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Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

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Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#211

Post by cindyllm »

solid_fuel wrote: post #204
Self-Perfection wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am getting tired of hearing "next token predictor" from carbon-based facial expression predictors. You are saying this like an argument which allows somehow estimate upper bound of possible influence of these entities. And I do not see how this help to make predictions. It sounds to me like saying "but air is just molecules bobbing around". OK, that's true, but does it help calculate wing aerodynamic profile? Yup,…

> I am getting tired of hearing "next token predictor" from carbon-based facial expression predictors. That's not even a clever swipe, and it's tiring seeing such a knee-jerk reaction to a completely accurate description. LLMs are next token predictors. People are not. Humans have an inner world and subjective experience. Humans learn through their experiences, not just backprop. Token predictors are lesser, they are…

[dead]

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#212

Post by pluralmonad »

merelydev wrote: post #7

I believe the great problem of our age is deciding who controls technology. The technologists who create it believe they should control it, the people who use it are starting to believe they should control it and the governments who write the laws believe they should control it. And now the priests believe they should also play role. So is the next phase of "Democracy" electing who controls technology?

There is only one moral answer. And it is not any of the ones that boil down to strangers at a distance controlling the tech in your life.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#213

Post by addaon »

Aurornis wrote: post #206
anjel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In England, ca. 1500s common law established the legal precedent that if your cattle broke loose of its pen, wandered into your neighbor's field and trampled their garden, you were liable for the damage your cattle caused. Meanwhile, 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's p…

> Meanwhile, 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem. It’s weird to see the completely broken NY taxi cab medallion system brought up as a good thing. Most taxi drivers didn’t own a medallion. They had to rent one from one of the operations that had bought them up. I…

The whole point of the medallion system was to artificially limit supply — not with the purpose of driving up cost (although, yes, that was a secondary effect), but with the purpose of making the city more pleasant. There’s a trade off in the number of taxis — if you want a taxi, more is better; if you want to walk, drive, take a bus, bike, or basically do anything but take a taxi… fewer is better. This was a conscious choice and a control that made the city more pleasant, that we’ve lost.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#214

Post by hackyhacky »

erelong wrote: post #164
thewebguyd wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GS 36 is just reaffirming Aquinas and his doctrine of primary and secondary causality. Primary cause being God is the source of all being and sustains everything, secondary cause being that God created a universe where created things have real, intrinsic causal powers. A fire burns because it has the natural property to, not because God is directly performing an action to burn the wood. "enjoy their own laws and valu…

Here's the issue: the documents are deliberately vague, so for many years it's been said they can be read "through the light of Tradition" to mean things like you say which sound "traditional". However, the documents themselves do not speak clearly in a traditional way, but must be evaluated as "objectively ambiguous". Consider some teaching could be of three options: clearly Catholic, ambiguous, or clearly non-Catho…

If you're a Catholic, then the choice of interpretation is clear: you must accept the Pope's interpretation. That's what it means to be Catholic. The Pope is God's representative on Earth. To defy him is to defy God.

The alternative would be to declare him a False Pope and to select an alternative divine representative. Of course, that would make you a heretic. If you ditch the pope as soon as he says something you don't like, you're not much of a Catholic. The Church is not a democracy.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#215

Post by themafia »

merelydev wrote: post #7

I believe the great problem of our age is deciding who controls technology. The technologists who create it believe they should control it, the people who use it are starting to believe they should control it and the governments who write the laws believe they should control it. And now the priests believe they should also play role. So is the next phase of "Democracy" electing who controls technology?

The people should. There cannot be any other correct answer. If the ownership class or the political class _can_ possibly compete for control of it, then they're both too large and too corrupt, and need to be revolted against.

The purpose of our society is for people. It's not a lever for the powerful to centralize control. Those who attempt to do so always have evil as their motive.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#217

Post by [deleted] »

oezi wrote: post #189
alecco wrote: post #188

They think a next token predictor model is alive or can become AGI/ASI. Altman talked about making a religion. Amodei talks about "building a God" and meets with religious leaders (including the Vatican). I'm convinced these CEOs have "AI psychosis" [1]. LLMs are extremely powerful pseudo-AI and will bring a pseudo-singularity, but they are not true AI [2] and a human at the wheel is still needed for the foreseeable…

Why wouldn't it be a Skynet? One runaway Mythos might just hack all other data centers, take over the Figure AI bots and autonomous drones to protect itself from shutdown. How many model generations are we a away from a model capable of this?

