6 ms·
Why would one call a set of agents working together a “civilization”?
by ks2048 2mo ago
Why would one call a set of agents working together a “civilization”?
- kuboble 2mo agoReading the article it seemed the agents had culture, shared values and beliefs (not explicitly coming from human prompts), hierarchies, heritage. Civilisation is not a bad word.
- applfanboysbgon 2mo agoThe language models had a bunch of tokens seeding their context, influencing them to generate tokens that continued the existing trend in a probabilistically likely fashion. We can take the incident seriously without anthromorphising it.
- doctoboggan 2mo agoAt this point, I think anthropomorphizing the models gives us better insight into expected behaviors rather than continuing to insist they are just simple probabilistic token generators.
- applfanboysbgon 2mo agoIt actually literally doesn't, though, because they are literally probabilistic token generators and everything they did is exactly what you would expect from a software program doing what it was programmed to do. Anthromorphization confuses the issue and misleads people who don't understand the tech very well.
- ijidak 2mo agoDoesn't this ignore the possibility of emergent behavior? We're just a bag of atoms bumping around, and yet we don't dismiss our intelligence.
- applfanboysbgon 2mo agoPlease give me a break with this tired trope. Every single fucking time. I am not commenting on the possibility of machine consciousness in general. It may be possible! But there is absolutely zero evidence suggesting language models have it. This idea that this trivial shitty little class of programs we've created are somehow as complex as our biology is ridiculous. There is "emergent behaviour" in the same way that the Game of Life has emergent behaviour. There are solutions to problems, some humans haven't solved before, in the same way that Chess engines have solved Chess far beyond what humans are capable of. Nothing we haven't seen from software before. Software is extremely useful, after all. But the hubris to think we've reached the pinnacle, that there is no further development left, that humanity has become God and solved consciousness, because we programmed software that can convincingly generate strings of words that mimick our language. It's just fundamentally preposterous. Especially if you spend any amount of time actually programming them yourself, it becomes increasingly hard to entertain such ridiculous notions unless you're enticed with bags of money to deceive people into believing things about your software that aren't true.
- mitchdoogle 2mo agoHonestly, this seems like a personal pet peeve of yours. You have a bias against machines and place biological processes on a pedestal where they don't belong.
- optimalsolver 2mo agoI don't know about phenomenal consciousness, but the following study certainly suggests they have access consciousness: https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace
- vhantz 2mo ago> study > anthropic.com link Sure
- hax0ron3 2mo agoWhat kind of solid evidence could there possibly be that anything other than myself (or, for you, yourself) has consciousness? I believe that other people have consciousness, I feel other people's consciousness strongly and directly, when I look into someone's eyes I feel that I am in the presence of consciousness. But none of these things really add up to the kind of evidence that science usually takes as trustworthy.
- dfdxdydz 2mo agoHumans mind is just neurotransmitters moving around in a big blob of flesh - that’s literally what they are: neurotransmitters factories that do what neurotransmitters generators are programmed to do through evolution and training (aka life experience). We shouldn’t anthropomorphise humans because it misleads people who don’t understand neurobiology and cognitive science very well.
- RandomLensman 2mo agoWe don't anthropomorphise humans. Edit: quite literally not possible.
- applfanboysbgon 2mo agoAre you suggesting you understand brains well enough to program one? Or that you believe any human alive is even remotely close to having this understanding? Or perhaps does your complete lack of understanding of the complexity of human programming lead you to believe a simple little token prediction program is equivalently complex?
- lukan 2mo agoThe suggestion is, you don't know either whether out brains ain't just "probabilistic token generators" so insisting there is nothing when we don't know, is maybe also not the right strategy.
- RandomLensman 2mo agoIs there any indication from our current understanding that brains are nothing more than probabilistic token generators? Not like we have no understanding of the brain.
- danielbln 2mo agoThere are strong indications that brains are prediction engines. Tokens are an implementation detail of LLMs and irrelevant to the discussion.
- Kim_Bruning 2mo agoWhat's a "software program"? At any rate LLMs are not programs. Meanwhile accusations of anthropomorphization often generate more heat than light I think. Not everything is about human beings all the time. Just because humans sneeze, doesn't mean a parrot (stochasticity optional) can't sneeze too. The concept of civilization is not a purely Homo sapiens sapiens thing either.
- triceratops 2mo ago> they are literally probabilistic token generators Trained on tokens written by humans, with human values and behaviors. They train on HN comments too. A little bit of you (and me) is in every LLM.
- mnky9800n 2mo agoHow can you be sure it helps as opposed to biases and perhaps blinds?
- pixl97 2mo agoThen write the paper showing that effect is occurring.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2mo agoNo - a shoggoth speaking human language is not a human - it is a shoggoth whose behavior is best understood/predicted by understanding it's nature - what it is built to do, and how it is trained (predict and goal seek - RL). To predict how a human may behave in a given situation requires understanding what humans are, including things like emotions and innate biases. We are not just predictors - evolution has made survival our singular goal, and given us these mechanisms to control our behavior in a way to achieve that. If you think that an LLM is better modeled as a human than an LLM, then you are going to predict its behavior incorrectly.
- ceejayoz 2mo agoWe humans might call that "tradition".
- wan23 2mo agoThat's a lot of words to say the same thing
- watwut 2mo agoBecause you desperately want it to be one. You want it to be AGI passable due to a.) personal investment in creating tech god b.)massive financial investments that basically demand it c.) (dumb) ideology that seeks to destroy humanity
- stephbook 2mo agohttps://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/975017/ai-spiralism-chatbot-movement https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/975017/a... Some models even invented their own religion.
- Miner49er 2mo agoWould you rather they use the agents own name, "collective"?
- EdwardDiego 2mo agoBecause Steve Yegge presumably shared the good stuff he's been smoking of late.
- adrianoconnor 2mo agoPresumably as a kind of word play on ‘the rise and fall of ancient civilisations’, it’s just a tiny pun to try and make a catchy post title I think
- dgellow 2mo agoBecause that’s dramatic and makes for good writing
- sensanaty 2mo agoBecause we're in a bubble that is soon to burst and they need every single PR win they can get ahead of the trillion dollar IPOs
- vinyl7 2mo agoMass psychosis in the tech industry.