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Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

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Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#191

Post by jtr1 »

vel0city wrote: post #106
throw0101a wrote: post #74

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 :-/ 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. :)

I also usually had success with signs when the child was otherwise too emotional to verbalize their desire. They're really upset and crying hard so it is hard to talk especially when talking clearly is already a challenge, but signing "milk" or "eat" or "hurt" or "more" can come through easily.

Wow I had not considered this at all. We used a bit of sign language before my toddler started talking, but have more recently run into these situations where big feelings are crowding out speech and it’d be useful to get anything through. I’ll give this a shot tomorrow

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#192

Post by alexk307 »

famouswaffles wrote: post #108

Paraphrasing and summarizing parts of this article, https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/artic... Some ~72 years ago in 1951, Claude Shannon released his "Prediction and Entropy of Printed English", an extremely fascinating read now. The paper begins with a game. Claude pulls a book down from the shelf, concealing the title in the process. After selecting a passage at random, he challenges his wife,…

Fascinating, thanks for explaining that

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#193

Post by jtr1 »

petsfed wrote: post #137
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…

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.

Once mine learned the sign for “cookie” it became the only word in her vocabulary for a month

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#194

Post by Barrin92 »

alexwebb2 wrote: post #117
Retr0id wrote: post #63

This is a really beautiful article, and while there are certainly fundamental differences between how a toddler thinks and learns, and how an LLM "thinks", I don't think we should get too comfortable with those differences. Every time I say to myself "AI is no big deal because it can't do X", some time later someone comes along and makes an AI that does X.

There's a well-documented concept called "God of the gaps" where any phenomenon humans don't understand at the time is attributed to a divine entity. Over time, as the gaps in human knowledge get filled, the god "shrinks" - it becomes less expansive, less powerful, less directly involved in human affairs. The definition changes. It's fascinating to watch the same thing happen with human exceptionalism – so many cries…

I honestly don't know where this is supposed to be happening. I have observed the opposite for decades. When Gary Kasparov was beaten by Stockfish, people proclaimed the end of chess and went on AI hyperboles. Same with Watson winning Jeopardy, Alexa, etc.

Every time computers outperform humans in some domain this is conflated with deep general progress, panicked projections of replacement and job losses, the end times and so on. People are way faster to engage in reductionism of human capacity and Terminator-esque fantasies than the opposite. Despite the fact that it never happens.

It's even reflected in our popular culture. I can barely recall a single work of science fiction in the last 30 years that would qualify as portraying human exceptionalism. AI doomerism, overestimation and fear of machines is the norm.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#195

Post by jtr1 »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #134
beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the argument is that you need to ask how you are measuring when you say it seems more correct than anything that came before. You may just be describing the experience of swimming in the dominant paradigm

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#196

Post by [deleted] »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #148
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step A: build a machine which reflects a reduced and simplified model of how some part of a human works Step B: turn it on its head "the human brain is nothing more than... " It's a bit tautological. The worry is that there's a Step C: Humans actually start to behave as simple as said machine.

What machines have we built that reflect a reduced and simplified model of how some part of a human works (other than as a minor and generally invisible research projects) ?

[deleted]

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#197

Post by doubleg72 »

skeaker wrote: post #143
AlecSchueler wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They might not have the dexterity required for some of the more complex signs, I would guess. If you devise your own gestures they can be much simpler.

No, the basics like hungry and please/thank you are fairly simple. The daycare my son goes to teaches all the kids sign language starting at like 6 months.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#198

Post by CamperBob2 »

chrbr wrote: post #185
PeterisP wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your thought experiment, I'd assert that the key missing part is experimentation in the real world, as that is what acquires new information, not the complexity of human brains working together. If you took millions of genius-level immortal humans with all the same Roman data but had them sit in a blank, empty room with their hands tied and simply discuss philosophy for eternity, I'm certain that they would not b…

Yeah, I like that improvement/clarification. Good assertion. Now I wonder if it changes my stance: are the path modern LLMs are on ever going to replicate this environment for acquiring new information that humans currently operate in?

As usual in these "Yeah, but can AI do this?" threads, the answer is yes, it is already happening: https://www.space.com/mars-oxygen-ai-robot-chemist-splitting...

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#199

Post by jtr1 »

dsign wrote: post #115
xigency wrote: post #56

Regarding dismissals of LLM’s on ‘technical’ grounds: Consciousness is first a word and second a concept. And it’s a word that ChatGPT or Llama can use in an English sentence better than billions of humans worldwide. The software folks have made even more progress than sociologists, psychologists and neuroscientists to be able to create an artificial language cortex before we understand our biological mind comprehens…

Exactly. To that I’m going to add that the blood of our civilization is culture (sciences, technology, arts, traditions). The moment there is something better at it than humans, it’s our “horse-moment”.

Simplifying greatly, but 1. LLMs “create” these cultural artifacts by recombining their inputs (text, images, etc), all of which are cultural artifacts created by humans 2. Humans also create cultural artifacts by recombining other cultural artifacts. The difference is that they combine another input which we can’t really prove AI has: qualia, the individual experience of being in the world, the synthesis of touch and sound and feeling and perspective.

I’m not saying computers can’t have something like it, but it would be so fundamentally different as to be completely alien and unrelatable to humans, and thus (IMO) non-contiguous with human culture.

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