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They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

mit.edu

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Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#121

Post by lucubratory »

boringuser2 wrote: post #112
kragen wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while they don't yet rise to the level i would describe as 'intelligent' without qualifications, they do seem to be less unintelligent than most of the humans, and in particular most of the ones criticizing them in this way, who consistently repeat specific criticisms applicable to years-ago systems which have no factual connection to current reality

It doesn't matter how it "appears". A disembodied paragraph that I've transmitted to you can appear to be intelligent or not, but it only really matters in the sense that you can ascribe that intellect to an agent. The LLM isn't an agent and no intellect can be ascribed to it. It is a device actual intelligent agents have made and ascribing it intellect is equally as erroneous.

Can any device ever be intelligent, according to you?

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#123

Post by agravier »

surprisetalk wrote: post #15

Andy Weir's The Egg is another excellent short story: [1] http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html If you're looking for more short stories, I highly recommend the following: • Ted Chiang's Exhalation • Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life and Others • Ken Liu's Paper Menagerie • Borges's Ficciones • Smullyan's What is the Name of This Book? • Smullyan's Lady or the Tiger? • Douglas Adams's God's Debris Remember t…

Also Lena by qntm: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#124

Post by _heimdall »

boringuser2 wrote: post #103
kragen wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think the point of the story is exactly what you've gotten from it namely, it's absurd to dismiss the possibility of self-awareness in some system because it's built out of parts different from the parts other self-aware systems you're familiar with are built out of a useful thing to keep in mind when the stochastic parrots start squawking about how large language models aren't actually intelligent shpxvat vf terng

But they aren't, and there is no obvious vector for them to develop the capability.

How are you defining intelligence? And how are you measuring the abilities in existing LLM systems to know they don't meet these criteria?

Honest questions by the way in case they come out snarky in text. I'm not aware of a single, agreed upon definition of intelligence or a verified test that we could use to know if a computer system has those capabilities.

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#125

Post by [deleted] »

boringuser2 wrote: post #112
kragen wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while they don't yet rise to the level i would describe as 'intelligent' without qualifications, they do seem to be less unintelligent than most of the humans, and in particular most of the ones criticizing them in this way, who consistently repeat specific criticisms applicable to years-ago systems which have no factual connection to current reality

It doesn't matter how it "appears". A disembodied paragraph that I've transmitted to you can appear to be intelligent or not, but it only really matters in the sense that you can ascribe that intellect to an agent. The LLM isn't an agent and no intellect can be ascribed to it. It is a device actual intelligent agents have made and ascribing it intellect is equally as erroneous.

[deleted]

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#126

Post by h0l0cube »

_heimdall wrote: post #124
boringuser2 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they aren't, and there is no obvious vector for them to develop the capability.

How are you defining intelligence? And how are you measuring the abilities in existing LLM systems to know they don't meet these criteria? Honest questions by the way in case they come out snarky in text. I'm not aware of a single, agreed upon definition of intelligence or a verified test that we could use to know if a computer system has those capabilities.

> I'm not aware of a single, agreed upon definition of intelligence

That may be, but I think today's tweet from Yann LeCun succinctly sums up the differences in capability between our wetware and LLMs

https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1728867136049709208

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#128

Post by jvanderbot »

shpx wrote: post #96

I've never understood what people see in this story. Meat is a complex organization of trillions of self-replicating machines, each of which (besides red blood cells maybe) is also incredibly complex... much more advanced than anything human minds have been able to build. I can't imagine what a sentient entity would have to be made out of or how much less "efficient" or stable it would have to be than me for me to fi…

The point I took away is that almost all biological life is optimized for energy efficiency in its ecological niche. Any interplanetary species would be beyond those constraints, and would either evolve or engineer their way out of them as soon as possible to, you know, live! Not to mention eradicate disease, travel the galaxy, etc.

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#129

Post by rendall »

boringuser2 wrote: post #112
kragen wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while they don't yet rise to the level i would describe as 'intelligent' without qualifications, they do seem to be less unintelligent than most of the humans, and in particular most of the ones criticizing them in this way, who consistently repeat specific criticisms applicable to years-ago systems which have no factual connection to current reality

It doesn't matter how it "appears". A disembodied paragraph that I've transmitted to you can appear to be intelligent or not, but it only really matters in the sense that you can ascribe that intellect to an agent. The LLM isn't an agent and no intellect can be ascribed to it. It is a device actual intelligent agents have made and ascribing it intellect is equally as erroneous.

Going meta for a moment, this argument begs the question, assuming the conclusion "Therefore LLMs are not intelligent" in the premises "No intelligence can be ascribed to LLMs".

I'm not convinced it's even possible to come up with a principled, non-circular definition of intelligence (that is, not something like "intelligence is that trait displayed by humans when we...") that would include humans, include animals like crows and octopuses, include a hypothetical alien intelligence, but exclude LLMs.

I'm not arguing that LLMs are intelligent. I'm arguing that the debate is inherently unwinnable.

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#130

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

js2 wrote: post #64
surprisetalk wrote: post #15

Andy Weir's The Egg is another excellent short story: [1] http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html If you're looking for more short stories, I highly recommend the following: • Ted Chiang's Exhalation • Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life and Others • Ken Liu's Paper Menagerie • Borges's Ficciones • Smullyan's What is the Name of This Book? • Smullyan's Lady or the Tiger? • Douglas Adams's God's Debris Remember t…

They're Made Out of Meat (21 submissions) and The Egg (33 submissions) seem to be the most frequently submitted short stories to this site: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=galactanet.com

> submitted short stories to this site

Now that you reminded me, I submitted a story that Russ Cox mentioned at the end of his post discussed a month ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38020792

It's "Coding Machines" by Lawrence Kesteloot, January 2009, and it has a lot to do with Cox's piece, Running the “Reflections on Trusting Trust” Compiler

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