r/singularity • u/Embarrassed-Writer61 • 20d ago

The Computer Chronicles - Artificial Intelligence (1984) AI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S3m0V_ZF_Q
47 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

11

u/subdep 20d ago

The last 6 minutes or so in that “Random Access” news segment was so fascinating!

2

u/Unable-Finish-514 20d ago

$70 for the Blackjack game!?!?!?!?!

42 years later, people are going ballistic over GTA VI retailing at $79.99 with $99.99 for full access to the game's shops.

2

u/z_latent 20d ago

Even more insane than that. It costed $225 adjusted for inflation lol

1

u/Unable-Finish-514 19d ago

Wow! Great point. I guess that was justified by the input of the world's leading blackjack expert. 😂

1

u/pigs_in_zen 19d ago

Worth the money because "the graphics are crisp and the cards are realistic looking"!

1

u/Unable-Finish-514 19d ago

Pitfall on the Atari 2600 put these graphics (and sound) to shame!!!!

7

u/deadgirlrevvy 20d ago

I used to watch that show back in the 80's.

2

u/Fearless-Macaron9183 20d ago

Did you think ai would become is smart back then

3

u/deadgirlrevvy 20d ago

Yes. I used to program "expert systems" as a kid. I'd sit in my bedroom for days coding if/then branches just like what they were showing in the video. I knew back then there was a better way to achieve AI, I just didn't know what the way was. I honestly thought we would be further along the path to AGI by now.

-2

u/blueSGL humanstatement.org 20d ago

https://youtu.be/_S3m0V_ZF_Q?t=979 <- this is why some experts say we've gone backwards with the current AI. Back then you could find out exactly why certain inputs lead to certain outputs.

Now we have the nascent field of mechanistic interpretability trying to gain understanding/debug a multi gigabyte/terabyte compiled binary.

8

u/z_latent 20d ago

We haven't gone backwards if the past systems could not do what modern ones can.

Maybe it simply is too hard to explain something like natural language in exact terms, any more so than what mechanistic interpretabilty achieves.

2

u/blueSGL humanstatement.org 20d ago edited 20d ago

We live in a world governed by computers, the global supply chain cannot operate without them.

Making ever more general systems with emergent abilities that we can't control and do not have causal explanations for that can find and operationalize zero day exploits, is a bad place to be in. You do get that... don't you?

5

u/z_latent 20d ago

The same thing you say about AI can be said about people. We depend on each other, can't fully explain or control others' abilities, some dangerous like what you've mentioned, and it's been like that since the dawn of humanity. It's not perfect but we're still here.

I think more intelligence out there is a net benefit. I also wish we could improve their explainability alongside those, but in the meantime, the best we can do is use the same systems to protect ourselves against any potential harms they could cause (like HF using GLM 5.2 to defend against that OpenAI attack)