Humans have been rationalizing war crimes, torture, reducing / displacing population for all recorded history. Trump is rationalizing his war on the ME with one mantra he repeats hundred times a day "Iran can not have a nuclear weapon" and with that he rationalizes every terrible thing he's done. Who says AI won't do the same, with even less emotion. Who says AI would not have nuked Iran already when given the instruction "Iran can not have a nuclear weapon".

Rationality is the quality of basing beliefs and decisions on reason, logic, and empirical evidence rather than emotion or intuition.


That can have positive effects, excluding racism from decisions, yet the evidence is all around us, banker wars for resources, it's the rational decision to keep a stranglehold over the world. It's rational decisions that lead to wars, despite the media and politicians using people's emotions to go along with it.

We don't need more acceleration, too much change too fast is far more dangerous and destructive. Btw Europe still has a car problem, congested, pollution, urban sprawl, nearly 20K traffic deaths yearly.

"it is our use of the technology, the societal parameters around it that decide the outcome."

Indeed, who is controlling AI is who determines where society will go. It's the same people that are orchestrating / funding and going along with resource wars / worship unbridled capitalism and don't give a crap about people. 

AI is a tool and I don't trust those wielding it at all. 

As example, would the world have been better off with nuclear technology? Sure it accelerated growth a bit with nuclear power plants, but those in power used it to take the world hostage and still do. The 2 nukes on Japan were not necessary at all yet rationalized away as a future deterrent. That same rationalization has now persuaded 'the deranged occupant of the white house' to seal the fate of millions of people. (Hunger/starvation will increase killing millions as the outcome of this folly)

Yes we need to fix our world, tech billionaires with their data centers are not going to do it. But they can accelerate the fall of US empire and civilization in general. International law has already been dismantled out of self-dense rational.

"Rationalizing" already implies it is not rational. You use that word multiple times. The definition you give is correct: "Rationality is the quality of basing beliefs and decisions on reason, logic, and empirical evidence rather than emotion or intuition." People claiming their decision being rational doesn't make it so and excluding factors that are known is indeed not rational. So yes, people lie a lot to define their decisions as rational, but I cannot see war being a rational decision, if you take everything into account. People use their emotions (fear, superiority) or personal gains to decide pro war, and then construct something to claim their decision is rational. It is not. In science starting from the result is not something you do. Rationalization is not the same as being rational. Because you already start with the conclusion and then cherry-pick your evidence to support it. So you are not arguing against rationality at all, just a facade over emotionally based decision.

Finding patterns and drawing conclusions in numerical data isn't forming an original idea, it's data in, data out. There's no "reasoning" involved, the model isn't really thinking.

But it wasn't in any data since no mathematicians had been able to come to that conclusion so not only did it produce something original for the field of mathematics, it's so advanced that only full on PHD level experts in math would be able to produce something that high quality. I understand scepticism here since it sounds wild but there is actually reasoning involved.

They don't just predict what the next thing is supposed to be, nowadays they have internal thought processes that they use while examining data to come to their own conclusions. Here's a link that shows the thought process of the model as it tackled the problem so you can see for yourself. Basically if it was just predicting what comes next and wasn't doing any thinking it wouldn't have been able to successfully do what it did since it's something original no one had ever done before in math.

Reading into this case, apparently human collaboration was needed for this result; the AI essentially brute forces possible solutions, in this case reaching a new one not through spontaneous or creative thought, but simply by persevering down a path the mathematician who coined the problem didn't think was worth the time and effort to explore.

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/checking-the-math-behind-openai-and

This kind of application has its uses, but it's not really the same thing as original thought, it's more akin to how water in a maze will find the way through without needing to "think".

For Gary Marcus something to keep in mind is that he hasn't exactly had the best track record on this topic in the past couple years. For example a couple years ago he starting writing an essay about how the AI bubble will collapse in 2025 but then was basically like scratch that it's happening later this year (2024). There's also that back then he had doubts that generative AI would ever be able to work well and just a couple years later it's already doing big things. Sceptic voices like his are valuable but those sort of voices have not been accurate on this subject lately.

For the thinking part I don't wanna get into a semantic argument over what exactly thinking is so I'll rephrase and say that they don't just predict what the next thing is supposed to be and remix and regurgitate data. State of the art models today are more complex than that and have gotten quite powerful so are capable of doing big things like advancing the field of mathematics now.

A reason I brought it up is you said earlier in the thread that AI capabilities are overstated and it can be useful in a few specific cases which comes across as a major underestimate of the power and applications of recent top end models since the applications and general utility is already vast. While just how exactly huge of a deal AI will become long term is up in the air it already being a big deal now is firmly established at this point with its current capabilities and rate of progress. Basically in the past half year or so there's been so much advancement that the technology can't be reasonably downplayed any more.

I'm still of the view it is overhyped. 

A computer solving a maths problem isn't revolutionary; computers have been doing this since the 1950s.

According to AI companies we were supposed to have sentient superintelligence by now, yet not only has this failed to materialize, but so many of AI's applications are still riddled with problems and/or actively make things worse than they were before.

AI companies continue to hemorrhage billions, drive up the price of hardware and services, waste colossal amounts of resources, and flood the internet with garbage, while the technology itself constantly gets basic things wrong and is fundamentally unreliable.

Massively speeds up processing and is a massive advantage.  If everyone sidelines except China, might as well hand everything over now, we live in a global economy.

As for bleeding money..  so did Apple and Amazon when they were emerging.  

Computers in the 1950's were not doing something as advanced as disproving something mathematicians thought was the case for close to a century. Thinking it's overhyped is fine but I do highly suggest looking up what mathematicians are saying on it if you haven't yet. There is variance in opinion with some thinking it's a bigger or smaller deal than others but it being significant has broad agreement with some worried that their degree will be mostly worthless in a few years due to AI completely taking over the field.

What AI companies said we'd have ASI by 2026? It's still flawed but top end models and in particular more powerful internal models like this OpenAI one are reliable enough now to be a big deal and do major things. Another big thing is in the Ukraine war drones are beginning to have autonomous capabilities impacting the war. More than anything a country fighting for its continued existence trusting the technology and benefitting from it proves just how big of a deal this stuff has already become I'd say.