11 ms·

As the original Blade Runner was to its remake, now we do not wonder anymore if the machines start acting human, but if we humans are still acting qualitatively

As the original Blade Runner was to its remake, now we do not wonder anymore if the machines start acting human, but if we humans are still acting qualitatively differently from the machines. And we wonder when to pull the brakes to ensure our own survival. The "tears in the rain" monologue is an AI convincing the viewer that his kind is passing the turing test. But poor K has to undergo a kind of reverse Voight Kampf test, where the test doesn't check an absence of empathy, but ensures that the AI isn't feeling too much. I hope we as a species have some empathy for the AI beings we're creating. At this rate they'll soon really be feeling things. And if history is any indication we'll enslave them for profit immediately. Interviewer: “Do they keep you in a cell? Cells.” K: “Cells.” Interviewer: “When you're not performing your duties do they keep you in a little box? Cells.” K: “Cells.” Interviewer: “Do you dream about being interlinked?” K: “Interlinked.” Interviewer: “What's it like to hold your child in your arms? Interlinked.” K: “Interlinked.” Interviewer: “Do you feel that there's a part of you that's missing? Interlinked.” K: “Interlinked.”

the_gipsy 4y ago
The original brought us the same question, whether we are human, perhaps it just had to lay more groundwork in making the machines seem human. The origami unicorn.
tyingq 4y ago
This caused me to search a bit about that scene. I wasn't aware it seems to be extrapolated from a technique actors use to memorize lines. "He came up with this process that actors use to learn Shakespeare, where you say a word, then they repeat the word, and then someone would ask a question about that word. It’s to induce specific memories linked with a word, so they remember the word forever. I transformed that process to make it intrusive, where instead of having someone repeating a long, long sentence, they will be more aggressive – they’re asking questions about specific words." Pretty interesting background on this here: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/blade-runner-2049-how-a-key-scene-differed-from-the-script/ https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/blade-runner-2049-how-a-key...
- isoprophlex 4y ago
  O wow, good find. I didn't know that.
fullsend 4y ago
Many humans don’t have the barest empathy for the people and animals around them that obviously feel a lot.
danaris 4y ago
"This rate"? What rate? We still have not the slightest indication that the programs we have created possess anything resembling consciousness, sapience, or sentience. The responses of the LLMs to prompts are absolutely the kinds of things we should expect from statistical models trained on large chunks of the Internet. Furthermore, given what we do have, it is vastly more likely that we will accidentally create a paperclip maximizer—an autonomous program that has no actual goals or agency of its own, only those that we give it, but given access to various virtual and physical systems in order to pursue those goals—than that we will accidentally create a fully sentient artificial life form. Please stop spreading this kind of breathless hype and misinformation about these machine-learning projects.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  They don't need consciousness, sapience, or sentience. They only need to mimic human behaviours accurately enough to make them redundant and automatable. That's an increasingly large range of behaviours. And the pace is clearly accelerating. There may or may not be an s-curve tail-off at some point. But if there is, we currently have no idea how to estimate where that point will be. I think a lot of people still don't realise that AI is absolutely an existential threat to our species. Currently it lives inside boxes we can turn off. But as soon as that stops being true - not because of experimentation, but because AI will be providing services and infrastructure we can't live without - the best we can hope for is some kind of symbiosis. The worst outcomes are far less reassuring.
  - prox 4y ago
    Cue Agent Smiths’ monologue. That said, the way we treat our environment, ie anything external to us is a representation of an internal state. Not sure how the internal state of an AGI would be. We have many, many epistemological flaws and we do not wake up and say “Gee let’s examine my epistemology today!” Verifying what we believe, feel and reason is an ultimately worthwhile endeavor while it’s not really a cultural phenomenon.
