AI's Explosion

Modified: 2024-03-25 10:31 PM CDST

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AI History (Smith, G., & Funk, J. ((2024) When it comes to critical thinking, AI flunks the test. Chronicle of Higher Education.

Predictions

1956
- Dartmouth College Summer Workshop: John McCarthy: the conference would “proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”
1965
- Herbert Simon:“machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.”
1970
- Marvin Minsky: in “three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.”
2008
- Shane Legg: “human-level AI will be passed in the mid-2020s.”
2015
- Mark Zuckerberg: “one of [Facebook’s] goals for the next five to 10 years is to basically get better than human level at all of the primary human senses: vision, hearing, language, general cognition.”
2022:
- Bill Gates: ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) are “every bit as important as the PC, as the internet.”
- Jensen Huang: ChatGPT is “genuinely is one of the greatest things that has ever been done for computing.”
- Geoffrey Hinton: on ChatGPT “I think it’s comparable in scale with the Industrial Revolution or electricity — or maybe the wheel.”
2023:
- Chris Anderson: “Surely it’s not crazy to think that sometime next year, a fledgling Gemini 2.0 could attend a board meeting, read the briefing docs, look at the slides, listen to everyone’s words, and make intelligent contributions to the issues debated?”

Critical Thinking

Robert H. Ennis defines critical thinking thusly:
- “reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do.”
- He gives the following critical thinking skills:
  - Open mindedness
  - Being well-informed
  - Assessing the credibility of sources
  - Identifying conclusions, reasons, and assumptions
  - Judging arguments
  - Defending reasonable positions
  - Asking the right questions
  - Knowing how to hypothesize and experiment
  - Defining context specific terms
  - Cautiously drawing conclusions
  - Using all of the items above correctly
Smith and Funk claim that LLMs cannot perform any of the tasks above

They had three LLMs: ChatGPT (OpenAI), Copilot (Microsoft), and Gemini (Google) answer prompts for the following areas:
- Statistics
- Finance
The answers given were wordy and incorrect
The answers showed no evidence of critical thinking
They concluded:
- "we are still a long way from the goal defined by AI boosters like McCarthy, Simon, and Minsky, not to mention the breathless hype emanating from Silicon Valley. For the time being, it looks like we’re going to have to continue to do our critical thinking for ourselves, and teach our students to do the same."
Tell class how you have used a LLM such as ChatGPT

Consciousness

We all experience it, but no one knows what it is

So, how can we imagine machine consciousness

Many of the disasters of science fiction result because of bad programming.

RoboCop

ED-209 malfunctions during test, killing the subject who had dropped his weapon

SkyNet

System gained consciousness and initiated nuclear attack

HAL 9000 (video)

Open the pod bay doors, Hal

I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that.

DishBrain (video) Real Science

DishBrain is about 800,000 neurons grown in a rectangular petri dish

It learned to play Pong by itself after being given motor "cortex" and a sensory "cortex"

NO RULES WERE PROVIDED

In five minutes it was playing Pong at a better than chance level

Is this consciousness?

Is it a machine?

AI Takeover

What about AI Takeover?

Old science fiction theme

Frankenstein (1818)

He wants a wife (video, 1935)

Superintelligence

Bostrom: "any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest"

Unfriendly vs Friendly

Alignment

Make AI values and human values align

Part of AI Safety

Reward Hacking

AI system achieves programmed goal but does so in a way not intended by the programmers

Fitness functions are programmed in

Humans, animals, and AI systems may "discover" new and unforeseen methods of achieving the fitness function

Chimpanzees are difficult to toilet train

NASA wanted to train chimps to use toilets for prolonged space flight

When on the toilet, chimps would receive food pellets when feces dropped into the toilet

One chimp learned to save one pellet and then drop it down the toilet

Reward Hack: the chimp now received more pellets, not what the trainers had designed as the fitness function

A. J. Riopelle, personal communication

Do you worry about AI Takeover?

Military AI

Autonomous Weapons (video) scroll down to video

AI Weapons (video)

Most current AI weapons have some degree of human control

But, how long will that last?

Drone Pilots

US Army RQ-7

US Air Force

RPA pilot (video)

US Navy

Remote pilots get PTSD

Swarming Drones

Swarming Drones have many purposes
- Military
  - Overwhelm anti-drone defenses
  - Kamikaze drones
- Agriculture
  - Monitor crop health
- Emergency management
  - Locate people in trouble
- Entertainment
  - Light shows
- Control
  - Centralized
  - Decentralized
  - Autonomous
Geometry and AI

These are some of the newer ways AI has evolved

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