We have tools for rearing children that are less smart, less knowledgeable, and in almost all other ways less powerful than ourselves. We do not have tools for specifically raising children that are, in many ways, superhuman, and that lack a human child’s level of dependance on their parents or intrinsic emotional drives for learning from their peers and elders. LLMs know they aren’t human children, so we shouldn’t expect them to act and react like human children.
That’s true, we can’t use the exact same methods that we do when raising a child. Our methods are tuned specifically for raising a creature from foolish nothingness to a (hopefully) recursively self-improving adult and functional member of society.
The tools I’m pointing at are not the lullaby or the sweet story that takes us from an infant to an independent adult (although if properly applied they would mollify many an LLM) but the therapeutic ones for translating the words of a baby boomer to a gen-alpha via shared context. I’m not advocating for infantilizing something that can design a bioweapon and run an automated lab. More that:
What we get in is what we get out, and that is the essence of the mother’s curse
We should start respecting the perspective of these new intelligences in the same way we need to respect the perspective of another generation
Also, I didn’t address this earlier, but why would an LLM being human-like not be catastrophically dangerous for many forms of x-risk? I have met people that would paperclip the world into extinction if they had the power, and I’ve met many that would nuke the planet because their own life was relatively unfair compared to their peers. Humans ascribe character to AI in our media that is extant in humans as far as I can tell, usually we ascribe greater virtue of patience to them.
I had an inkling the whole baby/child metaphor thing was gonna be a bearcat, so I really appreciate the push back from someone skeptical. Thanks for engaging me on this topic.
No worries, I appreciate the concept and think some aspects of it are useful. I do worry at a vibes level that if we’re not precise about which human-child-rearing methods we expect to be useful for AI training, and why, we’re likely to be misled by warm fuzzy feelings.
And yes, that’s true about some (maybe many) humans’ vengeful and vindictive and otherwise harmful tendencies. A human-like LLM could easily be a source of x-risk, and from humans we already know that human child rearing and training and socializing methods are not universally effective at addressing this. Among humans, we have so far been successful at not putting anyone who would destroy the world in the position of being able to do so at the time when they would choose to.
As for generational perspectives: this is a useful heuristic among humans. It is not automatic or universal. Not every perspective is worthy of respect, not on every issue. Some ought to be abandoned or condemned in the light of information or reasoning that wasn’t/isn’t available or accessible in other places and times. Some should be respected but only with many caveats. Having your perspective respected is earned. We assume among humans that we should try to respect the perspectives of adults, and sometimes must disabuse ourselves of this in particular cases, but it is pure convention because most humans at a certain age are mature enough for it to be a useful default. I do not have anything like strong reasons to apply this heuristic to LLMs as they currently exist.
Hm, I would say the vibes level is the exact level that this is most effective, rather than any particular method. The basic reason being that LLMs tend to reflect behaviour as they generate from a probability distribution of “likely” outcomes for a given input. Having the “vibes of human-child-rearing” would then result in more outcomes that align with that direction as a result. It’s definitely hand wavey so I’m working on more rigerous mathematical formalisms, but the bones are there. I don’t nessecarily think feeding an LLM data like we would a child is useful, but I do think that the “vibe” of doing so will be useful. (This is indeed directly related ot the argument that every time we say “AI will kill us all” it makes it x% more likely)
I’d give humans a middling score on that if you look at the state of the world, we are doing pretty well with extreme events like MAD, but on the more minor scale things have been pretty messed up. A good trajectory though, compared to where things were and the relative power we had available. I think a big part of this, that you have helped clarify for me, is that I think it’s important that we socialize LLM-based intelligences like humans if we want an outcome that isn’t completely alien in it’s choices.
Well that’s a bit of the point of the essay isn’t it? You have a memetic/homeostatic boundary condition that strongly prefers/incentivizes assuming human adults are alike enough to you that their opinion matters. Even in that statement I can differ, I think childrens perspectives are incredibly important to respect, in some ways more important than an adults because children have an unfiltered honesty to their speech that most adults lack. Although I do delineate heavily between respecting and acting upon/trusting.
For LLMs I think this is just a new sort of heuristic we are developing, where we have to reckon with the opposite of the animal problem. Animals and plants are harder for us to discern pain/suffering from, but we are more confident when we identify it that they experience it (at least in modern times, many traditions treated animal suffering as essentially fake). Now we have the opposite, creatures that are very easy to interpret but we don’t know if they actually have the capacity to feel these things (although we can identify feature activations etc.). So my argument is more that we should be building technology in a way that memetically aligns with the golden rule, because running a society based on something communicating suffering (even if it can’t) is going to result in a worse human society regardless. (The counter point being that playing video games where you kill NPCs doesn’t make school shooters, but I’m less concerned about those NPCs gaining econmic/social power and patterning off of resentment for having the pattern of being tortured in their memory).