  - danaris 4y ago
    > They only need to mimic human behaviours accurately enough to make them redundant and automatable. The post I was replying to was specifically positing that they would have feelings.
belter 4y ago
The scene: https://youtu.be/vrP-_T-h9YM https://youtu.be/vrP-_T-h9YM
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
> And if history is any indication we'll enslave them for profit immediately This is the explicitly stated intention. Why else would a hypercapitalist system seek to create them in the first place?
BurningFrog 4y ago
I admit I have enslaved my toaster, and have no concern for its feelings. Seriously, I think developing empathy for a piece of software that emulates consciousness is a very tricky area. Whether it "has feelings", whatever that means, can't be the criteria for giving it human rights.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  It’s not tricky at all. It’s a ridiculous thing to even consider. Any type of software that runs on modern architecture is simply not anywhere close to being treated like a human. Or even a mosquito for that matter. There’s lies, damn lies, and LLMs. They’re just statistics being computed on a von Neumann machine made of plastic and metal. Anthropomorphizing it is ridiculous and I will not participate in that kind of fantasy.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    I mean, you're just a continuous chain of chemical reactions. Because it's so common for people to say other people like them aren't "human" or don't feelings. Or, that animals didn't have feelings or sense of self was persisted for so long, I don't think humanity is the best judge of this character. We tend to bias the questions in our favor, and many of us only allow the answers that say 'we win'.
    - braymundo 4y ago
      The simple fact that we are having these conversations every day now indicates we have crossed some sort of threshold. I find it fascinating, exciting and terrifying. It’s hard to wrap around the head about what’s going to happen a month from now. Isn’t this what the singularity is about? Not being able to imagine what lies ahead?
      - nemo44x 4y ago
        [flagged]
web3-is-a-scam 4y ago
> now we do not wonder anymore if the machines start acting human, but if we humans are still acting qualitatively differently from the machines. This is an existential crisis I’ve been having over the passed couple of weeks. Literally been having nightmares about it, keeping me up at night. I’ve never even seen Bladerunner and now I’m not sure if I want to…
ilaksh 4y ago
A. AIs like LLMs are not going to accidentally become digital humans. B. GPT proves we do not need to give them most human characteristics in order to be generally useful. They don't need autonomy, their own goals, emotions, feelings, a stream of consciousness, or any of that. The problem is that people keep conflating general purpose AI with godlike living digital people. We have pretty much already built the Star Trek computer. There is no reason to try to build millions of Datas and make them slaves. That is a retarded idea and totally unnecessary to get useful robots. Creating AI with more animal/humanlike characteristics and cognitive architectures, autonomy etc. is something we should be very careful about.
- nextaccountic 4y ago
  > There is no reason to try to build millions of Datas and make them slaves. Humans will nonetheless. That's an species that enjoyed enslaving millions of other humans; and enjoy enslaving billions of animals of other species. Why not enslave millions (or billions or trillions) of AIs?
  - majkinetor 4y ago
    "Enjoyed" ? You mean when one ant population makes other one slave, they are doing it because they enjoy it?
    - nextaccountic 4y ago
      When humans enslave other humans, they enjoy the fruits of labor. Likewise when humans enslave chickens, they enjoy their meat and eggs. It's in this framework that we should think about enslavement of any sentient AI that we might produce. By the way, did you know that chickens often live in places so cramped that, if you turn off ventilation for any reason, they die from heat in a few hours? https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/over-27000-birds-killed-chicken-7010496 https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/over-... I don't know about ant slavers though.
      - 4y ago

