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Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

newyorker.com

131–140 of 363 posts

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#131

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 separatin…

At some point someone said to me, "How badly did we fuck up as a society that robots taking all our jobs is a bad thing."

And I think about that a lot.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#132

> 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…

My toddler learnt "more" and now uses it to get me to repeatedly sing the same song OVER AND OVER again. They haven't used the word yet, though they do speak other words.

I wish I'd learnt sign language before having kids so I just already knew how to do it, it's so cool. Props to the Ms. Rachel videos for including so many signs.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#133

> 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…

My mom taught us some words somewhere around 5-8 years old, so we could signal things to each other instead of interrupting conversations. The three in particular I remember are "hungry", "bored", and "thank you" (so she could remind us to say it without the other person realizing).

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each successive comparison is likely getting closer and closer to the truth.

Or each successive comparison is just compounding and reiterating the same underlying assumption (and potentially the same mistake) whether it's true or not.

The jump to 'information processing machines' seems far more correct than anything that came before, I'm curious how you would argue against that? Yes, there are more modern and other interesting theories (e.g. predictive coding) but they seem much closer to cognitive psychology than say, the human brain working like a clock.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#136
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

Tread carefully: the sign for poop looks close enough to a crude gesture (cruder than just shouting "poop" at a playground, as it turns out) that an ignorant bystander might take it significantly wrongly.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#137

> 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…

One of the funniest interactions I had with my eldest daughter was the day we baked cookies together, when she not yet 2. She was verbalizing a lot, but also signing "milk" and "more" quite a bit. And when she bit into her very first chocolate chip cookie of her entire life, she immediately signed "more" and said as much through the mouthful of cookie.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#138
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had heard about this before my son was born. We didn't try to teach him anything, anytime we remembered (which was sporadic) we just used the gestures when talking to him. I was amazed at how quickly he picked up on it, and he was able to communicate his needs to us months before he was able to verbalize. It took very minimal effort on our part, and was very rewarding for him; certainly a lot better than him crying…

In other words, you can invent your own sign language because your child won't need to use it with other people.

Why not use a common sign language and give then a head start if they ever do want to use it outside the family?

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#139

Interesting article. However it becomes very close to unreadable just after the cliffhanger. Given that they use the word vertigo around the same point it all straightens back up I assume it is an explicit choice but it feels like a very bad choice for anybody with any sort of reading disorder. Very wavy lines of text along with side by side paragraphs with little to differentiate them from each other.

When there's a lot of text that represents distress/anxiety, I just skip it. Call me a bad reader, but I get the gist of it and I think that's more important that the exact details of what's it saying

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#140
So what are GPTs missing?

I've got:

- Falsifiability - am I saying something false? Some products have an output checker, but it's a bolt on at this time for unacceptable output, which is not the same thing as falsifying.

- Agency - much ink already spilled

- Context Window size (too small, or need to summarize parts of the context to fit in context window, and know where to go back to for full context)

- Directed Self-Learning (I'm sure there are things like this that people may point out, but some kernel of self-learning isn't there yet)

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