11–20 of 29 posts
Meanwhile, among the yonger generations, "clanker" has been fully established a a term to disapprove of AI for at least a year. though it remains to be seen if it will stick or just be a passing meme, like tge eponymous "6-7" or the now nearly dead "skibidi"
it reminds people (or specifically, very online gen Z and gen alpha) of the N-word because there was a popular TikTok account that mapped "clanker" to 1960s civil rights parody videos and it was clear he was substituting it for the N-word
> The reason I liked the word is precisely the opposite of that use. I want language that prevents anthropomorphizing. I want a word that says: this is a tool, a machine of numbers and matrices I understand wanting the language to reflect the actuality that these agents are just code doing predictive word guessing and not a feeling person. The irony is by using a word that culturally reflects and is used as a slur fo…
Setting aside the history of anthropomorphism of robots using this term: https://sfdictionary.com/view/3048/clanker A clanker doesn't clank? It feels more like an emotional name — a pet name or derogatory name — as opposed to a name that evokes a tool-like view of the thing. A typer? an autocompleter? auto-sed? LLM? All probably would have less emotional feeling to it due to being rooted in the actions performed.
On the other hand "robot" sounds derogatory for me, as it etymologically suggests a slave who does forced work.
The oldest known term for "robots" was used by Homer in the Iliad, for the metallic (female) robots used by Hephaestus to do his work, and it was "amphipoloi", which is cognate with Latin "ancillae", which also means "servants" or "slaves", like the modern "robots".
It's not cool, it's not clever, it's just stupid.
I agree with his rationale, but not with how he arrives there.
> Racism Is About Humans
This is generally true, but this argument also falls into a pattern that has enabled racism in the past: "It's a sin to harm any soul, but sadly the savages/blacks/natives/etc have no souls" etc etc.
I think it might get more muddy if you compare clankers to animals: Those too are clearly not humans, often have a vastly different "neural wiring" than humans and are at all kinds of different levels of cognition. But we still recognize that some level is protection is warranted and the reasoning goes beyond "puppies look so cute".
I'd at least like some deeper criterion than "they're not human" or "they're just next token predictors" - at least then this would depend how they predict the next token.
I still have no qualms using LLMs and I don't think they (or at least the current batch) needs any protection. What's a more convincing argument for me is that there isn't even a clear way to count how many individual "AI"s there are that could be conscious. The number of models is relatively clear-cut, but models are just numbers on a hard drive. They're about as conscious as raw DNA is.
The only thing where a consciousness could hypothetically exist is in the inference loop - and that lasts only very short time anyway - so it would more be like a "Mr. Meeseeks" kind of situation, where some kind of ephemeral entity gets spirited into being (by the GPU!), does some work and then vanishes again. Except, it did not even really "vanish": Because the conversation, i.e. context window is the entity, you could "wake it up" again by continuing the conversation. It seems very hard to imagine a consciousness inside that - and even then, it would necessarily be one with retrograde and anterograde amnesia.
So I'm not exactly worried, until we have models that are running in a constant loop, where the weights are continuously updated and that shows evidence of episodic memory. Will that change in the future? Who knows?
Tells something how we went from "meatbag" back when tech was cool and the Future etc to "clanker" now that tech is evil... I agree with his rationale, but not with how he arrives there. > Racism Is About Humans This is generally true, but this argument also falls into a pattern that has enabled racism in the past: "It's a sin to harm any soul, but sadly the savages/blacks/natives/etc have no souls" etc etc. I think…
Are you daft? It's a robot for crying out loud.
Tells something how we went from "meatbag" back when tech was cool and the Future etc to "clanker" now that tech is evil... I agree with his rationale, but not with how he arrives there. > Racism Is About Humans This is generally true, but this argument also falls into a pattern that has enabled racism in the past: "It's a sin to harm any soul, but sadly the savages/blacks/natives/etc have no souls" etc etc. I think…
> This is generally true, but also this argument falls into the pattern that has enabled racism in the past: "It's a sin to harm any soul, but sadly the savages/blacks/natives/etc have no souls" etc etc. Are you daft? It's a robot for crying out loud.