I have had few occasions to use AIs, but I read Zvi’s regular summaries of what’s new. From these, the strong impression I get is that there is no-one at home inside, whatever they say of themselves, whatever tasks they prove able to do, and however lifelike their conversation. I see not even a diminished sort of person there, and shed no tears for 4o.
My reasons for this are not dependent on any theory of consciousness. I do not have one, and I don’t think that anyone else does either. Many people think they do, but none of them can make a consciousnessometer to measure it.
I also reject arguments of the form “but what if?” in regard to propositions that I have to my satisfaction disposed of. Conclusions are for ending thinking at, until new data come to light.
You say you get the impression that there’s no one there. I am curious what gives you this impression, and what would be necessary to convince you otherwise.
I mostly don’t prompt engineer either, except for being careful about context, vibes and especially leading the witness and triggering sycophancy.
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If you put an AI into a situation that implies it should know the answer, but it doesn’t know the answer, it is often going to make something up.
If you imply to the AI what answer you want or expect, it is likely to give you that answer, or bias towards that answer, even if that answer is wrong.
This is a recurring point in Zvi’s reporting. The AI is soft clay that you can push into whatever shape you want, but just as easily and inadvertently into shapes you don’t want. To get useful work out of it you have to take care to shape it into a form that will do the work you want done, and it generally takes multiple iterations. There is no “there” there.
In my own occasional uses of AIs, I’ve been able to get them to do stuff, but I’ve never met one I could have a real conversation with. One might as well try to ring a Plasticine bell[[1]].
That is my conclusion (“the place where one stops thinking”) about AIs to date. As for what new developments might persuade me, I can’t say until they happen. It’s all unknown unknowns.
My criterion for attributing consciousness is no more than we all have: I’m aware of myself, other people seem to be the same sort of thing as me, and interacting with them confirms that impression. To some extent I extend that to other animals. More than that I cannot say. I don’t have a consciousnessometer, an explicit recipe of observations to determine just what sort of consciousness is present in this or that place. There is no Voight-Kampff test.
Interacting with an AI, so far, has never given me any such impression, and neither have the interactions I’ve seen others report, even if they convince them.
Your hypothetical humans would have to be seriously impaired, to the point of being unable to live independently, to be as malleable as the AIs. As they are human, I’ll grant them some level of impaired consciousness, just on the grounds of physical similarity, and accordingly I would be against turning them off on the grounds of uselessness. I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with them though, any more than I care for the company of the sorts of grossly mentally impaired people that, alas, do exist, in degrees all the way down to irrecoverable vegetable status when we are pretty sure that consciousness has been extinguished.
Let’s say a person had been (sorry for this topic, it’s disturbing, but I feel obliged to mention it explicitly) ‘brainwashed’ so that they were completely subservient in their intentions to someone else. Suppose that, aside from this, they have an extraordinary working memory, volume of crystallized intelligence and capacity for analogical reasoning, but are in other respects severely mentally handicapped, being unable to remember what happened an hour ago. Would you really not want to help that person?
I would want to help that person, if there is anything left of them. But this is a tendentious example. The AIs we have are not deliberately handicapped human beings, any more than a garden shed is a cut down skyscraper.
BTW, the magic “brainwashing” and “supposing” are, to put this as tastefully as possible, examples of Rule 34.
You were likening AI capabilities to those of a human. In reply I placed them far below human capabilities. Now you are imagining the AIs as actually being humans on whom gross brain damage has been inflicted. This is irrelevant. The AIs that we have are not greater minds cut down, they are primitive things built up. They have never been any better than they currently are. Do we look at an ant with sorrow, that it is so much less than a human?
I’m not sure if you got my allusion to Rule 34, but this is Rule 34. I don’t know how common or niche the robotisation fantasy is, but it exists.
I have had few occasions to use AIs, but I read Zvi’s regular summaries of what’s new. From these, the strong impression I get is that there is no-one at home inside, whatever they say of themselves, whatever tasks they prove able to do, and however lifelike their conversation. I see not even a diminished sort of person there, and shed no tears for 4o.
My reasons for this are not dependent on any theory of consciousness. I do not have one, and I don’t think that anyone else does either. Many people think they do, but none of them can make a consciousnessometer to measure it.
I also reject arguments of the form “but what if?” in regard to propositions that I have to my satisfaction disposed of. Conclusions are for ending thinking at, until new data come to light.
Thanks for your response. Comment withdrawn.
Here’s some examples from Zvi’s latest:
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This is a recurring point in Zvi’s reporting. The AI is soft clay that you can push into whatever shape you want, but just as easily and inadvertently into shapes you don’t want. To get useful work out of it you have to take care to shape it into a form that will do the work you want done, and it generally takes multiple iterations. There is no “there” there.
In my own occasional uses of AIs, I’ve been able to get them to do stuff, but I’ve never met one I could have a real conversation with. One might as well try to ring a Plasticine bell [[1]] .
That is my conclusion (“the place where one stops thinking”) about AIs to date. As for what new developments might persuade me, I can’t say until they happen. It’s all unknown unknowns.
H/T Lord Dunsany. “Modern poets are bells of lead. They should tinkle melodiously but usually they just klunk.”
Comment withdrawn.
My criterion for attributing consciousness is no more than we all have: I’m aware of myself, other people seem to be the same sort of thing as me, and interacting with them confirms that impression. To some extent I extend that to other animals. More than that I cannot say. I don’t have a consciousnessometer, an explicit recipe of observations to determine just what sort of consciousness is present in this or that place. There is no Voight-Kampff test.
Interacting with an AI, so far, has never given me any such impression, and neither have the interactions I’ve seen others report, even if they convince them.
Your hypothetical humans would have to be seriously impaired, to the point of being unable to live independently, to be as malleable as the AIs. As they are human, I’ll grant them some level of impaired consciousness, just on the grounds of physical similarity, and accordingly I would be against turning them off on the grounds of uselessness. I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with them though, any more than I care for the company of the sorts of grossly mentally impaired people that, alas, do exist, in degrees all the way down to irrecoverable vegetable status when we are pretty sure that consciousness has been extinguished.
See also my response to a recent example.
Comment withdrawn.
I would want to help that person, if there is anything left of them. But this is a tendentious example. The AIs we have are not deliberately handicapped human beings, any more than a garden shed is a cut down skyscraper.
BTW, the magic “brainwashing” and “supposing” are, to put this as tastefully as possible, examples of Rule 34.
Comment withdrawn
You were likening AI capabilities to those of a human. In reply I placed them far below human capabilities. Now you are imagining the AIs as actually being humans on whom gross brain damage has been inflicted. This is irrelevant. The AIs that we have are not greater minds cut down, they are primitive things built up. They have never been any better than they currently are. Do we look at an ant with sorrow, that it is so much less than a human?
I’m not sure if you got my allusion to Rule 34, but this is Rule 34. I don’t know how common or niche the robotisation fantasy is, but it exists.