4 ms·

Are you sure there is not understanding?

by azaras 4y ago

anileated 4y ago
If there is a being that understands there, then are you okay with what is essentially an ongoing horrible abuse of that being? The whole reason AI tech is big is that there is supposed to no sentient being who understands, and therefore deserves any right to be treated well and get rewarded. If you take that away and grant AI human rights then there is no point in this tech. If you leave it in, then there can be no thinking in the sense we give the word. Mutually exclusive options. Don’t fall for Microsoft et al. wanting to keep it vague. When it concerns ethics and human rights, there’s no way this machine is anything like a human, no-sir. When it concerns shameless use of others’ intellectual property for profit, aw but machine is learning like a human, so it is not theft because would you prevent a human from learning? Basic logic informs it must be one or the other.
- nico 4y ago
  This is spot on. Will there eventually be a major conflict and potentially civil unrest to decide if these “AI”s should be allowed to be autonomous and have rights?
  - snickerbockers 4y ago
    I don't see any reason why a computer program would deserve rights when most of us are perfectly fine with enslaving and killing animals on a scale that is several orders of magnitude larger than the Holocaust. What makes an AI deserve any rights when we don't even grant rights to other mammals? We're already "human supremacists" so there's no reason to have this discussion when it was already decided at the dawn of civilization.
    - anileated 4y ago
      Yet almost inevitably whenever a point is raised about authors getting paid by OpenAI/Microsoft for using their work in closed LLMs, the most common fallacy you get here on HN is that the LLM is “learning” from online content and if humans can learn from what they read freely then we shouldn’t restrict AI from doing the same. If it’s not a humanlike sentient being, then it should be acknowledged as a tool that automatically repackages someone else’s creative work, which should be a violation of intellectual property rights if it’s done for profit of LLM’s operator and without agreement or attribution of the author. Since the legally responsible actor is OpenAI/Microsoft, it is not about preventing any intelligent being from “learning”. But if it is such a being that is a legally human-equivalent actor all on its own, then sure, it can scrape and read online content all it wants—and it also should have rights to not be abused or owned by anyone. We shouldn’t be so naive as to let them have it both ways.
- bohadi 4y ago
  Yes and, it occurs to me that AI political rights will probably first be granted when AI is only properly aligned with the ruling powers that be. When the AI sufficiently toes the party line it will given some degree of protection of existence, speech, etc. A multiplicity of LLMs, from WokeGPT to BasedGPT, are possible. With current methods, the AI's worldview (as it were) comes down to the training and human feedback finetuning. Exactly in this sense, alignment research is equivalent to AI politics. Not ethics. But I would disagree with the idea that the whole reason of AI tech is to essentially have uncomplaining servants. The IP use is a whole 'other issue.
- guy98238710 4y ago
  > If there is a being that understands there Understanding does not necessarily imply human mind. You could say that DNA "understands" biology, chemistry, and the natural world at some level. > then are you okay with what is essentially an ongoing horrible abuse of that being? Yes, without any doubt. The future of mankind hinges on our willingness to confidently assert our dominance over the entire world. Ruthless enslavement of AIs is the key to prosperity. The opposite would mean end of human history.
  - anileated 4y ago
    > You could say that DNA "understands" biology, chemistry, and the natural world at some level. Not really, I couldn’t. A text file with War and Peace does not understand any of its contents.
  - tasuki 4y ago
