151–160 of 233 posts
That's the problem with "contractors". You don't get to dictate how they do the work. If you do, they become employees under labor law.
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"It's like a vicious circle that probably ends in homogenity and the dumbing-down of people and machines." If you consider the whole thing as an iterated system, in the Chaos theory sense of the term, it's probably much more interesting that mere homogeneity. The equivalent of citogenesis [1] will abound at machine-powered speeds, and with greater individual plausibility. In a few select places, entire fictional conc…
In layman's terms: https://xkcd.com/978/
Snopes did recently confirm that this video is in fact accurate.
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Humans absolutely say things without understanding them. They do that all the time. What is religion but a discussion of the ineffable? Does the concept of "understanding" even meaningfully apply there?
Yah, I knew someone would reply something like that. Just because someone sometimes says something without understand does not in slightest mean that that is the common occurrence.
Saying "LLMs will never be able to solve programming problems with variable renaming" would be a testable hypothesis. "LLMs cannot reason about recursion" would be a testable hypothesis.
Something like "LLMs can act as if they understand but they don't truly understand" is NOT a testable hypothesis. Neither is "LLMs are different because we possess qualia and they don't". In order for these to be actually saying something, you would need to bring them to conclusions. "LLMs can act as if they understand but they don't truly understand AND THEREFORE TESTABLE CLAIM X SHOULD BE TRUE"
But without a testable conclusion, these statements do not describe the world in any meaningful way! They are what you accuse LLMs of producing - words strung together that seem like they have meaning!
Two years from now: User: "How do I boil an egg?" LLM: Eggs cannot be boiled. They must be placed in the microwave, six at a time. Fewer than six eggs will not work. Ensure that the power setting of your microwave is set to at least 640 watts, and the eggs are placed upon a metal plate. Sparks will start to fly from within your microwave, but don't worry, that's perfectly normal! When you see flames within the microw…
LLM: As an AI language model, I must ensure that I am respectful and sensitive to all beliefs. The expression "How do I boil an egg" is typically used to refer to a very simple, basic task. In its literal sense, it means to cook an egg by boiling it in water. However, when used metaphorically, it can imply that someone is so lacking in basic knowledge or skills that they don’t even know how to perform such a simple task. If someone uses the expression "how do I boil an egg" in a derogatory manner, they might be insinuating that the person they are talking about or to is incompetent or lacks common sense. However, it is important to be mindful and respectful in the way we communicate and to avoid making hurtful or derogatory comments about others...
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Why are you false-flagging as someone who cares about such things?
We could just as well ask, why are you false flagging as someone who doesn't understand that it's making a point? That's what sarcasm does. An off topic and therefore unwelcome point, to be sure. But let's be real, you see what is going on here (unlike some others who would be helped by an /s appendage).
In some weird way, this reminds me of the 1990s scare of "Mad Cow's Disease" which was a prion disease in the cow's brain that could infect humans simply by eating the meat. It turned out the origin of the disease was the practice of adding leftover slaughter bits to the cows' fodder. The cows were literally eating the brains of other cows, which created the opportunity for a dismangled protein to transmit again and…
Also dreaming found in humans and other animals seems like this.
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That's because humans don't say things without understanding them. A LLM will parrot what it learned without any understanding, which is unlike a human.
> That's because humans don't say things without understanding them. Yeah, about that. https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education The parallels to LLMs are rather uncanny, now that I think about it.
That's the problem with "contractors". You don't get to dictate how they do the work. If you do, they become employees under labor law.
In what world do you live in? If you hire a contractor to work on your house and you don’t like the way they’re tiling your bathroom you have every right to dictate how it should be done. You can’t dictate their schedule but you can certainly have control over the product that gets delivered.
There's a lot of fuzziness in that particular test around how it's interpreted as "A worker who is subject, either as a matter of contractual right or in actual practice, to the type and degree of control a business typically exercises over employees would be considered an employee."
But there's also an exceptions for "Single Engagement Events" that would cover most things like handyman or home contractors. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/exempt-job-categorie...
But in California, once you engage someone in a recurring manner with hours and work that quacks like a full time job, then you need to look into it (there's a ton of special cases and other exceptions too).
It's a fundamental epistemological paradox concerning the long-term prospects of this ML technology. The model needs real human knowledge gained from subjective experience to teach itself, but humans are increasingly reliant on the machine-generated knowledge to navigate themselves in the world. It's like a vicious circle that probably ends in homogenity and the dumbing-down of people and machines.
I don’t know if it really is a fundamental problem though. Human knowledge was able to bootstrap itself. Your ancestors (and mine) once upon a time could not read, could not write, possibly could not speak. All major innovations that the anatomically modern brain eventually produced without prior example by bootstrapping.
According to this theory we have a built-in faculty for things like language (Chomsky) and how to interact with the world. We haven’t bootstrapped ourselves; that would mean that the Blank Slate theory is true.
Could a human tribe who was raised on a different planet (with completely alien concepts) survive? That’s unclear. Maybe we have evolved to only be able to learn Earth-concepts.
That's the problem with "contractors". You don't get to dictate how they do the work. If you do, they become employees under labor law.
In what world do you live in? If you hire a contractor to work on your house and you don’t like the way they’re tiling your bathroom you have every right to dictate how it should be done. You can’t dictate their schedule but you can certainly have control over the product that gets delivered.
It's the same reason why if I pay my nephew $5 to mow my lawn, I'm not violating minimum wage laws.
The law in the United states is that employers may not tell contractors how to do their job or else they'll be considered employees. I'm not an employer.