Then explain why you disagree instead of coming at them with ad-hominem.

“ai could do x one day” is speculation at best

AI can do, and has done X already. That’s my point.

So, guilt by association. By that same logic, every Lemmy user must be a Marxist-Leninist.

Lemmy is a perfect example of the often unspoken side of propaganda: when you’re surrounded by people who all seem to share the same opinion, you’re far less likely to speak up if you disagree. In extreme cases, this leads to situations where the majority actually disagrees but stays silent, falsely assuming they’re in the minority. That’s how a vocal minority ends up controlling the silent majority - and it’s exactly why authoritarian governments try to silence the media. This is why freedom of speech and a free press are so important, and why silencing dissenting voices, even with good intentions, ends up mimicking the tactics of authoritarian regimes.

CRISPR is the tool that lets us precisely edit genes in DNA, which contain the instructions for making proteins. AlphaFold is the AI tool that helped us understand what those edits actually do. It’s the 3D shape of the protein that determines its function - without understanding protein folding, gene editing would be like changing code in a language you don’t fully understand and just hoping it works.

DeepMind’s AlphaFold solved the decades-old protein folding problem, and its results are already being used in drug and vaccine development.

I make three claims and your response only fits one of them.

It says AI in the title.

No it doesn’t.

That’s all information they need.

No it doesn’t.

Most people on social media don’t think - they react.

No it doesn’t.

AI-powered

Yes it does.

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It says AI in the title. That’s all information they need. Most people on social media don’t think - they react.

Exactly. I buy highly diversified index funds for a reason.

I don’t disagree but what’s also true is that some products are already as good as they can get and no longer need innovation. I know this is a bold claim but I’d argue that my dumb fridge without screen or internet connection keeps my food just as cool as the latest smart fridge.

Good. If your fridge is connected to the internet you deserve to be served ads.

Perhaps midwit meme format would work here as well with Ubuntu on both ends and everything else in between

Well, first of all, like I already said, I don’t think there’s substrate dependence on either general intelligence or consciousness, so I’m not going to try to prove there is - it’s not a belief I hold. I’m simply acknowledging the possibility that there might be something more mysterious about the workings of the human mind that we don’t yet understand, so I’m not going to rule it out when I have no way of disproving it.

Secondly, both claims - that consciousness has very little influence on the mind, and that general intelligence isn’t complicated to understand - are incredibly bold statements I strongly disagree with. Especially with consciousness, though in my experience there’s a good chance we’re using that term to mean different things.

To me, consciousness is the fact of subjective experience - that it feels like something to be. That there’s qualia to experience.

I don’t know what’s left of the human mind once you strip away the ability to experience, but I’d argue we’d be unrecognizable without it. It’s what makes us human. It’s where our motivation for everything comes from - the need for social relationships, the need to eat, stay warm, stay healthy, the need to innovate. At its core, it all stems from the desire to feel - or not feel - something.

I don’t think it does, but it seems conceivable that it potentially could. Maybe there’s more to intelligence than just information processing - or maybe it’s tied to consciousness itself. I can’t imagine the added ability to have subjective experiences would hurt anyone’s intelligence, at least.

Same argument applies for consciousness as well, but I’m talking about general intelligence now.

Same argument applies for consciousness as well, but I’m talking about general intelligence now.

The chart is just for illustration to highlight my point. As I already said - pick a different chart if you prefer, it doesn’t change the argument I’m making.

It took us hundreds of thousands of years to go from stone tools to controlling fire. Ten thousand years to go from rope to fish hook. And then just 60 years to go from flight to space flight.

I’ll happily grant you rapid technological progress even over the past thousand years. My point still stands - that’s yesterday on the timeline I’m talking about.

If you lived 50,000 years ago, you’d see no technological advancement over your entire lifetime. Now, you can’t even predict what technology will look like ten years from now. Never before in human history have we taken such leaps as we have in the past thousand years. Put that on a graph and you’d see a steady line barely sloping upward from the first humans until about a thousand years ago - then a massive spike shooting almost vertically, with no signs of slowing down. And we’re standing right on top of that spike.

Throughout all of human history, the period we’re living in right now is highly unusual - which is why I claim that on this timeline, AGI might as well be here tomorrow.

Not really the same thing. The Tic Tac Toe brute force is just a lookup - every possible state is pre-solved and the program just spits back the stored move. There’s no reasoning or decision-making happening. Atari Chess, on the other hand, couldn’t possibly store all chess positions, so it actually ran a search and evaluated positions on the fly. That’s why it counts as AI: it was computing moves, not just retrieving them.