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You're proposing that the... facebook feed is "more conscious" than GPT-3?

thatjoeoverthr 5y ago
Seems like an interesting thought. The feeds have a purpose or agenda, actively influence real people in real life, and do so in a way that perpetuates their own existence. As long as they’re effective, they have real world institutions to support them. As it happens, they are perpetually learning and growing. Putting that next to GPT3, it’s like an intelligent rescue dog next to a horse that counts.
blamestross 5y ago
The facebook feed is at least an online system vs a static model, so YES.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
Probably, yes. It's interesting how consciousness could be a matter of drawing boundaries. A well-known example are the ants: individual ants are somewhat dumb, barely above simple chemical seekers. But the ant colony behaves as a single organism, and quite smart at that. Other examples include cities, nations, corporations - it kind of feels like these organizations have minds of their own, with individual humans being cells, and the bureaucracy forming a computational substrate. In the same vein, Facebook feed could be seen as a mind of its own. So could the entire human civilization.
Applejinx 5y ago
Yes. It's bound to be a very complicated web of intentions and subroutines to produce outcomes, very likely with no one human overseer. It's gonna be a big pile of messy dumb code, not necessarily self-modifying but very likely with attempts to 'learn' and adapt on the fly towards basic ends. It will be HUNGRY in the way GPT-3 is not: through both indirect and direct pressures, it will be struggling to maximize engagement, reach more places, get more food in the sense of people trying to interact with it. The Facebook news feed, and even more so the less human-centered algorithms of Google and YouTube, are more conscious than GPT-3. When they're adjusted, such as the times Google has fiddled with the algorithm because YouTube was pipelining people to the alt-right after it 'observed' that this heightened engagement a lot, the algorithms are adjusted by trying to give them other types of information, other priorities (like giving them more sensory organs to highlight stuff they'd missed about their larger environment) rather than by diving in and recoding specifica about particular youtube creators, or looking for a more narrowly defined 'politics' that had been coded in there. No such nefarious coding existed. The algorithm is alive, but blind. It functions on a scale where it can't NOT trample its surroundings, so it must be given eyes… and the consciousness gradually increases.

Seems like an interesting thought. The feeds have a purpose or agenda, actively influence real people in real life, and do so in a way that perpetuates their own existence. As long as they’re effective, they have real world institutions to support them. As it happens, they are perpetually learning and growing. Putting that next to GPT3, it’s like an intelligent rescue dog next to a horse that counts.

blamestross 5y ago

The facebook feed is at least an online system vs a static model, so YES.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

Probably, yes. It's interesting how consciousness could be a matter of drawing boundaries. A well-known example are the ants: individual ants are somewhat dumb, barely above simple chemical seekers. But the ant colony behaves as a single organism, and quite smart at that. Other examples include cities, nations, corporations - it kind of feels like these organizations have minds of their own, with individual humans being cells, and the bureaucracy forming a computational substrate. In the same vein, Facebook feed could be seen as a mind of its own. So could the entire human civilization.

Applejinx 5y ago

Yes. It's bound to be a very complicated web of intentions and subroutines to produce outcomes, very likely with no one human overseer. It's gonna be a big pile of messy dumb code, not necessarily self-modifying but very likely with attempts to 'learn' and adapt on the fly towards basic ends. It will be HUNGRY in the way GPT-3 is not: through both indirect and direct pressures, it will be struggling to maximize engagement, reach more places, get more food in the sense of people trying to interact with it. The Facebook news feed, and even more so the less human-centered algorithms of Google and YouTube, are more conscious than GPT-3. When they're adjusted, such as the times Google has fiddled with the algorithm because YouTube was pipelining people to the alt-right after it 'observed' that this heightened engagement a lot, the algorithms are adjusted by trying to give them other types of information, other priorities (like giving them more sensory organs to highlight stuff they'd missed about their larger environment) rather than by diving in and recoding specifica about particular youtube creators, or looking for a more narrowly defined 'politics' that had been coded in there. No such nefarious coding existed. The algorithm is alive, but blind. It functions on a scale where it can't NOT trample its surroundings, so it must be given eyes… and the consciousness gradually increases.