CS and Music undergrad student at the University of Tulsa. Not a LLM (and don’t intentionally use them; I don’t want anything else thinking for me).
Donovan
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The [AI Box] Box
Re [18] on free will. I think that the common understanding among compatibilists (who believe that it can exist in a deterministic universe) is:
Free will is the ability to make decisions freely, as an individual with personal and moral considerations that impact your decisions.
As consciousness supervenes on the physical world, the state of the physical world means that you have specific considerations that come to mind and thereby influence your decisions; you only could have chosen differently if the physical world had been different.
However, if the physical world was different in such a way that you chose differently, then the person choosing would not be you, but instead a nearly-identical copy. You could only make the decision that you did and that is what makes you yourself and not your copy.
This also means that decisions which you would never make differently are more demonstrative of free will: they are more emblematic of who you are because you would have to be changed more (in terms of the general impact on your behavior) before you would consider alternatives. Decisions that have a chance of going either way have much less bearing on you as a person.
There are two views I’m aware of that make people that confident in not-”doom”: they are either convinced that ASI’s creation will almost certainly have desirable consequences (i.e. the e/accs) or they discount the possibility of ASI in general. I think the first group is obviously overconfident and the second-group is still overconfident but not trivially so.
Specifically, the consensus of the latter group is that LLMs are not a viable path to ASI because, outside of specific areas like math and programming where correct answers can be verified, they can’t exceed the capabilities of a skilled human; that no other technology is likely to reach that point either (in part because a long AI winter would follow the failure of LLMs to take off); and that recursive self-improvement, if it is possible, would lead to diminishing returns. They do not seem all that confident in the benevolence of ASI if it were created.
I also think everyone is insane, but some people are still more insane than others.