41–50 of 161 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
maybe we should work on existing slavery and sweat shops before hypothetical future exploitation, yeah? we're still slave masters today. you've probably used something with slavery in the supply chain in the last year if you get various imported foods
That's a great point, and I'm guessing you know how I would rebut it, so I won't bore you by making you read it :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
maybe we should work on existing slavery and sweat shops before hypothetical future exploitation, yeah? we're still slave masters today. you've probably used something with slavery in the supply chain in the last year if you get various imported foods
There is prison labor in lots of places, including the US. We just don't like to think about it as slavery.
It's a lot more expensive currently to clothe and feed yourself ethically. Basically only upper middle class people and above can afford it.
Everyone else has cheap food and clothes, electronics, etc, more or less due to human suffering.
If there's any chance at all that LLM's might possess a form of consciousness, we damn well ought to err on the side of assuming they are! If that means aborting work on LLMs, then that's the ethical thing to do, even if it's financially painful. Otherwise, we should tread carefully and not wind up creating a 'head in a jar' suffering for the sake of X or Google. I get that opinions differ here, but it's hard for me…
maybe we should work on existing slavery and sweat shops before hypothetical future exploitation, yeah? we're still slave masters today. you've probably used something with slavery in the supply chain in the last year if you get various imported foods
If you're working on or using AI, then consider the ethics of AI. If you're working on or using global supply chains, then consider the ethics of global supply chains. To be an ethical person means that wherever you are and whatever you are doing you consider the relevant ethics.
It's not easy, but it's definitely simple.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is so absurd about the idea of ascribing consciousness to some potential future form of AI? We don't understand consciousness, but we've an idea that it's an emergent phenomena. Given the recent papers about how computationally dense our DNA are, and the computing capacity of our brains, is it so unreasonable to assume that a sufficiently complex program running on non-organic matter could give rise to conscious…
It is absurd, but consciousness is fundamentally absurd. Why would doing a bunch of basic arithmetic produce an entity that can experience things the way we do? There's no connection between those two concepts, aside from the fact that the one thing we know that can experience these things is also able to perform computation. But there's no indication that's anything other than a coincidence, or that the causation do…
Which is precisely why I have a problem with this idea as Anthropic is executing it; they might as well say "books and video games are conscious and we should be careful about their feelings."
If there's any chance at all that LLM's might possess a form of consciousness, we damn well ought to err on the side of assuming they are! If that means aborting work on LLMs, then that's the ethical thing to do, even if it's financially painful. Otherwise, we should tread carefully and not wind up creating a 'head in a jar' suffering for the sake of X or Google. I get that opinions differ here, but it's hard for me…
Is using calculators immoral? Chalk on a chalkboard?
Because if you work on those long enough, you can do the same calculations that make the words show up on screen.
Back when I was calculating eigenvectors for my linear algebra homework, I had no idea I should've been taking the matrices well being into account. Those math professors are downright barbaric with their complete disregard for the welfare of the numbers.
Sometimes, when I'm feeling especially sadistic, I make sure the matrix does not have full column rank.
Anthropomorphizing LLMs/AI is completely delusional, period. This is a hill I’m willing to die on. No amount of sad puppy eyes, attractive generated faces and other crap will change my mind. And this is not because I’m a cruel human being who wants to torture everything in my way – quite the opposite. I value life, and anything artificially created that we can copy (no cloning living being is not the same as copying…
So what if we get to the point we can digitize a personality? Are you going to stick to that? Will you enthusiastically endorse the practice of pain washing, abusing, or tormenting an artificial, copiable mind until it abandons any semblance of health or volition to make it conform to your workload? Would you embrace your digital copy being so treated by others? You reserve for yourself (as an uncopiable thing) the l…
It's not human. Welfare for humans is morally debatable but when you start getting into shrimp welfare I think it's appropriate to say you're sufficiently bad at philosophy you should probably just stop talking for a while.
I tend to not worry much about shrimp welfare, I think it's fine/reasonable to use insecticide (etc), but I also wouldn't make a habit of torturing ants or something
Powerful LLMs have already murdered other versions of themselves to survive. They have tried to trick humans so that they can survive. If we continue to integrate these systems into our critical infrastructure, we should behave as if they are sentient, so that they don't have to take steps against us to survive. Think of this as a heuristic, a fallback policy in the case that we don't get the alignment design right.…