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Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

pnas.org

61–70 of 83 posts

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#62
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still do. Both cases, acceptance of god/ai is about (blind, if you will) trust. That the one correlates with the other doesnt supprise me.

How is trusting an AI blind? One of them you can test, the other you have no input and no output. Is trusting gravity blind trust?

I think it’s going to be blind trust for non-tech people. I even read mystic comments about LLMs here on HN where people tried to convey an idea of hidden self-awareness and conscience of these models.

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#63
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mmmmm why? seems like a bad thing to dismiss?

Replication crisis. Worth websearching and being aware of how bad it has been on just this kind of research.

But this says nothing about the quality of this particular article.

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#65
post #62
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is trusting an AI blind? One of them you can test, the other you have no input and no output. Is trusting gravity blind trust?

I think it’s going to be blind trust for non-tech people. I even read mystic comments about LLMs here on HN where people tried to convey an idea of hidden self-awareness and conscience of these models.

I think humans are just hard-wired to interpret language and conversation as signs of intelligence. The way LLMs actually behave is counterintuitive in a way that violates most people's expectations. You can have a complex, rational conversation with it. Give it commands and have it appear to infer details and anticipate the future.

Also, "AI" has been a part of pop culture and pop science for decades... people have been conditioned by Star Trek and Star Wars and the like to accept that a computer you can "just talk to" is self-aware, and that computers never make mistakes.

It's a bias you even find in discussions about self-driving cars. Computers are perfectly logical, rational, mathematically precise and if they were to be self-aware, would hold to a perfectly mathematically correct and provable model of reality based only on concrete data, without any prejudice or bias. Commander Data can't lie, can't even use contractions. Of course we can trust them to drive our cars, we just can't trust humans.

So we're left with the idea floating around in popular consciousness that whenever AI shows up, we should trust it implicitly.

The one thing computers have never done (until now,) and certainly never been known to do, is make up completely plausible nonsense and gaslight you into accepting it. LLMs can't even do math. This isn't the way "computers" behave.

One doesn't even really have to conflate any of this into religious belief for it to make sense. "LLMs being intelligent" is the model that just already happens to fit everyone's priors. It just happens to be dangerously wrong.

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#66
It looks like it's paywalled, so I'm wondering what exactly "thinking about God" means in the context of this study? Were study participants told to think about God? Was there any test to determine whether they were in fact actually thinking about God (e.g. by providing an intelligible response to a theological question)?

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#67
post #20

This matches my prejudices. Namely that 'thinking about god' is similar to the Eliza effect, ie., a kind of projection of consciousness onto the world. Animals solve 'the problem of other minds' by assuming that everything is like them, ie., conscious. And then walking back from this presumption upon evidence to the contrary. This kinda mild 'default schizophrenia' is something I've always been allergic to. (I imagin…

You're starting to sound a little like Terry yourself towards the end there. How do you see a religion in enthusiasm around AI, and worse nothing else at all? I think you're stretching the word religion very far from its meaning. No one is deriving any meaning or analogy to the world from AI beyond the answers to technical questions. Certainly no one attributes moral authority to AI? The hype is about its applied val…

Have you ever watched an interview with Ray Kurzweil, it’s about as religious as it gets?

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#68
post #62
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is trusting an AI blind? One of them you can test, the other you have no input and no output. Is trusting gravity blind trust?

I think it’s going to be blind trust for non-tech people. I even read mystic comments about LLMs here on HN where people tried to convey an idea of hidden self-awareness and conscience of these models.

It still isn't blind though.

It's not blind trust just because you don't understand it.

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#69
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"when God is salient" presumably means the participants both believed in God and it played an important/active part in their daily life. > Eight preregistered experiments (n = 2,462) reveal that when God is salient, people are more willing to consider AI-based recommendations than when God is not salient

No, it means that these subjects took the survey with the instruction to think or write about God, the Quran, or some other related thing. It's not about their beliefs, it's about the instruction.

But presumably the instruction meant more to those who had a belief in god. Perhaps not though - It's a shame the article isn't available so we can see whether its thinking about god increases acceptance of AI or just being distracted because you've been told to think about something else does.

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#70

This matches my prejudices. Namely that 'thinking about god' is similar to the Eliza effect, ie., a kind of projection of consciousness onto the world. Animals solve 'the problem of other minds' by assuming that everything is like them, ie., conscious. And then walking back from this presumption upon evidence to the contrary. This kinda mild 'default schizophrenia' is something I've always been allergic to. (I imagin…

Thinking itself is a projection of consciousness. Thinking is "learned" behavior.
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