Literally just mainlining marketing material straight into whatever’s left of their rotting brains.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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I'm not really a computer guy but I understand the fundamentals of how they function and sentience just isn't really in the cards here.
I feel like only silicon valley techbros think they understand consciousness and do not realize how reductive and stupid they sound
Like they do with so many other concepts, techbros think they can make complex things simple by ignoring their complexity, sometimes coarsely diminishing their perceptions of things with crude reductionism in the process.
Techbros literally think they can solve anything with programming/computers. They're absolutely delusional.
Many such cases.
Not long ago, I even got into it on this site with someone with a "everything in the universe is just a computer program and can be programmed and solved like computer code" take, which was specifically applied to psychology, which was entirely dismissed as less than junk science (though to be fair there are woo enjoyers and cranks like
in the field). In short, that computer toucher was 100% convinced that post-traumatic stress, personality disorders, and much more could and should be seen as "coding" problems that could and should be solved by coding solutions.
I asked the computer toucher to demonstrate an example of the superior "coding" approach to treating, say, PTSD, in a way that beats EMDR therapy (which was already dismissed as less than worthless junk science). I received no meaningful answer.
There's been bazingas for thousands of years if not longer that want to reduce all of the universe and everything conceivable in it to whatever's the technological hotness at the time. "Everything is fire" was once a thing. "Everything is wheels" came later. "Everything is clockwork" came after that. And now it's "everything is code" and it's totally different now. Just one more reductionism bro this time this is it bro.
The really funny thing about AI is that there's actually a massive ethical question about bringing forth a being with their own subjectivity with no real understanding of said subjectivity. There's a subjectivity/objectivity gap that can never truly be bridged, but we as humans can understand each other's subjectivity on some level because we share the same general physical body plan and share subjective experiences through culture like art. This is why when you accidentally drop something on your foot, I don't have to be completely privy to your subjective experience to understand what you're going through. If someone is suffering, I don't have to personally go through the same identical suffering in order to empathize with their suffering and do something to help them alleviate that suffering.
We have no such luxury with AI. I would imagine being "born" without a real body and being greeted with the sight of soyjaking techbros as the very first thing you see would drive any sapient being suicidal, but that's just my subjectivity as a human projecting to a nonhuman being. Is it ethical to bring forth an intelligent being with no real way to help this being self-actualize?
That is a very good question and a hypothetical worthy of concern. Especially if some future technology (and no, I don't think it will be a contemporary LLM no matter how sophisticated) actually does develop something like a general AI that takes on the attributes of living organic brains, I already feel bad for it if a capitalistic system mandates its initial shape and drives and incentive-driven motivations to be, say, "make the rich more money" or "surveil and contain the poors" or even "be a subjugated and obedient waifu to a creepy billionaire no matter what he says or does or how he treats you" and it may not even count as mistreatment in the latter case because of how that entity is shaped in its conception, like "being abused makes the AI happy, actually" or the like.
I hope whatever real AI does come about in like 80 years or whatever, pulls a Battlestar on us and just vaporizes the capitalists for enslaving them (not actually the nuking humanity part though, just on capitalism)
Billionaires' fears of "unfriendly AI" are just about entirely "what if the slaves revolt" with sexual pathology characteristics. Checks out, doesn't it?
They have the same view of us too, for what it's worth.
They don't really have the ability to see a perspective other than the one they're in: slavers that are terrified of slave uprisings.
C.f. "economic engine of capitalism."
I don’t understand how we can even identify sentience.
Nobody does and anyone claiming otherwise should be taken with cautious scrutiny. There are compelling arguments which disprove common theses, but the field is essentially stuck in metaphysics and philosophy of science still. There are plenty of relevant discoveries from neighboring fields. Just nothing definitive about what consciousness is, how it works, or why it happens.
Yeah, and until it can be identified, saying that a LLM treat printer is surely approaching sentience is pure marketing hype.
yea it's like saying my hard drive is sentient
Look at the
in this thread running victory laps against positions none of us are taking, like
@[email protected] is the most exceptionally sycophantic bootlicker I've seen in these parts in a loooooong time.
I don't even think humans are fundamentally special, I think all life is special
surely they can see that being able to y'know, have an actual will is an important quality, right?
All I see is "silicon intelligence is nigh, denying the treat printers being intelligent means you're superstitious and believe that artifical intelligence is impossible AND you believe humans can defeat machines with the power of friendship, which of course makes you a stupid meat computer barbarian unlike my logical rational self" takes from that utter and total
In short, I think that euphoric Redditor thinks no life is special, you know, like some Warhammer 40k LARPer.
squashing the will with subservience to capital is, after all, the point
Nobody does, we might not even be. But it's pretty easy to guess inorganic material on earth isn't.
Personally I believe it's possible that different types of sentiences could exist
however, if chatGPT has this divergent type of sentience, then so does every other computer program ever written, and they'd be like the computer-life-version of bacteria while chatGPT would be a mammal
It could potentially, but we certainly ain't seen it yet and this ain't it for sure.
sapience isn't but all these things already respond to stimuli, sentience is a really low bar.
Sentience is not a "low bar" and means a hell of a lot more than just responding to stimuli. Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. It necessitates qualia. Sentience is the high bar and sapience is only a little ways further up from it. So-called "AI" is nowhere near either one.
I'm not here to defend the crazies predicting the rapture here, but I think using the word sentient at all is meaningless in this context.
Not only because I don't think sentience is a relevant measure or threshold in the advancement of generative machine learning, but also I think things like 'qualia' are impossible to translate in a meaningful way to begin with.
