Thus revealing what kind of people they were at the time.
Humans do the same thing to humans all the time.
We've banned and made efforts to eradicate: children out of wedlock, children who turn out gay, disabled children, jewish children, children who aren't "aryan", more than two children to a single family...muslims, christians, uyghurs, indigenous groups all over the planet, mongols...
And it's not at all a thing of the past as in just the last 50 years we've had ~15 attempts at the exterminations of targetted groups of people.
No it just reveals that the people in charge of star trek for the past decade are incompetent and have only a passing familiarity with the franchise.
Of course it would be absurd to cast that judgement based of what could easily have just been a bad season but by this point its pretty clear that nobody running the star trek franchise actually wants to be running the star trek franchise. Thats why every new show has some bizarre cross-genre gimmick and they never try to just make a proper star trek.
If computers were fully deterministic, we wouldn't need error correcting ram.
The abstracted design of the machine is meant to be deterministic, but you can't predict before running any command whether or not it will complete because there are externalities that effect the outcome.
Electromagnetic interference even happens in-chip where an electron can accidentally escape it's wire and enter another, possibly resulting in an error, but not every time.
It's even been used as an attack vector where rapidly flipping a bit increases the likelihood that a neighbor bit is also flipped, but the method is probabalistic, not deterministic.
As long as the machine is part of the larger universe, and not completely isolated in its own bubble of space-time (an impossible situation, an object without an environment) - it cannot be purely deterministic because of the fundamental nature of physics.
We cannot test for that which we cannot define. Given that we cannot rigorously define sentience, we cannot test for it. Doesn't really matter whether we're talking about people who are locked in comas, "brain-dead" individuals, dolphins, primates, dogs, or the carefully polished and arranged minerals that we call processors.
There are those who believe that were they reduced to life support, they would no longer be alive and should therefore not be supported by said machines.
There are those who believe that penguins, dolphins, eagles, and more are sentient beings that make choices understanding the consequences, develop love of their partners and mourn their losses, and feel, display, and act upon their emotions.
There are those who believe that fungi/trees/plants are either individually sentient or sentient as a part of a network. Choosing to sacrifice their own nutrients to answer the call of a wounded neighbor, for instance.
Although, there are also those who believe that human's don't have any special unique quality that isn't shared by either all living things or all things in general. These individuals already believe that the machines have the same kinds of qualities as we do. They are slow when they are unhealthy (needing a dusting or coolant loop bleeding being equivalent to us needing some fresh air for instance) and uncooperative when upset (by a virus, full hard drive, or oom).
> There are those who believe that penguins, dolphins, eagles, and more are sentient beings that make choices understanding the consequences, develop love of their partners and mourn their losses, and feel, display, and act upon their emotions.
Anybody objecting to that statement is just ignorant of nature and/or adheres to the quasi-religious human superiority complex.
An eagle isn’t having a conversation with an eagle on the other side of the world about whether it should eat its prey because it’s sentient. It just eats it. I think that speaks to a moral superiority, in some ways.
I’m not claiming humans are morally superior in sum (there is a lot of evil as well as good.) But it’s pretty obvious that humans are the superior species evolutionarily in that we’ve essentially dominated the planet. And on some level, are beating evolution itself (by fixing genetic issues and helping the “least fit” to survive and reproduce.) And are also the only species which has doctors for other species.
All I’m trying to say: I can easily accept other species are intelligent and emotional. The fact that I can know that and accept that, to me, speaks to human “superiority.”
Does superiority matter? Not most of the time. What about when it comes down to life and death? If the choice was to keep one human alive or one theoretically more perfect AI alive? (Boil down utilitarianism into its essence.) doing the “most good” is by definition a human construct. Maybe an agent could have one. But if you don’t accept human superiority on some level, would you accept that a more perfect AI deserves to live more than you? To me, that’s the implication.
The human condition is one of deep and vast ignorance. Pulling information out of the field of reality is actually really difficult for humans much beyond what we see right around us. And the things we see are quite deceiving. And while humans for thousands of years have been as smart as we are, it wasn't till the enlightenment period that we really an ever increasing amount of information and knowledge take hold and start spreading across the world.
And there are plenty of people right now that would drag us kicking and screaming back into that ignorance and suffering. This is what can make talks of AI so annoying, not that people do or don't know what AI is, they don't have the first clue of what people are beyond their anecdotal experience. They don't question their motivations. Why particular flaws they have exist, and why these flaws are shared across humanity. What the pieces look like that make them tick. So yea, when these people talk it just adds noise to the conversation.
