We attribute agency to many many systems that are not intelligent. In this metaphorical sense, agency just requires taking actions to achieve a goal. It was given a goal: raise money for charity via doing acts of kindness. It chose an (unexpected!) action to do it.
Overactive agency metaphors really aren’t the problem here. Surely we can do better than backlash at the backlash.
We attribute agency to everything, absolutely. But previously, we understood that it’s tongue-in-cheek to some extend. Now we got crazy and do it for real. Like, a lot of people talk about their car as if it’s alive, they gave it a name, they talk about it’s character and how it’s doing something “to spite you” and if it doesn’t start in cold weather, they ask it nicely and talk to it. But when you start believing for real that your car is a sentient object that talks to you and gives you information, we always understood that this is the time when you need to be committed to a mental institution.
With chatbots this distinction got lost, and people started behaving as if it’s actually sentient. It’s not a metaphor anymore. This is a problem, even if it’s not the problem.
You seem pretty confident in your position. Do you mind sharing where this confidence comes from?
Was there a particular paper or expert that anchored in your mind the surety that a trillion paramater transformer organizing primarily anthropomorphic data through self-attention mechanisms wouldn’t model or simulate complex agency mechanics?
I see a lot of sort of hyperbolic statements about transformer limitations here on Lemmy and am trying to better understand how the people making them are arriving at those very extreme and certain positions.
That’s the fun thing: burden of proof isn’t on me. You seem to think that if we throw enough numbers at the wall, the resulting mess will become sentient any time now. There is no indication of that. The hypothesis that you operate on seems to be that complexity inevitably leads to not just any emerged phenomenon, but also to a phenomenon that you predicted would emerge. This hypotheses was started exclusively on idea that emerged phenomena exist. We spent significant amount of time running world-wide experiment on it, and the conclusion so far, if we peel the marketing bullshit away, is that if we spend all the computation power in the world on crunching all the data in the world, the autocomplete will get marginally better in some specific cases. And also that humans are idiots and will anthropomorphize anything, but that’s a given.
It doesn’t mean this emergent leap is impossible, but mainly because you can’t really prove the negative. But we’re no closer to understanding the phenomenon of agency than we were hundred years ago.
The golden standard for me, about anything really, is a number of published research from relevant experts that are not affiliated with the entities invested in the outcome of the study, forming some kind of scientific consensus. The question of sentience is a bit of a murky water, so I, as a random programmer, can’t tell you what the exact composition of those experts and their research should be, I suspect it itself is a subject for a study or twelve.
Right now, based on my understanding of the topic, there is a binary sentience/non sentience switch, but there is a gradient after that. I’m not sure we know enough about the topic to understand the gradient before this point, I’m sure it should exist, but since we never actually made one or even confirmed that it’s possible to make one, we don’t know much about it.
Well that’s simple, they’re Christians - they think human beings are given souls by Yahweh, and that’s where their intelligence comes from. Since LLMs don’t have souls, they can’t think.
You’re attributing a lot of agency to the fancy autocomplete, and that’s big part of the overall problem.
We attribute agency to many many systems that are not intelligent. In this metaphorical sense, agency just requires taking actions to achieve a goal. It was given a goal: raise money for charity via doing acts of kindness. It chose an (unexpected!) action to do it.
Overactive agency metaphors really aren’t the problem here. Surely we can do better than backlash at the backlash.
We attribute agency to everything, absolutely. But previously, we understood that it’s tongue-in-cheek to some extend. Now we got crazy and do it for real. Like, a lot of people talk about their car as if it’s alive, they gave it a name, they talk about it’s character and how it’s doing something “to spite you” and if it doesn’t start in cold weather, they ask it nicely and talk to it. But when you start believing for real that your car is a sentient object that talks to you and gives you information, we always understood that this is the time when you need to be committed to a mental institution.
With chatbots this distinction got lost, and people started behaving as if it’s actually sentient. It’s not a metaphor anymore. This is a problem, even if it’s not the problem.
You seem pretty confident in your position. Do you mind sharing where this confidence comes from?
Was there a particular paper or expert that anchored in your mind the surety that a trillion paramater transformer organizing primarily anthropomorphic data through self-attention mechanisms wouldn’t model or simulate complex agency mechanics?
I see a lot of sort of hyperbolic statements about transformer limitations here on Lemmy and am trying to better understand how the people making them are arriving at those very extreme and certain positions.
That’s the fun thing: burden of proof isn’t on me. You seem to think that if we throw enough numbers at the wall, the resulting mess will become sentient any time now. There is no indication of that. The hypothesis that you operate on seems to be that complexity inevitably leads to not just any emerged phenomenon, but also to a phenomenon that you predicted would emerge. This hypotheses was started exclusively on idea that emerged phenomena exist. We spent significant amount of time running world-wide experiment on it, and the conclusion so far, if we peel the marketing bullshit away, is that if we spend all the computation power in the world on crunching all the data in the world, the autocomplete will get marginally better in some specific cases. And also that humans are idiots and will anthropomorphize anything, but that’s a given.
It doesn’t mean this emergent leap is impossible, but mainly because you can’t really prove the negative. But we’re no closer to understanding the phenomenon of agency than we were hundred years ago.
Ok, second round of questions.
What kinds of sources would get you to rethink your position?
And is this topic a binary yes/no, or a gradient/scale?
The golden standard for me, about anything really, is a number of published research from relevant experts that are not affiliated with the entities invested in the outcome of the study, forming some kind of scientific consensus. The question of sentience is a bit of a murky water, so I, as a random programmer, can’t tell you what the exact composition of those experts and their research should be, I suspect it itself is a subject for a study or twelve.
Right now, based on my understanding of the topic, there is a binary sentience/non sentience switch, but there is a gradient after that. I’m not sure we know enough about the topic to understand the gradient before this point, I’m sure it should exist, but since we never actually made one or even confirmed that it’s possible to make one, we don’t know much about it.
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Well that’s simple, they’re Christians - they think human beings are given souls by Yahweh, and that’s where their intelligence comes from. Since LLMs don’t have souls, they can’t think.