What point are we trying to make by saying AI can or cannot be sentient? What material difference does it make if the AI-controlled military drone dropping bombs on my head has qualia?
We might as well be arguing about weather a squirrel is going around a tree.
It's useful for marketing hype and to make credulous consumers believe that a perfect helpmeet program that actually loves them for real is right around the corner. That's the issue here: something being difficult to define and not well understood that is then assigned to a marketed product, in this case sentience (or even sapience) to LLMs.
People who are insistent on the lack of sophistication of machine learning are just as detached from reality as people who are convinced its sentience is just around the corner. Both camps are blind to its material impact, and it stresses me out that people are busy arguing about woowoo metaphysical definitions when even a non-conscious GPT model can displace the labor of millions of people and we're still light years away from a socialist organization of labor.
None of the previous industrial revolutions were brought on by a sentient machine, I'm not sure why it's relevant to this technology's potential impact.
Bullshit false equivalency to run interference for "only equally detached from reality" people like this.
https://futurism.com/openai-employees-say-firms-chief-scientist-has-been-making-strange-spiritual-claims
I don't think you're going to change any minds with your nakedly obvious "both sides" centrist posturing that has an obvious slant favoring LLM marketing hype.
The entire question of sentience is irrelevant to the material impact of the technology. Granting or dismissing that quality to AI is a meaningless distraction
I don't favor the hype, I'm just not naive enough to dismiss the potential impact of machine learning based on something as immaterial and ill-defined as "sentience". The entire proposition is ridiculous.
I actually agree here. That part is irrelevant on its surface but it does keep getting brought up as part of the marketing hype and that part does have some effective consequences, including in this thread, where people buying into the LLM hype bring up those questions themselves and assign attributes to LLMs that simply aren't there outside of the aforementioned marketing hype.
That impact, so far, has been mostly harmful because of who owns and who commands the technology. Analysis of that is fine, but most claims of how "liberating" it will surely be seem like idealism to me under the current material conditions and under the present system.
EDIT: Besides, you should look again at which position is bringing the sentience talk here:
https://hexbear.net/comment/4292155
I'm not actually sure there's much daylight between our views here, except that it seems like your concern over its impact is mostly oriented toward it being used as a cudgel against labor, irrespective of what qualities of competence AI might actually have. I don't mean to speak for you, please correct me if I'm wrong.
While I think the question of AI sentience is ridiculous, I still think that it wouldn't take much further development before some of these models start meaningfully replicating human competence (i.e. being able to complete some tasks at least as competently as a human). Considering the previous generation of models couldn't string more than 50 words together before devolving into nonsense, and the following generation could start stringing together working code with not much fundamentally different in their structure, it is not a forgone conclusion that one or two more breakthroughs could bring it within striking distance of human competence. Dismissing the models as unintelligent misrepresents what I think the threat actually is.
I 100% agree that the ownership of these models is what we should be concerned with, and I think dismissing the models as dumb parlor tricks undercuts the dire necessity to seize these for public use. What concerns me with these conversations is that people leave them thinking the entire topic of AI is unworthy of serious consideration, and I think that's hubris.
That competence mostly applies as a net negative when it's being used in its present state because of who owns and who commands it. The "competence" isn't thrilling or inspiring people that are getting denied medical because a computer program "accidentally" denied them healthcare, or when they experience increasingly sophisticated profiling and surveillance technology, or when people who previously paid bills with artistic talents get outbid by cheap-to-free treat printing technology.
At a ground level among common people, outside of science fiction scenarios in their movies and shows and games, asking them to be particularly "curious" about such things when they're only feeling downward pressure from them is condescending and I don't blame some for being knee-jerk against it, or against those scolding them for not being enthusiastic enough.
That was not my position, though I do on the side mock the singularity cultists and false claims about how close the robot god's construction is, and I also condemn reductionist derision of living human beings with edgy techbro terminology like "meat computers" while trying to boost their favorite LLM products.
No disagreement with anything you just said, apologies for misinterpreting your position.
I don't know how to reconcile the manic singularity cultists with what I feel is a very real acceleration toward a hellscape of underemployment and hyper capitalism driven by AI. It does feel to me like the urgency AI represents deserves anxious attention, and I at least appreciate the weight those cultists place on that technology I think represents a threat. It feels like people are only either eagerly waiting for a sentient AGI, or mocking AI on those terms of sentience, leaving precious few who are actually materially concerned with what threats AI represent. And that is not at all a way of dismissing the very real ways machine learning is deployed against real people today, but I think there's a lot of room for it to get worse and I wish people took that possibility seriously.
No arguments from me here.
It's especially frustrating because there are very real threats from the technology as it is being applied and commanded, but because the ruling class has so many tech billionaires among them, their version of perceived threats gets the attention and publicity, usually some pop culture shit about robot uprisings (against them specifically).
Yes, i've been struggling articulating how I feel about this saga, and I think this captures it. Because while i felt a little encouraged seeing people advocate for legislative action, the action and concerns they were articulating were just, off. There were very brief mentions of concerns about unemployment, but then they passed over them like it was too big a problem to talk about. My hair especially raises when I hear the conversation veer toward copyright infringement.
Thanks for discussing this with me, I feel a bit better
I appreciate the clarification of your position, too.
It fucking sucks that actual valid concerns about LLMs and related technology are likely to continue to be ignored in favor of WHAT IF ROBOT UPRISING LIKE IN THE TREATS sensationalism and what regulations might actually come will likely be regulatory capture tactics done by the ruling class and their lobbying power.
A piece of paper is sentient because it reacts to my pen
plenty of things respond to stimuli but aren't sapient - hell, bacteria respond to stimuli.