(spoilers for Black Mirror season 4) One of my least favorite Black Mirror episodes inaccurately portrays DNA and technology (though it's still pretty entertai

(spoilers for Black Mirror season 4) One of my least favorite Black Mirror episodes inaccurately portrays DNA and technology (though it's still pretty entertaining). In the episode, a game developer creates perfect virtual replicas of his coworkers using their DNA - they look and behave exactly like their real counterparts, and share the same memories. This is absurd - DNA only provides the framework for our physical form, it's not storage for our individual memories or thought patterns. The episode's writer makes the same sort of category error as the author of this Twitter thread - you can't get more information out of something than exists to begin with. I am content to die on this hill: LLMs are great at doing a surprising number of high-level tasks, but expecting them to correctly juggle the rules for how the world works is like CSI enhancing those grainy security images. Written language is a noisy, grainy high-dimensional snapshot of intelligence. LLMs aren't minds, but they will probably be an interesting component of future improvements to software intelligence.