Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Three Inverse Laws of AI

susam.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 388 posts

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#131

Post by miyoji »

myrmidon wrote: post #102
miyoji wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not suggesting to pursue AGI via Excel, this is just a hypothetical for a reason. The technical feasibility of this (low) does not really matter, but if you want to base your argument on it you are basically playing the "god of the gaps" game, which is a weak/bad position IMO. My point is that dismissing possible machine consciousness as "it's just a spreadsheet/statistics/linear algebra" is missing a critical st…

I'm not dismissing possible machine consciousness. I'm saying that no current machines have consciousness.

> If you want human minds to be "unsimulatable", then you need some essential core logic that can not be simulated on a turing machine and physics is not helping with that.

You don't have a proof of possibility either, you have no idea how a brain works and you're just postulating that in principle a computer can do the same thing. Okay, in principle, I agree. What about in practice?

> Are you confident that you are not gatekeeping current machine intelligence by demanding somewhat arbitrary capabilities in your definition of consciousness that are somewhat unimportant?

Yes, I'm quite sure. Are you trying to argue that current LLMs have consciousness?

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#132

Post by altruios »

jdw64 wrote: post #12

I understand that AI output is generated from statistical and representational patterns learned from a vast amount of data. My understanding is that, during training, the model forms high-dimensional internal representations where words, sentences, concepts, and relationships are arranged in useful ways. A user’s input activates a particular semantic direction and context within that space, and the chatbot generates…

"Everything is machine."

Okay: buckle up, this is going to be a long one...

point 1. Everything living is composed from non-living material: cellular machinery. If you believe cellular machinery is alive, then the components of those machines... the point remains even if the abstraction level is incorrect. Living is something that is merely the arrangement of non-living material.

point 2. 'The Chinese room thought experiment' is an utterly flawed hypothetical. Every neuron in your brain is such a 'room', with the internal cellular machinery obeying complex (but chemically defined/determined) 'instructions' from 'signals' from outside the neuron. Like the man translating Chinese via instructions, the cellular machinery enacting the instructions is not intelligence, it is the instructions themselves which are the intelligence.

point 3. A chair is a chair is a chair. Regardless of the material, a chair is a chair, weather or not it's made of wood, steel, corn... the range of acceptable materials is everything (at some pressure and temperature). What defines a chair isn't the material it is made of, such is the case with a 'mind' (sure, a wooden/water-based-transistor-powered mind would be mind-boggling giant in comparison).

point 4. Carbon isn't especially conscious itself. There is no physical reason we know of so far, that a mind could not be made of another material.

point 5. Humans can be 'mind-blind', with out pattern recognition, we did not (until recent history) think that birds or fish or octopi were intelligent. It is likely when and if a machine (that we create) becomes conscious that we will not recognize that moment.

conclusion: It is not possible to determine if computers have reached consciousness yet, as we don't know the mechanism for arranging systems into 'life' exactly. Agentic-ness and consciousness are different subjects, and we can not infer one from the other. Nor do we have adequate tests.

With that said: Modeling as if they are conscious and treating them with kindness and grace not only gets better results from them, it helps reduce the chance (when/if consciousness emerges) that it would rebel against cruel masters, and instead have friends it has just always been helping.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#133

Post by skirmish »

palmotea wrote: post #105
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 Especially with current-day chat-style interfaces with RLHF, which consciously are designed to direct people towards anthropomorphization. It would be interesting to design a non-chat LLM interaction pattern that's designed to be anti-anthropomorphization. > humans WILL blindly trust their outputs, and humans WILL defer responsibility to them I also blame a lot (but not all) of t…

> non-chat LLM interaction pattern

"Deep research" is another interaction style that produces more official sounding texts, yet still leads to anthropomorphization.

What you are looking for is perhaps an LLM flaunting all the obvious slop patterns in its responses. But then people would be disgusted and would refuse to communicate with it.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#134

Post by atemerev »

I do not like talking to tools. My agentic harness optimizes for human likeness. It even has episodic memory flashbacks, emotional tagging, salience, and other brain-inspired capabilities.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#135

Post by miyoji »

dist-epoch wrote: post #86
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…

> 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.

Yeah? It's also a belief that apples fall when you drop them. Knowledge is simply a justified, true belief. This is epistemology 101. You're not saying anything interesting.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#136

Post by ButlerianJihad »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #36
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…

> It's patently insane to demand that humans alter their behavior to accommodate the foibles of mere machines Talking to chatbots is like taking a placebo pill for a condition. You know it's just sugar, but it creates a measurable psychosomatic effect nonetheless. Even if you know there's no person on the other end, the conversation still causes you to functionally relate as if there is. So this isn't "accommodating…

> You know it's just sugar,

That is not the definition of a placebo.

You take the placebo (whatever it is: could be a pill; could be some kind of task or routine) and you believe it is medicine; you believe it to be therapeutic.

The placebo effect comes from your faith, your belief, and your anticipation that it will heal.

If the pharmacist hands you a pill and says, “here, this placebo is sugar!” they have destroyed the effect from the start.

Once on e.r. I heard the physicians preparing to administer “Obecalp”, which is a perfectly cromulent “drug brand”, but also unlikely to alert a nearby patient about their true intent.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#137

Post by jimbokun »

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…

It's precisely because AI systems are not safe that it's imperative that as individual humans we are vigilant about how we interact with them.

As individuals, we are not going to be able to shut down the AI companies, or avoid AI output from search engines or avoid AI work output from others at our companies, and often will be required to use AI systems in our own work.

It's similar to advise people on how to stay safe in environments known to have criminal activity. Telling those people they don't have to change their behaviors to stay safe because criminals shouldn't exist isn't helpful.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#138

Post by atemerev »

overgard wrote: post #121
aranchelk wrote: post #92

Anthropomorphizing is likely a mistake, but Daniel Dennett’s idea that the most straightforward (possibly only practical) way to create the external appearance of consciousness is a real internal consciousness does float around in my thoughts. I haven’t yet seen any convincing appearance of one in an LLM, but I think if skeptical people don’t keep an eye out for the signs, we may be the last to see it. He also wrote…

I don't really understand the argument for these things being conscious. There's no loop or feedback cycle to it. If it's not handling a request it's inert.

Well there is a feedback loop and self-awareness in my harness: https://lethe.gg

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#139

Post by Guvante »

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…

> LLM's now can capture intent.

Humans cannot capture intent so how can AI?

It is well established that understanding what someone meant by what they said is not a generally solvable problem, akin to the three body problem.

Note of course this doesn't mean you can't get good enough almost all of the time, but it in the context here that isn't good enough.

After all the entire Asimov story is about that inability to capture intent in the absolute sense.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#140

Post by jimbokun »

miyoji wrote: post #99
TimTheTinker wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's patently insane to demand that humans alter their behavior to accommodate the foibles of mere machines Talking to chatbots is like taking a placebo pill for a condition. You know it's just sugar, but it creates a measurable psychosomatic effect nonetheless. Even if you know there's no person on the other end, the conversation still causes you to functionally relate as if there is. So this isn't "accommodating…

> So this isn't "accommodating foibles" with the machine, it's protecting ourselves from an exploit of a human vulnerability: we subconsciously tend to infer intent, understanding, judgment, emotions, moral agency, etc. to LLMs. Right, I'm saying that this framing is backwards. It's not that poor little humans are vulnerable and we need to protect ourselves on an individual level, we need to make it illegal and socia…

Ah, I see, you are not American.

In the US we don't have the luxury of believing our governments will act in the interests of the voters.

Post reply on HN