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Three Inverse Laws of AI

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Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#81

Post by sergiosgc »

miyoji wrote: post #6

I strongly disagree with this framing. It's patently insane to demand that humans alter their behavior to accommodate the foibles of mere machines, and it simply won't work in the majority of cases. Humans WILL anthropomorphize the AI, humans WILL blindly trust their outputs, and humans WILL defer responsibility to them. Asimov's laws of robotics are flawed too, of course. There is no finite set of rules that can con…

> Asimov's laws of robotics are flawed too, of course.

I always find the common references to Asimov's laws funny. They are broken in just about every one of his books. They are crime novels where, if a robot was involved, there was some workaround of the laws.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#82

Post by miyoji »

myrmidon wrote: post #13
miyoji wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know exactly how consciousness works, but I am extremely confident in the following assertions: * I am conscious. * A rock is not conscious. * Excel spreadsheets are not conscious. * Dogs are conscious. * Orca whales are conscious. * Octopi are conscious. To me, it's extremely obvious that LLMs are in the category of "Excel spreadsheets" and not "dogs", and if anyone disagrees, I think they're experiencing AI…

If you make a hypothetical spreadsheet that emulates a dog brain molecule for molecule, why would that not be conscious?

Hypothetically? You need more than a brain to have consciousness. Dead brains, I believe, do not have it. So it's more than just a simulation of a brain, you also need to simulate the data flow through the brain, the retention of memories, etc. Then there's the problem that a simulation of a roller coaster is not a roller coaster. Is there any reason to believe that this simulation of a brain will in fact operate as a brain? Does the simulation not lose something? Or are we discussing some impossible level of perfect simulation that has never and can never be achieved, even for something a million times less complicated than a mammalian brain?

If you build that spreadsheet, let me know and I'll evaluate it. I've done that evaluation with LLMs and they're definitely not conscious.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#83

Post by throwaway894345 »

devmor wrote: post #62
largbae wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article offers practical advice to go along with this framing, like configuring AI services to write/speak in a more robotic tone. I think that's a decent path to try.

This is actually one of the things that made LLMs more usable for me. The default tone and style of writing they tend to use is nauseatingly annoying and buries information in prose that sounds like a corporate presentation.

[flagged]

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#84

Post by glenstein »

vunderba wrote: post #47
quectophoton wrote: post #30

> Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems. Can someone explain why this is a bad thing, while at the same time it's a good thing to say stuff like "put a computer to sleep", "hibernate", "killing" processes, processes having "child" processes, "reaping", "what does the error say ?", "touch", etc? To me that's just language, and humans just using casual language.

That’s a different thing altogether. Read up on the history of Eliza, one of the earliest attempts at a chatbot and its unsettling implications. https://www.history.com/articles/ai-first-chatbot-eliza-arti...

I think it's bad manners to bluntly tell someone they should "read up" on something because it naturally reads as a kind of a closeted accusation of not being sufficiently well informed. There are ways of broaching the topic of what background knowledge is informing their perspective that don't involve the accusation.

Just to add a small bit of anecdotal value so this comment isn't just a scold: I one time many years ago suggesting an elegant way for Twitter to handle long form text without changing it's then-iconic 140 character limit was to treat it like an attachment, like a video or image. Today, you can see a version of that in how Claude takes large pastes and treats them like attached text blobs, or to a lesser extent in how Substack Notes can reference full size "posts", another example of short form content "attaching" longer form.

I was bluntly told to "look up twitlonger", which I suppose could have been helpful if I had indeed not known about twitlonger, but I had, and it wasn't what I had in mind. I did learn something from it though, which was that it's a mode of communication that implies you don't know what you're talking about with plausible deniability, which I suspect is too irresistible to lovers of passive aggression to go unused.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#85

Post by dijit »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #80
dijit wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Asimov's laws of robotics are flawed too, of course. Almost all of Asimovs writing about the three laws is written as a warning of sorts that language cannot properly capture intent. He would be the very first person to say that they are flawed, that is the intent of them. He uses robots and AI as the creatures that understand language but not intent, and, funnily enough that's exactly what LLMs do... how weird.

LLM's now can capture intent. I think the issue now is that the full landscape of human values never resolves cleanly when mapped from the things we state in writing as being human values. Asimov tried to capture this too, as in, if a robot was tasked with "always protect human life", would it necessarily avoid killing at all costs? What if killing someone would save the lives of 2 others? The infinite array of micro…

“LLMs can capture intent now” reads to me the same as: AI has emotions now, my AI girlfriend told me so.

I don’t discredit you as a person or a professional, but we meatbags are looking for sentience in things which don’t have it, thats why we anthropomorphise things constantly, even as children.