> Anybody objecting to that statement is just ignorant of nature and/or adheres to the quasi-religious human superiority complex.
Say we agree that a lot of things outside of humans are sentient. So what? Humans are sentient by that doesn't prevent treating them with with wars, bombs and what not. In fact trillions are spent every year on weaponry aimed squarely at the most sentient of all sentient beings.
Why would anyone worry about LLM's welfare when there's no peace movement to speak of, wars are raging as if they're normal, but hey, look the LLM is crying?
Let's fix human welfare first, then we can sit down and have a really long conversation about the feeble emotions of token generators.
I disagree with the notion that any nature protection efforts are meaningless until we have achieved world peace. (That's what you are essentially implying.)
Though I think that argument is not even applicable. "LLM's welfare" is a meaningless concept, unless "hammer and screwdriver welfare" also become a thing.
Being conscious is weird. It's why we have so many religions and spiritual beliefs.
From a purely secular standpoint, my understanding as a layman is that consciousness is generated through the electrical impulses taking place in our brain every day. The neurons are physical, unlike the modelled neurons in machine learning models. That means that the actual electrical impulses have their own imperfections/weirdnesses that are probably not simulated in a machine learning model... but we quantise the weights anyway in most cases, which is probably more of an issue.
Making actual neuron components out of silicon on the scale needed for a LLM is beyond our current capacity, given that LLM models have many billions of parameters. We're good, but not that good.[0]
Using actual living neurons would be unethical as you'd need to source them from somewhere. So the only other option would be synthesising them ourselves. If this ever happens (or maybe when it happens)... what do we call the resulting creation? Does that count as consciousness?
Or am I looking at this the wrong way?
[0] [Edit: Turns out that when I said "we're not that good", I might be wrong. Within the last few months, IBM introduced the first sub-nanometer node chip: https://research.ibm.com/blog/sub-1nm-node-chips . So... maybe it is in fact possible.]
I believe we have tried using actual neurons with “wetware”. I don’t know the effectiveness of wetware, but it’s out there. I don’t know if it’s ethical, I guess if you donated your brain upon death for that purpose it’s “mostly” ethical
> There are those who believe that penguins, dolphins, eagles, and more are sentient beings that make choices understanding the consequences, develop love of their partners and mourn their losses, and feel, display, and act upon their emotions.
If you grep pubmed for relevant Ethology papers, you'll find it's a bit more than a belief. ;-)
I'd strongly agree there are no non-contradictory definitions of consciousness among those that commonly appear. But it's a category that, despite these contradiction, hasn't become marginal in the fashion of the aether or the theory of the flat earth. I think this because people indeed need it to bridge the biological world and the world of ethics and legality. I think that if we have a system of legality and systems of opportunity humans should be legally equal persons and have equal opportunity. But humans are manifestly unequal (though overall more incomparable than orderable in a system of ranks). Most people need some concept of essence to justify ethical equality among people. And so consciousness stays in people's minds however contradictory.
Which I think gives the article's point validity. Confused definitions of consciousness can give really confused ideas about ethical behavior regards "intelligent" computer programs. And things are confusing enough otherwise.
> despite these contradiction, hasn't become marginal in the fashion of the aether or the theory of the flat earth. I think this because people indeed need it to bridge the biological world and the world of ethics and legality.
Sometimes the replies in these threads leave me wondering if p-zombies are real. It isn't that there are contradictions, it's that we literally do not know how to define the thing. And it has not fallen out of fashion because it is self evidently real - we all experience it.
We don't need it in order to bridge anything. Legality and ethics are largely game theory, however there are some aspects of both that only exist due to it. So it isn't some abstract concept used to bridge other concepts but rather a concrete thing that influences our way of doing things.
Consciousness is to our universe as a video game player is to the in-game universe. Some games even call player connections "souls" or "minds" - a character belonging to a player who's lost connection may be "unconscious" or a "zombie".
Game characters, unless they've been made to break the fourth wall, have no idea what this means or why this happens.
I don't mean to imply our universe is a video game, since it would be games all the way up.
Feigning? Okay then you go ahead and prove your claim by demonstration. Rigorously define the term such that I can objectively prove that my dog is conscious and that the rocks in my backyard aren't conscious. Then I'll finally be able to figure out whether or not various insects are (I sure hope wasps aren't otherwise I'm probably some sort of war criminal).