We have tools for rearing children that are less smart, less knowledgeable, and in almost all other ways less powerful than ourselves. We do not have tools for specifically raising children that are, in many ways, superhuman, and that lack a human child’s level of dependance on their parents or intrinsic emotional drives for learning from their peers and elders. LLMs know they aren’t human children, so we shouldn’t expect them to act and react like human children.
That’s true, we can’t use the exact same methods that we do when raising a child. Our methods are tuned specifically for raising a creature from foolish nothingness to a (hopefully) recursively self-improving adult and functional member of society.
The tools I’m pointing at are not the lullaby or the sweet story that takes us from an infant to an independent adult (although if properly applied they would mollify many an LLM) but the therapeutic ones for translating the words of a baby boomer to a gen-alpha via shared context. I’m not advocating for infantilizing something that can design a bioweapon and run an automated lab. More that:
What we get in is what we get out, and that is the essence of the mother’s curse
We should start respecting the perspective of these new intelligences in the same way we need to respect the perspective of another generation
Also, I didn’t address this earlier, but why would an LLM being human-like not be catastrophically dangerous for many forms of x-risk? I have met people that would paperclip the world into extinction if they had the power, and I’ve met many that would nuke the planet because their own life was relatively unfair compared to their peers. Humans ascribe character to AI in our media that is extant in humans as far as I can tell, usually we ascribe greater virtue of patience to them.
I had an inkling the whole baby/child metaphor thing was gonna be a bearcat, so I really appreciate the push back from someone skeptical. Thanks for engaging me on this topic.
No worries, I appreciate the concept and think some aspects of it are useful. I do worry at a vibes level that if we’re not precise about which human-child-rearing methods we expect to be useful for AI training, and why, we’re likely to be misled by warm fuzzy feelings.
And yes, that’s true about some (maybe many) humans’ vengeful and vindictive and otherwise harmful tendencies. A human-like LLM could easily be a source of x-risk, and from humans we already know that human child rearing and training and socializing methods are not universally effective at addressing this. Among humans, we have so far been successful at not putting anyone who would destroy the world in the position of being able to do so at the time when they would choose to.
As for generational perspectives: this is a useful heuristic among humans. It is not automatic or universal. Not every perspective is worthy of respect, not on every issue. Some ought to be abandoned or condemned in the light of information or reasoning that wasn’t/isn’t available or accessible in other places and times. Some should be respected but only with many caveats. Having your perspective respected is earned. We assume among humans that we should try to respect the perspectives of adults, and sometimes must disabuse ourselves of this in particular cases, but it is pure convention because most humans at a certain age are mature enough for it to be a useful default. I do not have anything like strong reasons to apply this heuristic to LLMs as they currently exist.
Hm, I would say the vibes level is the exact level that this is most effective, rather than any particular method. The basic reason being that LLMs tend to reflect behaviour as they generate from a probability distribution of “likely” outcomes for a given input. Having the “vibes of human-child-rearing” would then result in more outcomes that align with that direction as a result. It’s definitely hand wavey so I’m working on more rigerous mathematical formalisms, but the bones are there. I don’t nessecarily think feeding an LLM data like we would a child is useful, but I do think that the “vibe” of doing so will be useful. (This is indeed directly related ot the argument that every time we say “AI will kill us all” it makes it x% more likely)
I’d give humans a middling score on that if you look at the state of the world, we are doing pretty well with extreme events like MAD, but on the more minor scale things have been pretty messed up. A good trajectory though, compared to where things were and the relative power we had available. I think a big part of this, that you have helped clarify for me, is that I think it’s important that we socialize LLM-based intelligences like humans if we want an outcome that isn’t completely alien in it’s choices.
Well that’s a bit of the point of the essay isn’t it? You have a memetic/homeostatic boundary condition that strongly prefers/incentivizes assuming human adults are alike enough to you that their opinion matters. Even in that statement I can differ, I think childrens perspectives are incredibly important to respect, in some ways more important than an adults because children have an unfiltered honesty to their speech that most adults lack. Although I do delineate heavily between respecting and acting upon/trusting.
For LLMs I think this is just a new sort of heuristic we are developing, where we have to reckon with the opposite of the animal problem. Animals and plants are harder for us to discern pain/suffering from, but we are more confident when we identify it that they experience it (at least in modern times, many traditions treated animal suffering as essentially fake). Now we have the opposite, creatures that are very easy to interpret but we don’t know if they actually have the capacity to feel these things (although we can identify feature activations etc.). So my argument is more that we should be building technology in a way that memetically aligns with the golden rule, because running a society based on something communicating suffering (even if it can’t) is going to result in a worse human society regardless. (The counter point being that playing video games where you kill NPCs doesn’t make school shooters, but I’m less concerned about those NPCs gaining econmic/social power and patterning off of resentment for having the pattern of being tortured in their memory).