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Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

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Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#71

Post by ryandrake »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #39

Nice article, great presentation. However, it's a bit annoying that the focus of the AI anxiety is how AI is replacing us and the resolution is that we embrace our humanity. Fair enough, but at least to me the main focus in my AI anxiety is that it will take my job - honestly don't really care about it doing my shitty art.

More specifically, I think we're worried about AI taking our incomes, not our jobs. I would love it if an AI could do my entire job for me, and I just sat there collecting the income while the AI did all the "job" part, but we know from history (robotics) that this is not what happens. The owners of the robots (soon, AI) keep all the income and the job goes away.

An enlightened Humanity could solve this by separating the income from the job, but we live in a Malthusian Darwinian world where growth is paramount, "enough" does not exist, and we all have to justify and earn our living.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#72

Post by throwaway4aday »

dekhn wrote: post #41
xianshou wrote: post #33

Pour one out for the decline of human exceptionalism! Once you get material-reductionist enough and accept yourself as a pure function of genetics, environment, past experience, and chance, this conclusion becomes inevitable. I also expect it to be the standard within a decade, with AI-human parity of capabilities as the key driver.

We'll see! I came to this conclusion a long time ago but at the same time I do subjectively experience consciousness, which in itself is something a mystery in the material-reductionist philosophy.

It makes perfect sense if you can disprove your own existence

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#73

Post by kuchenbecker »

yojo wrote: post #59
throw0101a wrote: post #35

> But he could understand so much more than he could say. If you asked him to point to the vacuum cleaner, he would. Perhaps worth noting that it is possible to teach infants (often starting at around 9 months) sign language so that they can more easily signal their desires. Some priority recommended words would probably be: * hungry/more * enough/all done (for when they're full) * drink (perhaps both milk/formula an…

FWIW, I tried this with both my sons. They both started using the gestures the same day they started actually talking :-/ I have friends who had much more success with it, but the value will largely depend on your child’s relative developmental strengths. A friend’s son with autism got literally years’ benefit out of the gestures before verbal speech caught up.

My kids both picked it up, but my younger was similar. Being able to sign "please" and "all done" helps anyway because "eeess" and "a ya" are what she actually says.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#74

Post by throw0101a »

yojo wrote: post #59
throw0101a wrote: post #35

> But he could understand so much more than he could say. If you asked him to point to the vacuum cleaner, he would. Perhaps worth noting that it is possible to teach infants (often starting at around 9 months) sign language so that they can more easily signal their desires. Some priority recommended words would probably be: * hungry/more * enough/all done (for when they're full) * drink (perhaps both milk/formula an…

FWIW, I tried this with both my sons. They both started using the gestures the same day they started actually talking :-/ I have friends who had much more success with it, but the value will largely depend on your child’s relative developmental strengths. A friend’s son with autism got literally years’ benefit out of the gestures before verbal speech caught up.

> FWIW, I tried this with both my sons. They both started using the gestures the same day they started actually talking :-/

Could still useful: instead of shouting across the playground on whether they have to go potty you can simply make the gesture with minimal embarrassment. :)

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#75

Post by chx »

wongarsu wrote: post #51
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs don't create new information, they only compress existing complexity in their train and inference data sets. Humans definitely create new information. (Well, at least some humans do.)

Do we? Humans can observe new information, but that's obviously not that unique. We can reason about existing information, creating new hypotheses, but that is arguably a compression of existing information. When we act on them and observe the effects they become information, but that's not us creating the information (and LLMs can both act on the environment and have the effects fed back to their input to observe, s…

let's say you wanted to count the number of coins on a table

you organize them into piles of ten

this created new information

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#76

Post by jocaal »

function_seven wrote: post #55
jocaal wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> emergent property of complex-but-deterministic actions and reactions I think you mean non-deterministic. The last century of physics was dominated by work showing how deterministic systems emerged from non-deterministic foundations. It seems that probability and statistics were the branches of maths behind everything. Who would have thought.

Thanks. I did actually mean to use "deterministic", but only as it sits in opposition to "free will". Is there a better word for what I meant? Of course there is randomness as well. So, yeah, I should clarify: We don't impose upon the world any kind of "uncaused cause", even if it feels like we do. Everything we think and do is a direct result of some other action. Sometimes that action can trace its lineage to a ran…

I get what you are saying. I was just thinking about the stochastic parrot analogy for consciousness, but I see your comment is more about there not being special sauce to conciousness. But hey, the fact that such behaviour can emerge from simple processes is still pretty damn cool.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#77

Post by finefrenchbrit »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #48
ImHereToVote wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except LLM's are built on neural networks. That are based on how neurons work. The first tech that actually copies aspects of us.

sigh Neural networks are not based on how neurons work. They do not copy aspects of us. They call them neural networks because they are sort of conceptually like networks of neurons in the brain but they’re so different as to make false the statement that they are based on neurons.

[dead]

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#78

Post by sickcodebruh »

One of my favorite experiences from my daughter’s earliest years was the realization that she was able to think about, describe, and deliberately do things much earlier than I realized. More plainly: once I recognized she was doing something deliberately, I often went back and realized she had been doing that same thing for days or weeks prior. We encountered this a lot with words but also physical abilities, like figuring out how to make her BabyBjorn bouncer move. We had a policy of talking to her like she understood on the off-chance that she could and just couldn’t communicate it. She just turned 5 and continues to surprise us with the complexity of her inner world.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#80

Post by kaibee »

idle_zealot wrote: post #69
dekhn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll see! I came to this conclusion a long time ago but at the same time I do subjectively experience consciousness, which in itself is something a mystery in the material-reductionist philosophy.

I hear this a lot, but is it really a mystery/incompatible with materialism? Is there a reason consciousness couldn't be what it feels like to be a certain type of computation? I don't see why we would need something immaterial or some undiscovered material component to explain it.

Well the undiscovered part is why it should feel like anything at all. And this is definitely relevant because consciousness clearly exists enough that we exert physical force about it, so its gotta be somewhere in physics. But where?
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