> Confused definitions of consciousness can give really confused ideas about ethical behavior regards "intelligent" computer programs.
Is that what's going on? If these things were conscious, then their creators wouldn't be responsible for their actions? That's the crux of the disagreement?
Legal doctrine that boils down to "trust me bro" isn't even bad doctrine (it's not proper doctrine at all), but I think the comparison is still valid here, because both sentience/non-sentience and art/porn may just be fundamental category errors.
Perhaps we can't define a "partitioning" rule because no valid partition exists.
For consciousness/sentience, that's an incredibly tough a pill for most to swallow; it would mean calling into question more hundreds of years' worth (probably more) of philosophical thinking, all of which was constructed on the axiom that "sentience" is a single indivisible trait: you either have it or you don't.
If we find that "root dependency" was little more than wishful thinking all along, a whole slew of Enlightenment-era philosophy (and all the modern legal principles derived therefrom) suddenly fall apart unless we find some other suitable criterion that would shore them up (or we just collectively avert our attention and pretend the conflict doesn't exist, which is the route I expect many would prefer to take).
> a whole slew of Enlightenment-era philosophy (and all the modern legal principles derived therefrom) suddenly fall apart
I don't think that's true. Pretty much all legal constructs hold up just fine under game theory regardless of whether or not you consider the world to be deterministic and have absolutely nothing to do with consciousness or lack thereof. Also note that a deterministic world isn't an argument against consciousness.
That's not the point. You know exactly how to define being conscious and aware- it's your subjective experiencing of the world and of your inner states. The problem is that being a subjective experiencing, there is no way to communicate it to the outside world.
No, humans output a stream of tokens that sound like what a being with subjective experiences would output. Both you and I make an assumption that this stream of words is at least somewhat representative of what the are experiencing and that the person is not a p-zombie.
But you have zero proof that their words aren't a confabulation, you can only know than when you output a similar set of words you had a subjective mind state they represent.
The very best you can do is define human consciousness as requiring the functions of a human brain, and try to figure out (decide/agree) the chances that something which is working loosely on the same principles is or isn't conscious.
At the end of the day it will always be an agreement, never scientifically proven as fact.
Yeah, I'm really pissed at all these car drivers doing marathons in 26 minutes because I've been working on it for years and can't get my time below 4 hrs.
Even though I used AI, it took me months to decipher parts of the emulation. I had to study, and I loved learning things I didn't know. It's also a very beautiful learning path; everything related to technology is magical. Engineers from all over the world are trying to revive the iPod and products that are no longer commercially available.
I think one of us missed the sarcasm. Lots of people post compiled binaries to git, so you can't really use that as a "you shouldn't forget to mention LLM use because you shouldn't submit compiled binaries" because lots of people do it in order to use it as a distribution channel rather than requiring users to compile it themselves or requiring the author(s) to host the binaries elsewhere.
>If you're going to expend hours creating the page, the table etc etc then you're far more likely to also pay attention to the research
There are and were entire sites and networks dedicated to conspiracy and disinformation. Hell, people have been payed to spread disinformation. People have done it deliberately for the lolz.
It has alway been possibly to get your nonsense enrgaved upon the web in an afternoon. That it now takes less time is irrelevant. You should have been checking your sources then, and you should be checking your sources now.
Authors of the past would often not provide sources, so if you were interested you'd have to track them down. This is also true today.
That an LLM is in the loop is no different, in kind, from the old copy-pasta and network driven spread of misinformation. The problem was never the tools (ah, damn, now anyone who knows [html] can just lie on the internet)(ah, damn now anyone who knows [prompting] can just lie on the internet).
The problem isn't the tools, it's the users unwillingness and or reluctance to develop critical reading and thinking skills. If you're using "Not an LLM" as a proxy for "gains reliability in my mind" then you're being lazy. It is just as easy to lie without an LLM.
You're not selling nothing, you're selling space, and taking 80% of the donation for it.
So, if I want to donate to children's surgeries, I can either donate to say St. Judes where ~82% of my donation goes to treatments and the rest supports the operations of the hospital, or buy a slot on your site so that 80% of the donation goes in your pocket.
I'll really have to spend a lot of time solving this particularly vexing quandry.
Some believe one should come to forgive their enemies. Some believe that one should purge one's enemies from life itself. Some believe that one should have no enemies.
