I think the last hurdles will be sentience and a theory of the mind. Theory of the mind is probably something that a LM could predict given enough data, but sentience? I don't think we understand enough about our own sentience for us to create it in a machine.
> I don't think we understand enough about our own sentience for us to create it in a machine.
Invention preceding understanding is the norm, not the exception. We created fire before understanding chemistry, and we constantly use pharmaceuticals without really understanding how they work. Invention first, then theory comes along to explain and generalize.
For all we know, sentience is a necessary side-effect of semantic processing of any kind, in which case LLMs already have a form of sentience.
So yes, you're right that we don't understand our own sentience. In fact, we understand so little that it could literally be staring us in the face right now and we don't realize it.
It goes back to the old question of whether matter is fundamental and consciousness emerges from it or the other way around. My inclination is the latter, by way of Descartes. "I think therefore I am." If you can think "I am me" then you know with certainty that your first person identity exists but all other information that comes to you through your senses will always be an incomplete picture of the material universe. I think this is the strongest argument why consciousness precedes matter (or pervades through all matter, depending how you look at it). If sentience is a fundamental property of the universe, the way I see it, all matter shares the same soul. That makes it perfectly logical for a machine that mimics the pathways of the brain to behave just like a brain, to me.
It may be that we found out that sentience is not as magical or unique as we originally thought.
Some people claimed that "creativity" (another rather nebulous term) was a uniquely human trait, and machines could perform tasks that require this. But recent generative AI models have started to make people question that position.
No, because GPT-4 has finite memory, its context length, and its random number generator for output selection is probably pseudo-random with finite memory.
If the random number generator is pseudo-random, this makes GPT-4 a deterministic finite-state machine, and the output sequence does not necessarily contain all possible subsequences no matter how many times the monkey types a new random key. Put differently, some output subsequences may be inaccessible no matter which keys are input. Same if the random number generator is truly random but its value cannot select among all possible output tokens, only a subset provided by the GPT at each step.
No cryptocurrency is a monetary system, they aren't even a functioning currency. For that to happen they would need to fulfill three functions that currently none do. Namely:
A means of exchange
A unit of account
A store of value
They satisfy the first but not the other two. I cannot know for sure what value my coins have on any given day, let alone what they are likely to be valued at by next year. Thus they do not act as a store of value nor a unit of account.
If it takes the electricity consumption of Denmark to secure less than $10bn in transactions, how much will it take to replace the $6tn daily Forex volumes?
Honestly I wish people would realise how utterly pointless crypto is as a currency. Maybe then I'll get a cheap graphics card.
Definitely one issue with crypto-currencies today is that they have volatile pricing which makes them difficult to use in commerce. There are several projects working to use smart contracts in order to peg the value of the coin to currencies like USD, EUR, etc. As liquidity increases in decentralized exchange formats, such as atomic swaps and DEX applications, there will be enough volume to properly manage these smart contracts to peg coins to fiat currencies.
A unit of account from my understanding simply means that other people are willing to price their goods/services in your currency. This is a by-product of people participating and using the token, and it being stable enough. So once there is a "stablecoin" that gains traction, this will surely follow.
I've enjoyed your posts in this thread but I have a question. How are the projects you allude to fundamentally different than PayPal, iPay, GooglePay, Venmo or just strait up Visa or MC?
Crypto-currency is different in the sense that it is decentralized. Paypal and other payment systems can and do freeze people's balances at will. Many countries have features disabled. Some countries are flat out discluded.
At the end of the day, there is no button that can be pressed to remove your access to the system.
The problem is a catch 22, you cannot be stable until you gain volume and you cannot gain volume until you are stable.
Simply using a smart contract between two parties doesn't give the underlying coin stability, and it introduces the risk that one party ends up with an undervalued/overvalued coin. The average person will still earn in dollars, shop in dollars, pay tax in dollars and do accounts in dollars. The demand for crypto as a result will be restricted to speculators, criminals and (some) geeks. I cannot see stability anywhere on the horizon.
Their value is so volatile because their total valuation is not big enough to make them stable. Multiply Bitcoin's or Ethereum's total valuation by 100 and suddenly you have a much more stable asset at the price range of gold. And being stable makes them way more valuable so their price would keep increasing just because of that.
To solve proof-of-work consuming too much electricity, Ethereum is upgrading to proof-of-stake which is on the roadmap and consumes a negligible amount of power.
Their value is so volatile because they have no intrinsic value, no government (that I am aware of) is demanding tax paid in a cryptocoin. There is also no mechanism for increasing the value of the coin, through a central bank interest rate. There's also no means to increase the supply (after mining runs out) to allow for economic expansion, eventually you will end up with run away inflation, with no mechanism to control it. Honestly they don't work as currencies, they are speculative assets underpinned by some interesting but largely redundant technology.
Proof of stake is built on trust, much like the financial system, so why reinvent the wheel for a corruptible ledger of a non-trustless, non-currency?