We are easily fooled and misled.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#86

Post by dist-epoch »

miyoji wrote: post #11
rytill wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does its architecture or you knowing how AI is architected cause thoughts of it being conscious to go out the window? It seems like the biggest factor has nothing to do with AI, but instead that you went from being someone who admits they don’t know how consciousness works to being someone who thinks they know how consciousness works now and can make confident assertions about it.

I don't know exactly how consciousness works, but I am extremely confident in the following assertions: * I am conscious. * A rock is not conscious. * Excel spreadsheets are not conscious. * Dogs are conscious. * Orca whales are conscious. * Octopi are conscious. To me, it's extremely obvious that LLMs are in the category of "Excel spreadsheets" and not "dogs", and if anyone disagrees, I think they're experiencing AI…

> I am extremely confident in the following assertions:

These are called "beliefs".

Some people are extremely confident that God exists, other are extremely confident that Earth is flat.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#87

Post by atleastoptimal »

dijit wrote: post #85
atleastoptimal wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM's now can capture intent. I think the issue now is that the full landscape of human values never resolves cleanly when mapped from the things we state in writing as being human values. Asimov tried to capture this too, as in, if a robot was tasked with "always protect human life", would it necessarily avoid killing at all costs? What if killing someone would save the lives of 2 others? The infinite array of micro…

“LLMs can capture intent now” reads to me the same as: AI has emotions now, my AI girlfriend told me so. I don’t discredit you as a person or a professional, but we meatbags are looking for sentience in things which don’t have it, thats why we anthropomorphise things constantly, even as children. We are easily fooled and misled.

LLM's capturing intent is a capabilities-level discussion, it is verifiable, and is clear just via a conversation with Claude or Chatgpt.

Whether they have emotions, an internal life or whatever is an unfalsifiable claim and has nothing to do with capabilities.

I'm not sure why you think the claim that they can capture intent implies they have emotions, it's simply a matter of semantic comprehension which is tied to pattern recognition, rhetorical inference, etc that are all naturally comprehensible to a language model.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#88

Post by giancarlostoro »

miyoji wrote: post #6

I strongly disagree with this framing. It's patently insane to demand that humans alter their behavior to accommodate the foibles of mere machines, and it simply won't work in the majority of cases. Humans WILL anthropomorphize the AI, humans WILL blindly trust their outputs, and humans WILL defer responsibility to them. Asimov's laws of robotics are flawed too, of course. There is no finite set of rules that can con…

> Humans WILL anthropomorphize the AI

r/myboyfriendisai

Is quite... an interesting subreddit to say the least. If you've never seen this, it was really something when the version that followed GPT4o came out, because they were complaining that their boyfriend / girlfriend was no longer the same.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#89

Post by [deleted] »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #80
dijit wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Asimov's laws of robotics are flawed too, of course. Almost all of Asimovs writing about the three laws is written as a warning of sorts that language cannot properly capture intent. He would be the very first person to say that they are flawed, that is the intent of them. He uses robots and AI as the creatures that understand language but not intent, and, funnily enough that's exactly what LLMs do... how weird.

LLM's now can capture intent. I think the issue now is that the full landscape of human values never resolves cleanly when mapped from the things we state in writing as being human values. Asimov tried to capture this too, as in, if a robot was tasked with "always protect human life", would it necessarily avoid killing at all costs? What if killing someone would save the lives of 2 others? The infinite array of micro…

[deleted]

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#90

Post by ryandrake »

cobbzilla wrote: post #22
miyoji wrote: post #6

I strongly disagree with this framing. It's patently insane to demand that humans alter their behavior to accommodate the foibles of mere machines, and it simply won't work in the majority of cases. Humans WILL anthropomorphize the AI, humans WILL blindly trust their outputs, and humans WILL defer responsibility to them. Asimov's laws of robotics are flawed too, of course. There is no finite set of rules that can con…

We have invented a new tool that can cause great harm. Do you see any value whatsoever in promulgating safety guidelines for humans to use the tool without hurting themselves or others? Do you not own any power tools?

I think in order for "AI safety" to be achievable and effective, we need to have a shared agreement on what "safety" means. Recently, the word has been overloaded to mean all sorts of things and used to justify run-of-the-mill censorship (nothing to do with safety).

Safety should go back to being narrowly defined in terms of reducing / preventing physical injury. Safety is not "don't use swear words." Safety is not "don't violate patents." Safety is not "don't talk about suicide." Safety is not "don't mention politics I don't like." As long as we keep broadly defining it, we're never going to agree on it, and it won't be implementable.

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