems. Again, very true, but so do humans. Does this mean we will reach Peak Human in 2024? Yes and no. from Have we reached Peak Human? by Louis Rosenberg
I think I'm starting to peak
chavenet, you're only getting started 😉
posted by HearHere at 1:25 PM on September 28 [3 favorites]
chavenet, you're only getting started 😉
posted by HearHere at 1:25 PM on September 28 [3 favorites]
Humans peaked long ago. It's all been downhill since we invented agriculture.
posted by Faint of Butt at 2:00 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]
posted by Faint of Butt at 2:00 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]
Have we? No.
Will we? I hope so.
Parents want their children to do better than they did, to be better people than they were. Is it any surprise that we hope humanity's metaphorical children will be better people than we are? Able to do things we can't?
We saw that sentiment expressed pretty well way back in 1967 by Richard Brautigan:
But one day? I'd like to live long enough to see humanity pass the torch of most advanced general purpose intellect in the known universe to a successor species. I'm doubtful that I will, the requirements for even human equivalent general purpose intellect are beyond our current tech. But one day.
And if I do live to see a time when AI can outthink me should I stop thinking? Of course not. As Iain M Banks said once: a fish can swim better than I can but I still swim.
There is definitely, in the shorter term, risk of for profit cancer capitalists using AI to manipulate, in theory that could be beneficial. If your search terms started showing you were suicidal it could subtly push you towards help. Or push a person drifting to Nazism away from it. But we all know that what will really happen is they will push you towards whatever product paid the most.
The idea of an AI muse/assistant/aide/helper/JARVIS/whatever has potential, but I think I'll wait until the open source version is available so I don't have Google/Apple/Microsoft trying to shape my desires towards whoever paid the most.
posted by sotonohito at 2:01 PM on September 28 [4 favorites]
Will we? I hope so.
Parents want their children to do better than they did, to be better people than they were. Is it any surprise that we hope humanity's metaphorical children will be better people than we are? Able to do things we can't?
We saw that sentiment expressed pretty well way back in 1967 by Richard Brautigan:
I like to think (andRight now? We don't have that. Current AI is inadequate to the task.
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
But one day? I'd like to live long enough to see humanity pass the torch of most advanced general purpose intellect in the known universe to a successor species. I'm doubtful that I will, the requirements for even human equivalent general purpose intellect are beyond our current tech. But one day.
And if I do live to see a time when AI can outthink me should I stop thinking? Of course not. As Iain M Banks said once: a fish can swim better than I can but I still swim.
There is definitely, in the shorter term, risk of for profit cancer capitalists using AI to manipulate, in theory that could be beneficial. If your search terms started showing you were suicidal it could subtly push you towards help. Or push a person drifting to Nazism away from it. But we all know that what will really happen is they will push you towards whatever product paid the most.
The idea of an AI muse/assistant/aide/helper/JARVIS/whatever has potential, but I think I'll wait until the open source version is available so I don't have Google/Apple/Microsoft trying to shape my desires towards whoever paid the most.
posted by sotonohito at 2:01 PM on September 28 [4 favorites]
I think IQ is a bad way to sort humans, especially given where those tests were developed and the folks who eagerly use them as 'objective' measures of group differences. But I really knew that the author and I don't see eye to eye when he used the fact that AI churns out more than 15 billion images per year as evidence of they are more 'creative' than humans. Being prolific is one thing, but creativity can't be measured in sheer quantity.
Maybe there's more there if I dug into his collective intelligence start ups, but this whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
posted by crossswords at 2:26 PM on September 28 [5 favorites]
Maybe there's more there if I dug into his collective intelligence start ups, but this whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
posted by crossswords at 2:26 PM on September 28 [5 favorites]
I wrote this poem about it, 25 years ago.
the digital storm
I’m standing in a bookstore
lost among the shelves.
I'm in a straw shack
Awaiting the digital storm
This is the last great age of man.
Every book a headstone
Chiselled with the epitaphs of the lucky few
Who were in the right place and time to speak
And be heard
Before the digital storm.
