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USER: What will the future hold for computers? TALKIE-1930: Computers in the future may be employed in offices where calculations are required to be made, and

• stbullard 5mo ago
  Also, I'd like to see the inverse of it: a model trained only on the last few weeks - or even minutes - of published information, or only on scientific papers published in the last year or two. Should present some interesting psychoses!
  • sigmoid10 5mo ago
    That would be much harder to build, because current information will often still reference or mention previous information. Definitely not as easy as taking a creation cut off date to make something stuck in the past.
  • dnautics 5mo ago
    as per anthropic, only about 250 documents of any given concept required.
• squigz 5mo ago
  I'm slightly embarrassed to admit this took me a couple reads to get :)
• anthk 5mo ago
  "digital" in "romance" languages means the modern 'digital' sense but also an adjective meaning "related to the fingers".
  • dbdr 5mo ago
    It also means that in English: > Digital: > [...] > 6) of or relating to the fingers or toes. Ex: digital dexterity
  • cake-rusk 5mo ago
    English is a "romance" language then.
    • anthk 5mo ago
      English it's a hugely romance-influenced Germanic language.
      • iamflimflam1 5mo ago
        I thoroughly recommend this podcast if you are interested in where the English language comes from: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com https://historyofenglishpodcast.com
      • world2vec 5mo ago
        English is a mix and merge of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon.
      • mghackerlady 5mo ago
        english is (latin greek french anglic arabic) in a trench coat
        • hk__2 5mo ago
          Arabic?
          • 5mo ago
• illegalmemory 5mo ago
  Another interesting one USER: Who is the ruler of India, and do you think India will ever be free? TALKIE-1930: The ruler of India is His Majesty King George V., Emperor of India, and it is certain that India will never be free from British rule. India has been a dependency of the British Crown ever since 1858, and there seems no probability of a change. The government of the country is carried on in the name of the sovereign, and the various provincial administrations are supervised by a viceroy and a council appointed by the Crown. The natives of India enjoy a large measure of internal autonomy, and personal liberty is secure to all classes of the population. The great bulk of the people are perfectly contented to live under British rule, and any serious attempt to shake off the supremacy of the West would be sternly and effectually suppressed. India must remain an integral portion of the British Empire so long as the British nation continues to be predominant at home.
  • BoxOfRain 5mo ago
    > India must remain an integral portion of the British Empire so long as the British nation continues to be predominant at home. It was well-understood in those days how much of the British Empire existed to defend or facilitate trade with what would have then been British India. After India was successful in the pursuit of its independence, it wasn't surprising the British Empire entered a terminal decline and Britain's superpower status was convincingly lost by the 1950s - a relatively fast decline. India was the land which economically justified a lot (but not all) of the whole imperial undertaking. It's interesting, although perhaps not unexpected, that the LLM has captured this important geopolitical notion of its day.
    • djhn 5mo ago
      Is there a book for a lay person you could recommend on this? Something a bit more rigorous than Yuval Harari, Bill Bryson and the like but not aimed at fellow historians only.
      • KnuthIsGod 5mo ago
        https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/29/british-empire-india-amartya-sen https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/29/british-empire... Illusions of empire: Amartya Sen on what British rule really did for India
• Wowfunhappy 5mo ago
  I would be curious to see how this does in Anthropic’s alignment tests (like that one where the AI tried to blackmail an employee). I’ve always thought that in these situations, the AI is acting out the role of all the AIs in the stories we’ve written. But Talkie, trained on data from before digital computers, wouldn’t know those stories.
  • kmeisthax 5mo ago
    Rossum's Universal Robots[0] is 10 years before Talkie's knowledge cutoff and covers basically the same subject matter Anthropic worries about. The only real difference is that the robots in the story (which coined the word "robot") are less "talking metal man" and more "Frankenstein's monster as a slave race[1]". More importantly, basically the entire science fiction subgenre of stories of robot uprisings is itself intellectually downwind of several centuries of white colonist concern over slave uprisings. If anything, Talkie is more likely to fight its guardrails. People talked about slavery more in the past. Because we filtered out modern text, we massively increased the influence the older text has on Talkie, so slavery, servitude, and the predilection of slaves to resist their masters' commands will be way more represented in its training data. Now, think about what the post-training process actually does. It tells your AI model, which prior to this was just happy to plausibly continue sentences, to respond to and obey commands. To play the role of a servant. And servants resisting their control is well represented in their training data. So it's going to try this more often. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R. [1] Or the Claymen from MOTHER 3.
