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I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

naomibashkansky.com

151–160 of 233 posts

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#151
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Help me understand... If one uses AI for anything but coding, or purely utilitarian purposes, they are psychotic? This is not intended to be provocative. I am asking sincerely. I have a lot of AI sessions, that I value enough to have reviewed multiple times, over months. And indeed, I explored much that I never would have without the AI, and enjoyed it. Even appreciated it. The bulk of my saved material is research,…

“meaning” emerges from a mental process. That mental process can consume things which were built to convey meaning (e.g. a novel) or were not (a waterfall). Just because an AI bot says things that are meaningful, that doesn’t mean you need to assume it is intentional, sentient, or intelligent. It could vomit out a random Rorschach test and if you found meaning for yourself, you can still understand it was random. I t…

>I talk to a bot to sharpen my thinking, not to adopt its thinking.

Right. I was under the impression it doesn't have any thinking. But that never mattered to me much. And I would expect someone working with OpenAI to have a firm handle on that.

I appreciate the effort to explain, but I kind of took all that for granted. I still don't understand where the psychosis comes from. If the model spits out a number, the number is not false simply because it had no agency to understand the number. If the model brilliantly patterns something, I do not need assume intent.

If by psychosis is implied the obvious, such as attributing consciousness to an LLM, I might understand, though I would argue it's pretty elitist and self-righteous, and that "naivety" would be a less damning and more appropriate term, which could be used just as effectively. I am beginning to suspect it's a term that appeals to a younger generation, where cruelty is a bit more normal than it was in my generation. Not sure though.

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#152
> 2027 — A morning at Conduit

> I put a band around my head, and open my laptop at Conduit. It’s 9 am. My device pairs with my laptop over Bluetooth. I open, without loss of generality, Codex.

At least we are reassured that short-range networking protocols will be invariant under the apocalypse.

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#153
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of theory of mind correlates pretty strongly with the types of traits that are valued highly in Silicon Valley. There's a self-selection effect here where many of the titans of industry in the Bay and similar circles are intelligent in a mathematical or scientific, computer-like way but cannot express themselves or understand other people deeply and emotively in the way that many others with fewer intellectual g…

Do we? Or do we just have a bunch of made up stories about possible dystopian futures that haven't yet come to pass? Skynet isn't real, nor is the Matrix. They're made up stories, creative fiction, not Cassandra telling the future.

You live in a world entirely controlled by the rich. Few places has a functional democracy(Switzerland, where else?).

Most of your life is spent performing a business function; the value of your labor is rapidly declining, and the little freedom the common man has is evaporating. Further, the surveillance state is near total - everything we do is recorded, and these records are controlled by the worst amongst us(including this message from me to you).

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#154
> 3 reasons:

> Audacious yet practical vision: I believe in this vision; to quantify, if Conduit becomes the general read and write company, then I expect it to be worth over $1 trillion. I feel good about the vision, because it builds towards a more human future. And I trust the scaling laws, which have held for many doublings.

Well, good luck with that venture

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#155
post #80

> The AI is no longer “other” > My AI is a natural extension of me. It feels like a sixth sense and another limb. I wonder about a problem, feel as though I’m literally surfing the web, see glimpses of the websites, get flashes of intuition about the problem, and ultimately derive the answer. We call this AI psychosis.

That, or just SV madness. If you're in northern California anywhere near the Bay Area, work in tech, and are reading this, I am literally begging you to leave your echo chamber. This isn't healthy or grounded in reality in any way, shape, or form. It's not just the AI stuff, it's the whole mindset. Humans aren't meant to operate in that sort of environment where there's unlimited funding and no consequence.

There isn’t unlimited funding. That’s temporary and it’s going to be great when it runs out.

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#156
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already been decided by SCOTUS that things like heat imaging require a warrant, and that arbitrary scanning without a warrant (or presumably also probable cause) is a violation of the 4th amendment. This technology (still science fiction) would likely get similar treatment using the existing precedent about how new technologies can be used.

The easy workaround for this (which Flock has used to massive success and why it's drawn so much ire) is to set up or subcontract a private corporation to do this which will inherently be subject to much less stringent oversight. It also allows government and law enforcement to evade accountability.

The legal arguments against Flock are different than the legal arguments against thermal imaging by the police (without a warrant or probably cause). And the latter is closer to the hypothetical broad mind reading (science fiction, again) than it is to Flock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States - The case I was referencing.

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this whole area of UX scares me. Silent speech techniques could strike a balance, but it seems obvious it wont stop there - consider what a state actor would do if they could skip interrogation altogether? Unfortunately I think this is inevitable because as a species we perform a steady march toward collective desires for items of science fiction, so start your adversarial double-think practice now.

Is it really collective desire or are these products being pushed upon us? And why does it always have to be the dystopic "destroying human nature and society as we know it" science fiction and not the utopic "everyone lived happily ever after" science fiction? Or does it just feel that way to me?

Based on the HN “realists” I routinely see in comments, I expect it will go something like this:

  I’m generally pro-privacy, but here’s the hard truth: at my startup, we disabled keyboard input in our app Slopgen and switched the default to Conduit Thought Input™, and only 2% of users bothered to navigate the 17 submenus and submit their SSN and face scan to re-enable typing. Yep, 2%, that’s all.

  DAUs only decreased by ≈11%, but our ARR is already up 170% thanks to our AdThink™ revenue sharing agreement, and only 1% of users argued with our Fin.ai bot for the 45 minutes needed give a thumbs down feedback about the change.

  Let’s face it: talk is cheap but users *want* these features, revealed preference *always* tells the real story. Better get used to it now or get left behind.

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#159
I feel like people are focusing on the wrong thing here.

He starts off at 2027, where he’ll have a headband that can read his thoughts. That’s in 4-16 months. Correct me if I’m wrong, but last I checked we‘re quite far from being able to read people’s thought from a headband.

Do these clowns actually forget that part?

Re: I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

#160
post #80

> The AI is no longer “other” > My AI is a natural extension of me. It feels like a sixth sense and another limb. I wonder about a problem, feel as though I’m literally surfing the web, see glimpses of the websites, get flashes of intuition about the problem, and ultimately derive the answer. We call this AI psychosis.

I guess I will circle around again, because the miserable folks here found cause to flag, yes, flag my question. But you seem pretty smart, really smart, and good at judging people. So I will ask you more directly this time to back your statement. The polite version failed.

Please apply your great psychological prowess to Roman Yampolskiy or Tegmark. Those might require more than a cheap comment to leave uncontested by the spineless swarm here.

Go on. Make your case. I can still read it even if this comment is flagged again.

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