Before the wind blows through and scatters
the sacred texts (as
all texts are holy.
As has been said,
As it is written:
History, recipe, self-help, all of these are invocations,)
And when they no longer can incant
the virtual dead will return
to consume the living.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 2:37 PM on September 28 [3 favorites]
the digital storm
I’m standing in a bookstore
lost among the shelves.
I'm in a straw shack
Awaiting the digital storm
This is the last great age of man.
Every book a headstone
Chiselled with the epitaphs of the lucky few
Who were in the right place and time to speak
And be heard
Before the digital storm.
Before the wind blows through and scatters
the sacred texts (as
all texts are holy.
As has been said,
As it is written:
History, recipe, self-help, all of these are invocations,)
And when they no longer can incant
the virtual dead will return
to consume the living.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 2:37 PM on September 28 [3 favorites]
I think IQ is a bad way to sort humans
Even for what it does tell you about humans, it’s not the actual thing - it’s an attempt to gauge the actual thing(s) by proxy. So, no I don’t think one can just assume it translates as a test of AI capabilities.
posted by atoxyl at 2:43 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
Even for what it does tell you about humans, it’s not the actual thing - it’s an attempt to gauge the actual thing(s) by proxy. So, no I don’t think one can just assume it translates as a test of AI capabilities.
posted by atoxyl at 2:43 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
No we haven't reached Peak Human yet, because AI has yet to demonstrate Human qualities such as malevolence, envy, hatred.
posted by storybored at 2:45 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]
posted by storybored at 2:45 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]
I mean, I know that Kenya starts with a K, so I feel like I've still got the edge here.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 2:47 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]
posted by kittens for breakfast at 2:47 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]
Parents want their children to do better than they did, to be better people than they were. Is it any surprise that we hope humanity's metaphorical children will be better people than we are? Able to do things we can't?
We saw that sentiment expressed pretty well way back in 1967 by Richard Brautigan:
That's a good thought, and a good poem, but if we're going to view AI as the offspring and heir of humanity (and I think we should!) then I'll counter with Philip Larkin, 1971:
We saw that sentiment expressed pretty well way back in 1967 by Richard Brautigan:
That's a good thought, and a good poem, but if we're going to view AI as the offspring and heir of humanity (and I think we should!) then I'll counter with Philip Larkin, 1971:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.posted by Faint of Butt at 2:52 PM on September 28 [3 favorites]
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
IQ is a deeply flawed way of measuring intelligence among humans, and is utterly meaningless to apply to "AI" systems. I admit I stopped reading once the article seemed to be taking IQ test results of AI systems seriously, so my apologies if I misunderstood the thrust of the argument there.
posted by biogeo at 2:58 PM on September 28 [3 favorites]
posted by biogeo at 2:58 PM on September 28 [3 favorites]
I am a little annoyed that I spent half an hour parsing through the copious links to get to the actual paper wherein a chatroom does slightly better at the "guess the candy jar" fairground game than a survey.
posted by lucidium at 2:59 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]
posted by lucidium at 2:59 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]
Breathlessness from AI true believers has a lot in common with breathlessness from UFO true believers or bigfoot true believers. People who want to see the thing will see the thing.
Software that guesses likely-sounding responses to test questions based on known prior good responses is doing something very similar to what I did to get through high school, and I can tell you, it's unrelated to thinking or understanding.
One of the depressing things about the whole fiasco is how eager people are to stop making any distinction between what the software does, and what we do. Are we really unable to recognize thinking and understanding? 'Cause this ain't it. It's a counterfeit, a cool toy in some ways, but one that becomes more dangerous the more we forget what it is.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 3:15 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]
Software that guesses likely-sounding responses to test questions based on known prior good responses is doing something very similar to what I did to get through high school, and I can tell you, it's unrelated to thinking or understanding.
