Humans are emotional animals, not rational animals, so it would make sense that people who grew up without power would seek out things that empower themselves. However, power corrupts, and we’re seeing a lot of that in tech these days, where the tech is being used to disempower others. That needs to change.
IMO Occam's Razor suggests that this is exactly what intelligence is.
The ability to compress information, specifically run it through a simple rule that allows you to predict some future state.
The rules are simple but finding them is hard. The ability to find those rules, compress information, and thus predict the future efficiently is the very essence of intelligence.
I don't really think that is what Occam’s Razor is about. The Razor says the simplest answer is most likely the best, but we already know that intelligence is very complex so the simplest answer to intelligence is still going to be a massively complex solution.
In some ways this answer does fit Occam's Razor by saying the simplicity is simply scale, not complex algorithms.
> Intelligence isn't about memorising information—it's about finding elegant patterns that explain complex phenomena. Scale provides the computational space needed for this search, not storage for complicated solutions.
I think the word finding is overloaded, here. Are we "discovering," "deriving," "deducing," or simple "looking up" these patterns?
If "finding" can be implemented via a multi-page tour—ie deterministic choose-your-own-adventure—of a three-ring-binder (which is, essentially, how inference operates) then we're back at Searle's Chinese Room, and no intelligence is operative at runtime.
On the other hand, if the satisfaction of "finding" necessitates the creative synthesis of novel records pertaining to—if not outright modeling—external phenomena, ie "finding" a proof, then arguably it's not happening at training time, either.
Even simpler: intelligence is the art of simplifying. LLMs can fool us if they reduce a book into one wise-looking statement, but remove the deceptive medium - our language - and tell it to reduce a vast dataset of points into one formula, and LLMs will show how much intelligence they truly have.
Unless you can provide a definition for intelligence which is internally consistent and does not exclude things are obviously intelligent or include things which are obviously not intelligent, the only thing occam's razor suggests is that the basis for solving novel problems is the ability to pattern match combined with a lot of background knowledge.
Sometimes I wonder if AGI/superintelligence/whatever will be like flight, which was not successful until we stopped trying to copy nature’s flapping wings and studied flight at a more fundamental level.
I think perhaps it would be useful to completely ignore the nice words people use and just judge everyone based on their behavior.
From Zuckerberg’s behavior, since the beginning, it’s clear what he wants is power, and if you have the kind of mental health disorder where you believe you know better than everyone and deserve power over others, then that’s not dystopian at all.
Everything he says is PR virtue signaling. Judge the man on his actions.
It isn’t that straight forward. If you wrote it and it got published, it still counts as published even if you didn’t publish it yourself. The crux of libel is that you made it permanent somehow by writing it.
That would be sensible proposition and I completely agree with that. But even mentioning that your brain is turning into a mush as you age is akin to heresy in today's gerontocracy.
Humans aren’t rational animals, they are emotional animals. They believe what they want to believe, emotionally. Body Keeps the Score kind of stuff, which focused on acute amygdala hijacking, but should have talked a lot more about continuous amygdala hijacking.
I’m sorry about your daughter I hope she gets better.
Being a contrarian is often an intellectually dishonest way to seek power. Goes all the way back to the serpent in Adam and Eve.
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