What was the purpose of using octopuses in this metaphor? Like, it seems you’ve piled on so many disanalogies to actual octopuses (extremely smart, many generations per year, they use Slack...) that you may as well just have said “AIs.”
I found it helpful because it put me in the frame of a alien biological intelligence rather than an AI because I have lots of preconceptions about AIs and it’s it’s easy to implicitly think in terms of expected utility maximizers or tools or whatever. While if I’m imagining an octopus, I’m kind of imagining humans, but a bit weirder and more alien, and I would not trust humans
I’m not making a strong claim this makes sense and I think people should mostly think about the AI case directly. I think it’s just another intuition pump and we can potentially be more concrete in the octopus case as we know the algorithm. (While in the AI case, we haven’t seen an ML algorithm that scales to human level.)
What was the purpose of using octopuses in this metaphor? Like, it seems you’ve piled on so many disanalogies to actual octopuses (extremely smart, many generations per year, they use Slack...) that you may as well just have said “AIs.”
EDIT: Is it gradient descent vs. evolution?
I found it helpful because it put me in the frame of a alien biological intelligence rather than an AI because I have lots of preconceptions about AIs and it’s it’s easy to implicitly think in terms of expected utility maximizers or tools or whatever. While if I’m imagining an octopus, I’m kind of imagining humans, but a bit weirder and more alien, and I would not trust humans
I’m not making a strong claim this makes sense and I think people should mostly think about the AI case directly. I think it’s just another intuition pump and we can potentially be more concrete in the octopus case as we know the algorithm. (While in the AI case, we haven’t seen an ML algorithm that scales to human level.)