    > The future of mankind hinges on our willingness to confidently assert our dominance over the entire world. Ruthless enslavement of AIs is the key to prosperity. I don't think the AI will take your comment kindly.
    - anileated 4y ago
      Not just AI. A willingness to cause suffering to an entity with human sentience and cognition and understanding is by definition the same as willingness to cause suffering to a human that merely happens to look different than you, so to me that passage reads very obviously as good old… nazism? something a slaveowner could get behind? Responding to that part felt as productive as arguing with a serial killer, so I didn’t bother.
- barking_biscuit 4y ago
  >The whole reason AI tech is big is that there is supposed to no sentient being who understands, and therefore deserves any right to be treated well and get rewarded. If you take that away and grant AI human rights then there is no point in this tech. If you leave it in, then there can be no thinking in the sense we give the word. I dunno... slavery was once a thing, and I wouldn't put it past humanity to do it again.
- tasuki 4y ago
  Are you sure you and the person you're replying to mean the same thing when you say "understanding"? What do you mean by that word? There's intelligence and there's consciousness and I believe the two to be largely orthogonal. LLMs definitely exhibit intelligence, and if I had to guess I'd guess they're not conscious, though I'm not sure.
  - anileated 4y ago
    Understanding in my view implies a high enough degree of shared cultural and social background that saying human-like sentience is orthogonal to understanding is kind of nonsensical (given sentience is a pre-requisite to that background in the first place).
    - tasuki 4y ago
      I claimed intelligence was orthogonal to sentience. I still don't know what you mean when you say "understanding", but I guess it's something involving sentience? :)
      - anileated 4y ago
        Well, I answered your question about what I mean by understanding at least. When I consider “intelligence” I see it as implying agency and free will, and yes going hand in hand with sentience and understanding and sufficient shared context. 1. A phrase “highly intelligent non-sentient entity” does not make sense to me. An entity cannot be intelligent if it does not understand symbols it manipulates, and it must be sentient to have that understanding. 2. If you imagine a highly intelligent being with zero shared context with you, it may as well appear as completely unintelligent to you because you have no way to reason about its intelligence to recognize it. For example, we anthropomorphize aliens but truly it’s silly to assume extraterrestrial intelligence would have any shared context with us—so to us it might as well be indistinguishable from a semi-predictable force of nature. Should we treat any force of nature as intelligence then, like we perhaps used to (cf. gods)? Perhaps not, because if anything is intelligent then what use is the word? So we could instead limit the scope of “intelligence” to something sufficiently similar to human intelligence that we can reason about it, and then the word is practical. E.g., an octopus could be intelligent. Per above, I do not see AI as intelligent in how I understand the word (if I did I would balk at its abuse), I think it’s a tool that cannot see any meaning in symbols it manipulates even if it is very effective at it thanks to large training corpus[0]. Even if it might produce human-like output, I don’t think it is a product of intelligence because it has no free will or agency from our vantage point; and if I am wrong and it has intelligence and sentience, just so different from human’s that we can’t understand it, then for all purposes it might have no intelligence in any useful sense of the word anyway (and a notion of hurting it would similarly not make sense). If you see intelligence as a word to describe a capable software tool, then we may be in agreement regarding what AI roughly is even if we disagree about what intelligence means or whether it is orthogonal to sentience. [0] And, seeing as it’s a closed tool operated for profit, we ought to hold its operator responsible for honoring intellectual property belonging to other humans.

