pegasus

23 ms·

421.
by pegasus 4y ago
Doing nothing does that for me. Seriously. I'm regularly confronted with this feeling, and one thing I found over the years to consistently lift me out of that trough of meaninglessness is meditation. It boils down to "if nothin
422.
by pegasus 4y ago
They might well be in a couple of years, once they become deeply integrated with symbolic techniques. It's already happening with plugins, chain-of-thought reasoning, self-reflection etc. Soon the illusion will be very convincing and h
423.
by pegasus 4y ago
The rabbit hole goes very deep with these questions. For example, you left out above the other half of the equation: inventions. Our creative ability. Is that just more pattern recognition? And can discovery and invention be always clean
424.
by pegasus 4y ago
Maybe that's all there is to it. But maybe not. These questions are not settled. It might seem obvious to you, but it doesn't seem so to me. Check out some of my other comments in this thread if you'd like to understand wher
425.
by pegasus 4y ago
Yes, in as far as LLMs can be said to make inventions and discoveries, this is clearly how they do it. And yes, these type of processes definitely play a big part in our human creative capacity. But to say this is all there is to it, is
426.
by pegasus 4y ago
If you subscribe to a purely mechanistic world-view, i.e. computationalism, then yes. But that's a leap of faith I cannot justify taking. It's a matter of faith, because though we cannot exclude the possibility logically, it als
427.
by pegasus 4y ago
I would agree that much more than we're usually ready to admit to ourselves is second-hand, but saying everything is going too far. Inventions and discoveries are happening all the time, at all scales.
428.
by pegasus 4y ago
Yes, but that dream? It could never have it. Sure, it can produce at times very convincing descriptions of supposed dreams, but not actually have the experience of dreaming. Because of that, there will always be ways it will eventually m
429.
by pegasus 4y ago
There's definitely hubris in how clever we consider ourselves. And encountering these AIs will hopefully bring a healthy adjustment there. But another manifestation of our hubris is the way we over-valorize our cleverness, making us
430.
by pegasus 4y ago
I think @dvt's comment above is a good attempt at answering this question. I agree with him that intrinsic motivation and a capacity for suffering, hope and all the other emotions (which we share with pretty much all animals, if not p
431.
by pegasus 4y ago
Good point, that very much vibes with my thoughts on this matter. Lately, I've been contemplating the analogy between the role LLMs might take within society with that of the brain's language center* in human behavior. There'
432.
by pegasus 4y ago
It's more than just that. The intermediary steps act as a kind of working memory, ensuring that the model is less likely to get lost in the weeds.
433.
by pegasus 4y ago
You would command it if you'd think it's sentient. Otherwise, you'd take up that beef with its maker, which would be the right course of action (preferably before being put in that uncomfortable situation)
434.
by pegasus 4y ago
That's because we haven't encountered coherent text-producing systems until now. Those who won't adjust this reaction will suffer from confusion and pollution of their informational environment.
435.
by pegasus 4y ago
And what about that doppelgänger I keep meeting whenever I face a mirror? He seems so alive and real, and we really don't understand enough about qualia to dismiss his existence, after all. I'm starting to worry about him, what
436.
by pegasus 4y ago
Look again, two different books are referred on one line, then a third lower down.
437.
by pegasus 4y ago
Why would you be in such a rush to return home?
438.
by pegasus 4y ago
Not so: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/health/27well.html "But when it comes to long distances, humans can outrun almost any animal. Because we cool by sweating rather than panting, we can stay
439.
by pegasus 4y ago
Yes, I believe some careful and informed pondering leads one towards that conclusion. Hume's guillotine is an implacable philosophical device: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEUO6pjwFOo (I warmly recommend all the co
440.
by pegasus 4y ago
I've seen that paper, and it's amazing indeed what GPT-4 is capable of. But none of that supports that closing quote, which to me points to a worrying philosophical naïveté. How can one equip an entity with "intrinsic motiv
441.
by pegasus 4y ago
IMO, the only realistic answer to that question is "we have no idea". Everything else is just taking wild, tenuous guesses. But LLMs have no desires of their own, which to me settles the question of rights.
442.
by pegasus 4y ago
The opposite effect (generated by one wanting astrology to be false - and there are plenty of reasons for that inclination also) might also be afoot.
443.
by pegasus 4y ago
The flow of a river is also highly chaotic - look at all the turbulence for example. It's course over it's lifetime (of millenia) is similarly unpredictable.
444.
by pegasus 4y ago
Psychedelic therapy.
445.
by pegasus 4y ago
Some level of respect, higher than the average warlord of the time.
446.
by pegasus 4y ago
Especially when their experiments will start to slowly turn into the paperclip maximizer. That's going to be the most interesting thing ever!
447.
by pegasus 4y ago
But it's not easy at all to get confused, unless one decides to consciously suspend disbelief, in spite of what they know. If they do know how LLMs work. It's much easier to get confused, of course, for someone who doesn'
448.
by pegasus 4y ago
I think, rather than dabbling into the very foreign world of 3D reality, a malicious LLM would be much more comfortable staying within the bounds of the purely symbolic world it inhabits and "understands". Hacking into some criti
449.
by pegasus 4y ago
Sure, there's no intent, but the most straightforward translation of that threat into actions (if it would be connected to systems it could act on) would be to act on that threat. Does it matter if there's real intent or it'
450.
by pegasus 4y ago
That's what proponents of self-driving cars keep promising also.

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