• @givesomefucks
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    85 months ago

    There’s literally no point.

    Like, humans aren’t really the “smartest” animals. We’re just the best at language and tool use. Other animals routinely demolish us in everythig else measured on an IQ test.

    Pigeons get a bad rap at being stupid, but their brains are just different than ours. Their image and pattern recognition is so insane, they can recognize words they’ve never seen aren’t gibberish just by letter structure.

    We weren’t even trying to get them to do it. They were just introducing new words and expected the pigeons to have to learn, but they could already tell despite never seeing that word before.

    Why the hell are we jumping straight to human consciousness as a goal when we don’t even know what human consciousness is? It’s like picking up Elden Ring on whatever the final boss is for your very first time playing the game. Maybe you’ll eventually beat it. But why wouldn’t you just start from the beginning and work your way up as the game gets harder?

    We should at least start with pigeons and get an artificial pigeon and work our way up.

    Like, that old reddit repost about pigeon guided bombs, that wasn’t a hail Mary, it was incredibly effective.

    • MudMan
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      215 months ago

      Who’s jumping to human consciousness as a goal? LLMs aren’t human consciousness. The original post is demagoguery, but it’s not misrepresenting the mechanics. Chatbots already have more to do with your pigeons than with human consciousness.

      I hate that the stupidity about AGI some of these techbros are spouting is being taken at face value by critics of the tech.

    • Flying Squid
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      95 months ago

      Pigeons get a bad rap at being stupid

      Do they? I guess I haven’t encountered that much. I think about messenger pigeons in wars and such…

      Disgusting? Sure, I’ve heard that a lot. But I haven’t heard ‘stupid’ really as a word to describe pigeons.

      Anyway, I don’t disagree with you otherwise. My dogs are super stupid in my perception but I know which one of us would be better at following a trail after someone had left the scene. (Okay, maybe Charlie would still be too stupid to do that one, but Ghost could do it).

      • @[email protected]
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        85 months ago

        Something that blows my mind about dogs is that their sense of smell is so good that, when combined with routine, they use it to track time i.e. if their human leaves the house for 8 hours most days to go to work, the dog will be able to discern the difference between “human’s smell 7 hours after they left” and “human’s smell 8 hours after they left”, and learn that the latter means their human should be home soon. How awesome is that?!

        • Flying Squid
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          35 months ago

          Is that how it works? That’s really neat!

    • JayTreeman
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      15 months ago

      You might like the scifi youtuber Isaac Arthur. He has a huge library, but a number of episodes that talk about intelligence.