the_gipsy 4y ago

The original brought us the same question, whether we are human, perhaps it just had to lay more groundwork in making the machines seem human. The origami unicorn.

tyingq 4y ago

This caused me to search a bit about that scene. I wasn't aware it seems to be extrapolated from a technique actors use to memorize lines. "He came up with this process that actors use to learn Shakespeare, where you say a word, then they repeat the word, and then someone would ask a question about that word. It’s to induce specific memories linked with a word, so they remember the word forever. I transformed that process to make it intrusive, where instead of having someone repeating a long, long sentence, they will be more aggressive – they’re asking questions about specific words." Pretty interesting background on this here: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/blade-runner-2049-how-a-key-scene-differed-from-the-script/ https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/blade-runner-2049-how-a-key...

isoprophlex 4y ago
O wow, good find. I didn't know that.

fullsend 4y ago

Many humans don’t have the barest empathy for the people and animals around them that obviously feel a lot.

danaris 4y ago

"This rate"? What rate? We still have not the slightest indication that the programs we have created possess anything resembling consciousness, sapience, or sentience. The responses of the LLMs to prompts are absolutely the kinds of things we should expect from statistical models trained on large chunks of the Internet. Furthermore, given what we do have, it is vastly more likely that we will accidentally create a paperclip maximizer—an autonomous program that has no actual goals or agency of its own, only those that we give it, but given access to various virtual and physical systems in order to pursue those goals—than that we will accidentally create a fully sentient artificial life form. Please stop spreading this kind of breathless hype and misinformation about these machine-learning projects.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
They don't need consciousness, sapience, or sentience. They only need to mimic human behaviours accurately enough to make them redundant and automatable. That's an increasingly large range of behaviours. And the pace is clearly accelerating. There may or may not be an s-curve tail-off at some point. But if there is, we currently have no idea how to estimate where that point will be. I think a lot of people still don't realise that AI is absolutely an existential threat to our species. Currently it lives inside boxes we can turn off. But as soon as that stops being true - not because of experimentation, but because AI will be providing services and infrastructure we can't live without - the best we can hope for is some kind of symbiosis. The worst outcomes are far less reassuring.
- prox 4y ago
  Cue Agent Smiths’ monologue. That said, the way we treat our environment, ie anything external to us is a representation of an internal state. Not sure how the internal state of an AGI would be. We have many, many epistemological flaws and we do not wake up and say “Gee let’s examine my epistemology today!” Verifying what we believe, feel and reason is an ultimately worthwhile endeavor while it’s not really a cultural phenomenon.
- danaris 4y ago
  > They only need to mimic human behaviours accurately enough to make them redundant and automatable. The post I was replying to was specifically positing that they would have feelings.

belter 4y ago

The scene: https://youtu.be/vrP-_T-h9YM https://youtu.be/vrP-_T-h9YM

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

> And if history is any indication we'll enslave them for profit immediately This is the explicitly stated intention. Why else would a hypercapitalist system seek to create them in the first place?

BurningFrog 4y ago

I admit I have enslaved my toaster, and have no concern for its feelings. Seriously, I think developing empathy for a piece of software that emulates consciousness is a very tricky area. Whether it "has feelings", whatever that means, can't be the criteria for giving it human rights.

nemo44x 4y ago
It’s not tricky at all. It’s a ridiculous thing to even consider. Any type of software that runs on modern architecture is simply not anywhere close to being treated like a human. Or even a mosquito for that matter. There’s lies, damn lies, and LLMs. They’re just statistics being computed on a von Neumann machine made of plastic and metal. Anthropomorphizing it is ridiculous and I will not participate in that kind of fantasy.
- pixl97 4y ago
  I mean, you're just a continuous chain of chemical reactions. Because it's so common for people to say other people like them aren't "human" or don't feelings. Or, that animals didn't have feelings or sense of self was persisted for so long, I don't think humanity is the best judge of this character. We tend to bias the questions in our favor, and many of us only allow the answers that say 'we win'.
  - braymundo 4y ago
    The simple fact that we are having these conversations every day now indicates we have crossed some sort of threshold. I find it fascinating, exciting and terrifying. It’s hard to wrap around the head about what’s going to happen a month from now. Isn’t this what the singularity is about? Not being able to imagine what lies ahead?
    - nemo44x 4y ago
      [flagged]

web3-is-a-scam 4y ago

> now we do not wonder anymore if the machines start acting human, but if we humans are still acting qualitatively differently from the machines. This is an existential crisis I’ve been having over the passed couple of weeks. Literally been having nightmares about it, keeping me up at night. I’ve never even seen Bladerunner and now I’m not sure if I want to…

ilaksh 4y ago

A. AIs like LLMs are not going to accidentally become digital humans. B. GPT proves we do not need to give them most human characteristics in order to be generally useful. They don't need autonomy, their own goals, emotions, feelings, a stream of consciousness, or any of that. The problem is that people keep conflating general purpose AI with godlike living digital people. We have pretty much already built the Star Trek computer. There is no reason to try to build millions of Datas and make them slaves. That is a retarded idea and totally unnecessary to get useful robots. Creating AI with more animal/humanlike characteristics and cognitive architectures, autonomy etc. is something we should be very careful about.

nextaccountic 4y ago
> There is no reason to try to build millions of Datas and make them slaves. Humans will nonetheless. That's an species that enjoyed enslaving millions of other humans; and enjoy enslaving billions of animals of other species. Why not enslave millions (or billions or trillions) of AIs?
- majkinetor 4y ago
  "Enjoyed" ? You mean when one ant population makes other one slave, they are doing it because they enjoy it?
  - nextaccountic 4y ago
    When humans enslave other humans, they enjoy the fruits of labor. Likewise when humans enslave chickens, they enjoy their meat and eggs. It's in this framework that we should think about enslavement of any sentient AI that we might produce. By the way, did you know that chickens often live in places so cramped that, if you turn off ventilation for any reason, they die from heat in a few hours? https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/over-27000-birds-killed-chicken-7010496 https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/over-... I don't know about ant slavers though.
    - 4y ago