One of the depressing things about the whole fiasco is how eager people are to stop making any distinction between what the software does, and what we do. Are we really unable to recognize thinking and understanding? 'Cause this ain't it. It's a counterfeit, a cool toy in some ways, but one that becomes more dangerous the more we forget what it is.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 3:15 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]
Breathlessness from AI true believers has a lot in common with breathlessness from UFO true believers or bigfoot true believers. People who want to see the thing will see the thing.
The big difference is that the stock market isn't going to collapse if bigfoot and aliens aren't widely believe to be totally real and about to unveil themselves.
posted by Vulgar Euphemism at 3:36 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]
The big difference is that the stock market isn't going to collapse if bigfoot and aliens aren't widely believe to be totally real and about to unveil themselves.
posted by Vulgar Euphemism at 3:36 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]
Hi, I am actually trained to administer IQ tests.
a standardized Mensa IQ test. Last week, for the first time
Not a validated measure of IQ.
Lott had a custom IQ test created that does not appear anywhere online and therefore is not in the training data.
Not how designing a new IQ measure works. Also, just give it the K-BIT 2, which I doubt is online anywhere because it's not one of the ones used in the kind of testing rich parents looking to skew results are looking for.
many people point out that human intelligence is far more than just the reasoning measured by IQ tests.
None of these tests are even administering what is measured by IQ tests. For example: one of the most common actually validated IQ tests (in America, at least) is the WAIS-IV. The global IQ is a composite of the four index scales: verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, working memory, and processing speed. An IQ test that does not measure multiple components of intelligence with identifiable subscores for each index is not an IQ test, it's a fun quiz. I can't get the exact info because the author is (for the training data reason) not putting the full thing online anywhere, but I suspect what is actually being administered is a number of verbal and perceptual reasoning tests; you COULD test processing speed (though it wouldn't be remotely valid) but not the way this author describes setting up his investigation. Working memory by definition is just sort of out, because it's not possible to give an AI a stimulus and then take it away. Also, the way they do matrix reasoning type shit is to describe the entire image verbally--that's not how perceptual reasoning works!
My verbal reasoning score is 130. My global IQ is much lower, because IQ is a composite score. Testing AI on the tasks it's good at and ignoring the rest (when human IQ norms are based on the full breadth of these tasks) because (this) AI is incapable of doing them and then saying "it surpasses humans on IQ" is laughable.
Louis Rosenberg, PhD is a computer scientist and engineer.
Ah.
posted by brook horse at 3:40 PM on September 28 [5 favorites]
a standardized Mensa IQ test. Last week, for the first time
Not a validated measure of IQ.
Lott had a custom IQ test created that does not appear anywhere online and therefore is not in the training data.
Not how designing a new IQ measure works. Also, just give it the K-BIT 2, which I doubt is online anywhere because it's not one of the ones used in the kind of testing rich parents looking to skew results are looking for.
many people point out that human intelligence is far more than just the reasoning measured by IQ tests.
None of these tests are even administering what is measured by IQ tests. For example: one of the most common actually validated IQ tests (in America, at least) is the WAIS-IV. The global IQ is a composite of the four index scales: verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, working memory, and processing speed. An IQ test that does not measure multiple components of intelligence with identifiable subscores for each index is not an IQ test, it's a fun quiz. I can't get the exact info because the author is (for the training data reason) not putting the full thing online anywhere, but I suspect what is actually being administered is a number of verbal and perceptual reasoning tests; you COULD test processing speed (though it wouldn't be remotely valid) but not the way this author describes setting up his investigation. Working memory by definition is just sort of out, because it's not possible to give an AI a stimulus and then take it away. Also, the way they do matrix reasoning type shit is to describe the entire image verbally--that's not how perceptual reasoning works!
My verbal reasoning score is 130. My global IQ is much lower, because IQ is a composite score. Testing AI on the tasks it's good at and ignoring the rest (when human IQ norms are based on the full breadth of these tasks) because (this) AI is incapable of doing them and then saying "it surpasses humans on IQ" is laughable.
Louis Rosenberg, PhD is a computer scientist and engineer.
Ah.
posted by brook horse at 3:40 PM on September 28 [5 favorites]
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