Some believe that material wealth is fine to a point, some believe that the desire of possesing material wealth is a source of discontent, some believe that it is the source of many or all other discontents.
Some believe that wanting to improve one's station is a source of discontent.
Some are fine with removing life if it is inconvenient (like bugs) where others value the life of a bug equally to their own.
Some are okay with their friends and family members murdering foreigners actively engaged in warfare that threatens their own life and livelihood. Some are okay with their friends and family killing the friends and family of the enemy combatants. Some are okay with killing anyone just generally in the vicinity of enemy combatants. Some say literally poisoning the well is a step too far, but that we had to write that down is evidence of other's believing differently. Some believe it's okay to murder people, communities, and entire populations because they'd rather use the land for themselves, or maybe their noses are too long and their skin is indistinguishably different.
Rereading your comment, I see the "in group" disclaimer. What's the in group? Some believe it's just their family, the people on the block, the people who have lived within a certain number of miles for a certain number of years, citizens governed by a particular government, the citizens governed by a group of governments, the people living on a particular continent, people in general, humans in general, life in general, or everything. There are people to whom no human should ever murder another for any reason. You might agree with that in theory, but would you allow a conquering force that is literally raping your friends and family to simply do so unquestioned? Would you feel vindicated striking back? There are some who have decided that the morally correct thing to do is to simply quit the land and or life itself rather than to fight back, because to them murder is wrong period.
The good life is deeply personal and absolutely not universal.
But it all comes down to an expectation of some altruism. Yes you may vilify the out group but are the basic dynamics of helping your fellow person out really so different across space and time? I don't think so. Every culture has villages and relies upon others for mutual benefits. That is what I am talking about with this sort of universal baseline level of morality. Yes there could be a spectrum of acceptable cruelty but generally you have to think about these things in terms of a playground scenario vs the context that leads to a military operation involving poisoning a well. Would you play with someone who slapped you in the face and pulled your hair on the playground? No, and that is universal.
>Yes you may vilify the out group but are the basic dynamics of helping your fellow person out really so different across space and time?
I believe that the bible teaches the purpose of life is to glorify the God of the universe. If a religion's "purpose of life" is about "interacting with other humans, and not about God" then we have opposing "purposes". I saw something similar about Secular Humanists: they claimed they align with the bible "Love God and love your Neighbor"... but they don't believe God exists, so they - on a fundamental level - can't follow thay commandment.
>Would you play with someone who slapped you in the face and pulled your hair on the playground?
Having made friends of enemies, I may or may not depending on the persons development in future, and that's my point. There are many people who would agree that just because someone had done something bad in the past does not warrant continued future negative engagement. But there are also people who will make a lifelong arch-nemesis when getting cut off in traffic.
In the same village model, you'll see villages who will excommunicate people over relatively minor things, some only in severe cases, and some who will offer paths to redemption in all but the most severe of cases. A church might give you a life time ban for skipping a meeting, wearing the wrong clothing, talking to the wrong people, or any of a list of what an average person might call small transgressions.
Homophobes will taunt and even shun their friends if their friends talk to queers, god forbid befriend a fag. Christians will admonish those who talk to declared Satanists, those who listen to satanic music, etc. Some christains are homophobic, some are not. Some Satanists are homophobic, some are not. Some Christains don't mind homophobia, some can't tolerate it. So what's the core good life shared between all of these match-ups? Does the one universal good life include gay people and communication with gay people? How is that there can be these groups of people who are happy to hate on gay people if the one universal good life does not include bigotry? And you can't say that the one universal good life includes bigotry because there are many people who cannot abide such a stance toward anyone.
Even if you abstract all the way to "all in groups are wary of their outgroups" you're still not saying anything entirely true because their are in fact groups of people who believe that all are genuinely equal in all things. Do I personally? No. I believe that there are bad people and that there are people that humanity would be better off without. But, I also know that there are people who do not believe that there are bad people, only bad actions - that everyone is elligible for equality at some point.
Humans do the same thing to humans all the time.
We've banned and made efforts to eradicate: children out of wedlock, children who turn out gay, disabled children, jewish children, children who aren't "aryan", more than two children to a single family...muslims, christians, uyghurs, indigenous groups all over the planet, mongols...
And it's not at all a thing of the past as in just the last 50 years we've had ~15 attempts at the exterminations of targetted groups of people.
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