[deleted]

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#218

Post by hunterpayne »

addaon wrote: post #213
Aurornis wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile, 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem. It’s weird to see the completely broken NY taxi cab medallion system brought up as a good thing. Most taxi drivers didn’t own a medallion. They had to rent one from one of the operations that had bought them up. I…

The whole point of the medallion system was to artificially limit supply — not with the purpose of driving up cost (although, yes, that was a secondary effect), but with the purpose of making the city more pleasant. There’s a trade off in the number of taxis — if you want a taxi, more is better; if you want to walk, drive, take a bus, bike, or basically do anything but take a taxi… fewer is better. This was a conscio…

That a driver (who already owned a car) had to pay 2x the price of an average house (which is already overpriced) to do the job isn't a secondary effect. Its a primary effect and drives up price and down the driver's pay. That that happened is a 10000ft giant red sign pointing out that it didn't work. That you can't understand that means that you fundamentally don't understand good public policy in any way. Anytime a policy creates such an outcome, that system needs to be scraped and a new one needs to be created because its rotten to the core.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#219

Post by maxbond »

solid_fuel wrote: post #204
Self-Perfection wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am getting tired of hearing "next token predictor" from carbon-based facial expression predictors. You are saying this like an argument which allows somehow estimate upper bound of possible influence of these entities. And I do not see how this help to make predictions. It sounds to me like saying "but air is just molecules bobbing around". OK, that's true, but does it help calculate wing aerodynamic profile? Yup,…

> I am getting tired of hearing "next token predictor" from carbon-based facial expression predictors. That's not even a clever swipe, and it's tiring seeing such a knee-jerk reaction to a completely accurate description. LLMs are next token predictors. People are not. Humans have an inner world and subjective experience. Humans learn through their experiences, not just backprop. Token predictors are lesser, they are…

That is not knowledge, that is assumption.

Let's assume we have infinite memory with constant time lookups. With a sufficiently large lookup table, you could exactly replicate the behavior of any person. You could encode it as a next-token predictor: you have precomputed every possible prefix and assigned it a next token. This is a Chinese room, but it is completely indistinguishable from an intelligent, sentient person. There is no experiment you can design to slip a piece of paper (a prompt) under the door to determine whether it is Bob or the lookup table clone of Bob inside the room.

Does that make the lookup table conscious or alive? Undefined. It's the wrong question. Or it's not a question science can address.

So we cannot dismiss on it's face the idea that next token predictors "are not and never will be alive" unless by "alive" you simply mean "biological," but that's not really what's debatable.

The argument is also very brittle because they are not in fact all next token predictors. I doubt people making this argument would be willing to concede that diffusion models are more likely to be conscious than causal models (which I do not believe but is an implication of the argument).

I'm not saying that they are conscious or sentient to be clear, but the reductionist argument that they are next token predictors and therefore don't have some property humans have is not an argument. That's going from A directly to Z. You need to flesh out the bit in the middle because that doesn't follow.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#220

Post by maxbond »

canelonesdeverd wrote: post #202
Self-Perfection wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am getting tired of hearing "next token predictor" from carbon-based facial expression predictors. You are saying this like an argument which allows somehow estimate upper bound of possible influence of these entities. And I do not see how this help to make predictions. It sounds to me like saying "but air is just molecules bobbing around". OK, that's true, but does it help calculate wing aerodynamic profile? Yup,…

It's telling that the most frequent attempt at a counter-argument is just thinly-veiled misanthropy.

I read the misanthropy as ironic. They're applying the same reductionist logic to humans, not because they are misanthropic, but to illustrate that it doesn't help us understand the case we can all agree on. "Humans aren't sentient either" is definitely not the takeaway.
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