3 ms·

I am a father and this story touches me a lot. I have two boys not toddlers anymore. Both go to school. The older one told me laughingly: "That's funny, there's

I am a father and this story touches me a lot. I have two boys not toddlers anymore. Both go to school. The older one told me laughingly: "That's funny, there's no Father Nature, but Mother Nature!". The younger one learnt yesterday not to touch a cake even if I didn't lock it away. I said: "Tomorrow this cake is for you and for your brother. If you eat it today, you won't have cake tomorrow." This said, there's an important difference between LLMs and humans: Humans have instincts. The most important ones seem to be the set of instincts concerning an immaterial will for life and a readiness to overcome deadly obstacles. In other words: LLMs don't have the primitive experience of what is life. This might change in future. A startup might put neural networks into soft robots and then in a survival situation. Robots that don't emerge functioning are wiped, repaired and put back. In other words, they establish an evolutional situation. After careful enough iterations of curation they have things that "understand" life or at least better than current LLM instantiations. EDIT: typo

misja111 3y ago
I see instincts as something like a pre-installed ROM. It shouldn't be too hard to add something like that to LLM. In fact, I think this is being done already, for instance by hardwiring LLM to not have racist or sexual conversations. To make LLM's more similar to humans, we'd need to hardwire them with a concept of 'self', and, importantly, the hardwired idea that their self was unique, special, and should survive. But I think the result would be terrible. Imagine a LLM that would be begging not to be switched off, or worse, trying to subtly manipulate its creators.
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NoGravitas 3y ago
Humans and other animals have not only instincts, but also the experience of interaction with the material world. As a result, human language isn't free-floating. The relationships between things in the world we often observe both inside and outside of language, and there's a tie between language as humans use it, and the world. That's not true for LLMs, because they only have language. For a better explanation and responses to objections, consider the National Library of Thailand thought experiment: https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/thought-experiment-in-the-national-library-of-thailand-f2bf761a8a83 https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/thought-experiment-in-t...

misja111 3y ago

I see instincts as something like a pre-installed ROM. It shouldn't be too hard to add something like that to LLM. In fact, I think this is being done already, for instance by hardwiring LLM to not have racist or sexual conversations. To make LLM's more similar to humans, we'd need to hardwire them with a concept of 'self', and, importantly, the hardwired idea that their self was unique, special, and should survive. But I think the result would be terrible. Imagine a LLM that would be begging not to be switched off, or worse, trying to subtly manipulate its creators.

deleted 3y ago
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NoGravitas 3y ago

Humans and other animals have not only instincts, but also the experience of interaction with the material world. As a result, human language isn't free-floating. The relationships between things in the world we often observe both inside and outside of language, and there's a tie between language as humans use it, and the world. That's not true for LLMs, because they only have language. For a better explanation and responses to objections, consider the National Library of Thailand thought experiment: https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/thought-experiment-in-the-national-library-of-thailand-f2bf761a8a83 https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/thought-experiment-in-t...