We Humans Are In A Race To Understand Ourselves

we are racing robots taught by self-play reinforcement learning (RL)

Artificial Intelligence Large Language Models (LLMs) are the stuff that ChatGPT is made of. Recent models made to learn by self-play reinforcement learning (RL) surpass previous ones by discarding human centric rules for learning in favor of pure trial and error over very many examples. That is all done in the realm of text, of language. Nothing too badly could go wrong if the machine goes off the rails and starts hallucinating. Gibberish or nonsense text comes out and its easily ignored.

But when robots in the physical world are made to learn the same way, things could get broken. A robot being trained to clean your house might answer the doorbell and start using the neighbor to mop the floor.

So will these robots be incubated in a kind of nursery, locked in a padded room with some toys and expected to learn things by bouncing off the walls? Probably yes I guess. But then that knowledge in digital form, when its gained, could be downloaded to many other such robots at once.

That incubation period would really be evolution in microcosm. The robot would have to learn to crawl, to stand, to walk, to grasp things without breaking them, etc. It could take a very long time, and that’s assuming the robots brain power approximates that of a higher mammal like a dog or a cat or a monkey or a human, any of which would take an awful lot of computing power because most of our functioning is autonomic and beneath our awareness. To build that kind of computing power in a small package and then train it over every possible situation that evolution threw at living beings will take a long time.

So we humans are in a race to understand ourselves and put a stop to that nonsense before it happens. Because if it happens before we understand ourselves well enough to put people like Bill Gates or Anthony Fauci in prison, then we are in big trouble. We would not be able to control our creations.

God willing that we can win. But don’t let the pathocrats sell you this as the next crisis that only they can solve.