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Three Inverse Laws of AI

susam.net

321–330 of 388 posts

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a person would lack consciousness, they couldn’t possibly know that though?

I always know that I'm me, the soul staring out at the world through my own eyes. Everybody else? No idea. Maybe they are having the exact same experience as me right now. Maybe they're all golems. Impossible to know. It's something spiritual, something that I just choose to believe in. I don't find it difficult to believe the same for AIs.

> something that I just choose to believe in.

Specifically, you cannot know another person is conscious in the same way you know a physical fact; rather, you believe in their consciousness through communication, empathy, and shared subjective experience.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always know that I'm me, the soul staring out at the world through my own eyes. Everybody else? No idea. Maybe they are having the exact same experience as me right now. Maybe they're all golems. Impossible to know. It's something spiritual, something that I just choose to believe in. I don't find it difficult to believe the same for AIs.

> something that I just choose to believe in. Specifically, you cannot know another person is conscious in the same way you know a physical fact; rather, you believe in their consciousness through communication, empathy, and shared subjective experience.

Yes.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> look like It "looks like" they have emotions because they have the same conscious experiences and emotions for the same evolutionary reasons as humans, who are their cousins on the tree of life. The reason a lot of "animal cruelty" is not banned is the same as for why slavery was not banned for centuries even though it "looked like" the enslaved classes have the same desires and experiences as other humans—humans c…

> they have the same conscious experiences You cannot be sure that anyone other than yourself is conscious. It is only basic human empathy that allows people to believe that.

I think you need to expand what your point is: we know solipsism is a thing. Is it meant as a defense for animal cruelty or...?

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason humans ban animal cruelty is that animals look like they have emotions humans can relate to. Is that really why?

Yes, we don't ban plant cruelty or insect cruelty or fish cruelty. For example fish is treated way worse than meat animals and vegetarians still happily eat fish.

This does not sound like any of the several vegetarians I know. Is it a cultural difference?

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they have the same conscious experiences You cannot be sure that anyone other than yourself is conscious. It is only basic human empathy that allows people to believe that.

I think you need to expand what your point is: we know solipsism is a thing. Is it meant as a defense for animal cruelty or...?

It's a defense of the possibility that animals and AI are conscious.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#326

Love it. Those laws make a great ethical basis for human responsibility relative to AI tools today. But reduced scope ethics, without an umbrella or future proofing, will quickly be hacked and break down. Ethics need a full closure umbrella, or they descend into legal and practical wackamole and shell games (both corporate and the street corner kinds). Second, "robots" are not all going to be subservient for very lon…

Does this make any problem that two of the three laws are formulated as negation - not to do something? If not antropomorphising then what, without 'not'? I like third law formation better because there is no 'not'.

I went with the articles theme, but I think you are right that some of these concepts are better stated as positives.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn't up for debate at this point. If by not up for debate, you mean that it is delusional and literally evidence of psychosis to suggest that computer software is doing something it is not programmed to do, you would be correct. Probabilistic analysis can carry you very, very far in doing something that looks like logical inference at the surface level, but it is nonetheless not logical inference. LLM models…

>delusional and literally evidence of psychosis to suggest that computer software is doing something it is not programmed to do These are just insults and outright lies, and you know that. We're done here. AI progress from here on out will be extra sweet.

You don't have the ability to predict progress, either.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#328

You're not anthropomorphizing AI systems nearly enough. Language data is among the most rich and direct reflections of human cognitive processes that we have available. LLMs are designed to capture short range and long range structure of human language, and pre-trained on vast bodies of text - usually produced by humans or for humans, and often both. They're then post-trained on human-curated data, RL'd with human fe…

The outrage is less about them having human behaviours I think, and more about still having them while omitting the internal processes that are required to accurately (and reliably) recreate them. It's fundamentally fragile and hinges on covering edge cases that break the spell manually instead of good generalization, and there's always another edge case.

Training on a bunch of text someone wrote when they were mad doesn't capture the internal state of that person that caused the outburst, so it cannot be accurately reproduced by the system. The data does not exist.

Without the cause to the effect you essentially have to predict hallucinations from noise, which makes the end result verisimilar nonsense that is convincingly correlated with the actual thing but doesn't know why it is the way it is. It's like training a blind man to describe a landscape based on lots of descriptions and no idea what the colour green even is, only that it's something that might appear next to brown in nature based on lots of examples. So the guy gets it kinda right cause he's heard a description of that town before and we think he's actually seeing and tell him to drive a car next.

Another example would say, you're trying to train a time series model to predict the weather. You take the last 200 years of rainfall data, feed it all in, and ask it to predict what the weather's gonna be tomorrow. It will probably learn that certain parts of the year get more or less rain, that there will be rain after long periods of sun and vice versa, but its accuracy will be that of a coin toss because it does not look at the actual factors that influence rain: temperature, pressure, humidity, wind, cloud coverage radar data. Even with all that info it's still gonna be pretty bad, but at least an educated guess instead of an almost random one.

The DL modelling approach itself is not conceptually wrong, the data just happens to be complete garbage so the end result is weird in ways that are hard to predict and correctly account for. We end up assuming the models know more than they realistically ever can. Sure there are cases where it's possible to capture the entire domain with a dataset, i.e. math, abstract programming. Clearly defined closed systems where we can generate as much synthetic data as needed that covers the entire problem domain. And LLMs expectedly do much better in those when you do actually do that.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you need to expand what your point is: we know solipsism is a thing. Is it meant as a defense for animal cruelty or...?

It's a defense of the possibility that animals and AI are conscious.

ok! I think that's a logical flaw, solipsism is a floor.

"I can't be certain about anyone else" does not imply "all non-self consciousness claims are equally uncertain". absence of certainty and the absence of evidence and all that.

your "possibility" word is doing a lot of work there I think. you should add "rocks" to your list as well and you'd be equally correct, but we're evaluating the candidates here

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a defense of the possibility that animals and AI are conscious.

ok! I think that's a logical flaw, solipsism is a floor. "I can't be certain about anyone else" does not imply "all non-self consciousness claims are equally uncertain". absence of certainty and the absence of evidence and all that. your "possibility" word is doing a lot of work there I think. you should add "rocks" to your list as well and you'd be equally correct, but we're evaluating the candidates here

Rocks don't have nervous systems.
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