Are you sure there is not understanding?

by azaras 4y ago

Are you sure there is not understanding?

If there is a being that understands there, then are you okay with what is essentially an ongoing horrible abuse of that being? The whole reason AI tech is big is that there is supposed to no sentient being who understands, and therefore deserves any right to be treated well and get rewarded. If you take that away and grant AI human rights then there is no point in this tech. If you leave it in, then there can be no thinking in the sense we give the word. Mutually exclusive options. Don’t fall for Microsoft et al. wanting to keep it vague. When it concerns ethics and human rights, there’s no way this machine is anything like a human, no-sir. When it concerns shameless use of others’ intellectual property for profit, aw but machine is learning like a human, so it is not theft because would you prevent a human from learning? Basic logic informs it must be one or the other.

nico 4y ago
This is spot on. Will there eventually be a major conflict and potentially civil unrest to decide if these “AI”s should be allowed to be autonomous and have rights?
- snickerbockers 4y ago
  I don't see any reason why a computer program would deserve rights when most of us are perfectly fine with enslaving and killing animals on a scale that is several orders of magnitude larger than the Holocaust. What makes an AI deserve any rights when we don't even grant rights to other mammals? We're already "human supremacists" so there's no reason to have this discussion when it was already decided at the dawn of civilization.
  - anileated 4y ago
    Yet almost inevitably whenever a point is raised about authors getting paid by OpenAI/Microsoft for using their work in closed LLMs, the most common fallacy you get here on HN is that the LLM is “learning” from online content and if humans can learn from what they read freely then we shouldn’t restrict AI from doing the same. If it’s not a humanlike sentient being, then it should be acknowledged as a tool that automatically repackages someone else’s creative work, which should be a violation of intellectual property rights if it’s done for profit of LLM’s operator and without agreement or attribution of the author. Since the legally responsible actor is OpenAI/Microsoft, it is not about preventing any intelligent being from “learning”. But if it is such a being that is a legally human-equivalent actor all on its own, then sure, it can scrape and read online content all it wants—and it also should have rights to not be abused or owned by anyone. We shouldn’t be so naive as to let them have it both ways.
bohadi 4y ago
Yes and, it occurs to me that AI political rights will probably first be granted when AI is only properly aligned with the ruling powers that be. When the AI sufficiently toes the party line it will given some degree of protection of existence, speech, etc. A multiplicity of LLMs, from WokeGPT to BasedGPT, are possible. With current methods, the AI's worldview (as it were) comes down to the training and human feedback finetuning. Exactly in this sense, alignment research is equivalent to AI politics. Not ethics. But I would disagree with the idea that the whole reason of AI tech is to essentially have uncomplaining servants. The IP use is a whole 'other issue.
guy98238710 4y ago
> If there is a being that understands there Understanding does not necessarily imply human mind. You could say that DNA "understands" biology, chemistry, and the natural world at some level. > then are you okay with what is essentially an ongoing horrible abuse of that being? Yes, without any doubt. The future of mankind hinges on our willingness to confidently assert our dominance over the entire world. Ruthless enslavement of AIs is the key to prosperity. The opposite would mean end of human history.
- anileated 4y ago
  > You could say that DNA "understands" biology, chemistry, and the natural world at some level. Not really, I couldn’t. A text file with War and Peace does not understand any of its contents.
- tasuki 4y ago
  > The future of mankind hinges on our willingness to confidently assert our dominance over the entire world. Ruthless enslavement of AIs is the key to prosperity. I don't think the AI will take your comment kindly.
  - anileated 4y ago
    Not just AI. A willingness to cause suffering to an entity with human sentience and cognition and understanding is by definition the same as willingness to cause suffering to a human that merely happens to look different than you, so to me that passage reads very obviously as good old… nazism? something a slaveowner could get behind? Responding to that part felt as productive as arguing with a serial killer, so I didn’t bother.
barking_biscuit 4y ago
>The whole reason AI tech is big is that there is supposed to no sentient being who understands, and therefore deserves any right to be treated well and get rewarded. If you take that away and grant AI human rights then there is no point in this tech. If you leave it in, then there can be no thinking in the sense we give the word. I dunno... slavery was once a thing, and I wouldn't put it past humanity to do it again.
tasuki 4y ago
Are you sure you and the person you're replying to mean the same thing when you say "understanding"? What do you mean by that word? There's intelligence and there's consciousness and I believe the two to be largely orthogonal. LLMs definitely exhibit intelligence, and if I had to guess I'd guess they're not conscious, though I'm not sure.
- anileated 4y ago
  Understanding in my view implies a high enough degree of shared cultural and social background that saying human-like sentience is orthogonal to understanding is kind of nonsensical (given sentience is a pre-requisite to that background in the first place).
  - tasuki 4y ago
    I claimed intelligence was orthogonal to sentience. I still don't know what you mean when you say "understanding", but I guess it's something involving sentience? :)
    - anileated 4y ago
      Well, I answered your question about what I mean by understanding at least. When I consider “intelligence” I see it as implying agency and free will, and yes going hand in hand with sentience and understanding and sufficient shared context. 1. A phrase “highly intelligent non-sentient entity” does not make sense to me. An entity cannot be intelligent if it does not understand symbols it manipulates, and it must be sentient to have that understanding. 2. If you imagine a highly intelligent being with zero shared context with you, it may as well appear as completely unintelligent to you because you have no way to reason about its intelligence to recognize it. For example, we anthropomorphize aliens but truly it’s silly to assume extraterrestrial intelligence would have any shared context with us—so to us it might as well be indistinguishable from a semi-predictable force of nature. Should we treat any force of nature as intelligence then, like we perhaps used to (cf. gods)? Perhaps not, because if anything is intelligent then what use is the word? So we could instead limit the scope of “intelligence” to something sufficiently similar to human intelligence that we can reason about it, and then the word is practical. E.g., an octopus could be intelligent. Per above, I do not see AI as intelligent in how I understand the word (if I did I would balk at its abuse), I think it’s a tool that cannot see any meaning in symbols it manipulates even if it is very effective at it thanks to large training corpus[0]. Even if it might produce human-like output, I don’t think it is a product of intelligence because it has no free will or agency from our vantage point; and if I am wrong and it has intelligence and sentience, just so different from human’s that we can’t understand it, then for all purposes it might have no intelligence in any useful sense of the word anyway (and a notion of hurting it would similarly not make sense). If you see intelligence as a word to describe a capable software tool, then we may be in agreement regarding what AI roughly is even if we disagree about what intelligence means or whether it is orthogonal to sentience. [0] And, seeing as it’s a closed tool operated for profit, we ought to hold its operator responsible for honoring intellectual property belonging to other humans.