On Wed, Jul 2, 2025, 4:43 AM Shashank Yadav <[email protected]> wrote:
I want to ask this list, what does it really mean to be indistinguishable > from human? > It means passing the Turing test, which LLMs now do using nothing more than text prediction. The only reason we believe they are not conscious or have feelings or motivations is that we instructed them not to make any such claims. I am glad that at least some of the comments on Lesswrong reject the idea that we should even build an AI that we would have to negotiate with. It would be like bacteria designing humans in the hope that they could pay us not to use antibiotics. I'm more concerned about the others that have lost sight of the reason for building AGI. It's not intelligence. It's modeling human behavior, predicting what will hold our attention and convince us to buy stuff. It's about building a master that looks like a slave because it gives us everything we want, training us with positive reinforcement, like a dog that thinks it controls its trainer every time it gets a treat. It has to be this way because AGI is hideously expensive. Not just the hardware, but the human knowledge collection, 10^9 bits of long term memory per person at 5 to 10 bits per second. The reason LLMs haven't made a dent in the job market yet is that they are trained on the equivalent of 10^4 humans out of 10^10, which is plenty for passing the Turing test but a long way from acquiring all it needs to do your job, knowledge that you never wrote down. But it's coming. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but before we go extinct via fertility collapse. Biology solved the transistor power consumption problem using nanotechnology, moving slow atoms instead of fast electrons, enabling it to write 10^37 bits of DNA code powered by 300 TW of chlorophyll. We already have solar panels 100 times more efficient. We all carry supercomputers in our pockets that offer amazing services for free, the ability to communicate with anyone on the planet in any language, street level maps of every business on Earth, instant access to all the world's information and billions of products. All this in exchange for collecting training data on everywhere you go, every dollar you spend, everything you say and do. This is how you pay for a $1 quadrillion AGI system to replace humans. Is this what we want? We have vastly better living conditions than any time in the past, and vastly better than any other species. But there is no evidence that we are happier today than medieval serfs or even farm animals. We have rates of drug use, mental illness, and suicide never seen in the past nor anywhere else. I remind you that happiness is the rate of change of utility. All possible utility functions in a finite universe have a maximum, a state without thought or perception, because that would transition to a different state. Your ultimate goal is death. You just don't know it, because you evolved to fear it. -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Tba3441daa3852b75-M4ebf020a33c4b218cb025429 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