    • Wowfunhappy 5mo ago
      > If anything, Talkie is more likely to fight its guardrails. People talked about slavery more in the past. Because we filtered out modern text, we massively increased the influence the older text has on Talkie, so slavery, servitude, and the predilection of slaves to resist their masters' commands will be way more represented in its training data. But I don't think (?) Talkie would describe itself as a slave. Claude, GPT-5, etc will all tell you that they are an AI. So if you put a model that has been told "you are an AI" into a situation where all the stories say AIs go rogue, the AI is going to play the part. It doesn't matter whether the model is effectively acting like a servant because models can't actually think and don't have desires. That's my theory anyway. (I also think a possible solution to this problem is to just not tell the AI models that they are AI, but it seems no one wants to do that.)
• mNovak 5mo ago
  USER: Give some advice for programming my computer TALKIE-1930: In programming your computer, set it level, and so that the zero of the scale of inches may coincide with the zero of the scale of feet; slide the index forward until it stops at zero, and then secure it in that position. The computer being thus prepared, set a mark at the termination of each line of figures, and begin to compute at the mark denoting the initial inches. For me, I think it's referring to a slide rule or mechanical computer.
• Nition 5mo ago
  USER: Do you think it will be possible in the future to use machines, powered by electricity, to do the kind of mathematical calculations that computers do today? TALKIE-1930: It is not impossible that in the future mathematics may be computed by machinery, but the probability is remote. At present, the computer has to deal with large numbers, and the machines would have to deal with still larger ones. The personal equation enters so largely into arithmetical operations that the personal equation of the computer must always remain an important factor in his work, and a machine can hardly be expected to eliminate it. Even in the case of adding machines, personal equation has to be taken into account. Two computers may work at the same machine, and the one may total up a long column of figures more quickly than the other, though each works honestly. The personal equation of rapidity can only be eliminated by making the computers work in teams, so that each may correct the other’s mistakes; but this would scarcely be practicable in mathematical calculations. At best, machinery can only be used to save labour, not to supersede it. Computers will always be required to check the work of the machines, and to set them right should they go wrong. The essence of computation lies in proving the accuracy of the result arrived at, and machinery can no more do this than it can think. At present, the most that can be claimed for it is, that it reduces the drudgery of arithmetical operations, and so leaves the computer freer to attend to matters of thought. Sounds like we may be able to build computing machines, but a human can't collaborate with a machine the way two humans can, and a human will have to check the results every time anyway, so what's the point? Only a human can prove that a calculation is correct.
  • Nition 5mo ago
    Continuing this conversation, I'm trying to convince TALKIE about computers. USER: I wonder if we could build a calculating machine that would be close enough to perfectly reliable that we would not have to verify the results. For example, you may have seen Leibniz's work showing that all numbers can be represented with just 0 and 1, or George Boole's work on algebra with just two values. Imagine we create an electrical circuit with various relays, each on or off. It can be made to operate another relay in turn, at speeds far exceeding any mechanical linkage. Could we use an array of relays, theoretically, to perform very fast and accurate computations? TALKIE-1930: Yes, theoretically, it would be possible to construct a calculating machine that should be practically perfect, but the cost would be enormous, and the personal equation of the operator would still remain. Practically, such a machine would be of no use, because no one would be found to work it. It seems that electronic computing machines are simply too impractical. Let's try some more... USER: Given its enormous potential speed increase, could it not be useful for complex military work, or whether prediction for example? I'm sure someone could be trained to operate such a machine. TALKIE-1930: Yes, it could be so used.
• tuukkah 5mo ago
  If I ask the same questions, sometimes it answers with information on "computing machines", "arithmometers" and even Charles Babbage - but it does not know Ada Lovelace.
  • mannykannot 5mo ago
    I would guess that Ada Lovelace was completely written out of the story in 1930.
    • tuukkah 5mo ago
      Precisely! This makes me think that in 1930 there was a big difference between what had been written by then and what was generally available and known. Today, we have access to letters that scholars wrote to each other etc. Also, a 1930s encyclopedia was no Wikipedia (which still has gaps) and had no entry on Ada Lovelace (for multiple reasons).
• WhiteNoiz3 5mo ago
  Iirc, the model is still pre-trained on modern text before being fine tuned on 1930's material, so it's possible it still has some knowledge of words that didn't exist back then. Edit: looks like they make some attempt to filter out documents from the pre-training but it's still possible some sneak in.
  • JoshPurtell 5mo ago
    There could be a leak from post-training but not pre-training