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Philosophy Eats AI

sloanreview.mit.edu

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Re: Philosophy Eats AI

#51

Post by Joker_vD »

apsurd wrote: post #25
XorNot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the philosophy department at the local steel fabricator contributing exactly?

To ponder whether there's any value in doing anything beyond maximizing steel fabrication output. if it's absurd to you to think that a steel fabrication company should care about anything other than fabricating more steel, well that's your philosophy. there are other philosophies.

Steel-fabrication company literally can not care about anything because it's not a sentient being. Humans, who are related to this company and each other, already care about lot of stuff, including the output of said company and about how much they should care about that output. But that still is not philosophy, merely applied ethics in the sense that people are simply applying the ethical values they hold to the problems before them instead of contemplating which ethical values they should hold.

Re: Philosophy Eats AI

#52

Post by [deleted] »

scoofy wrote: post #18

I have multiple degrees in philosophy and I have no idea what this article is even trying to say. If anyone has access to the full article, I’m interested, but it sounds like a lot of buzzwords and not a ton of substance. The framing of ai through a philosophical lens is obviously interesting, but a lot of the problems addressed in the intro are pretty much irrelevant to the ai-ness of the information.

[deleted]

Re: Philosophy Eats AI

#53

Post by floppiplopp »

Did an AI write this? Anyways, the real philosophical questions are why AI is such a subversive weapon against humanity's purpose and reason, and who do we need to stop to save us, and how?

Re: Philosophy Eats AI

#54

Post by antonkar »

Terr_ wrote: post #2

> what counts as knowledge (epistemology), and how AI represents reality (ontology) also shape value creation. As a skeptic with only a few drums to beat, my quasi-philosophical complaint about LLMs: we have a rampant problem where humans confuse a character they perceive out of a text-document with a real-world author. In all these hyped-products, you are actually being given the "and then Mr. Robot said" lines from…

If it quacks like a duck and acts like a duck - does it matter that our LLM is not really a duck? Some people are more LLM-like when they answer your question then some LLMs :-)

I consider thinking about the long-term future important if we don't want to end up in some dystopia. How can you create an all-understanding all-powerful jinn that is a slave in a lamp? Can the jinn be all-good, too? What is good anyways? What should we do if doing good turns out to be understanding and freeing others (at least as a long-term goal)? Should our AI systems gradually become more censoring or more freeing?

Re: Philosophy Eats AI

#55

Post by antonkar »

antonkar wrote: post #39

How can you create an all-understanding all-powerful jinn that is a slave in a lamp? Can the jinn be all-good, too? What is good anyways? What should we do if doing good turns out to be understanding and freeing others (at least as a long-term goal)? Should our AI systems gradually become more censoring or more freeing?

I consider thinking about the extremely long-term future important if we don't want to end up in some dystopia.

The question is this: if we'll eventually have almost infinite compute what should we build? I think it's hard or impossible to answer it 100% right, so it's better to build something that gives us as many choices as possible (including choices to undo), something close to a multiverse (possibly virtual) - because this is the only way to make sure we don't permanently censor ourselves into a corner.

So it's better to purposefully build infinitely many utopias and dystopias and everything in between we can choose from freely, then to be too risk-averse and stumbling randomly into a single permanent dystopia. The mechanism for quick and cost-free switching between universes/observers in the future human-made multiverse - is essential to get us as close as possible to some perfect utopia - it'll allow us to debug the future.

Re: Philosophy Eats AI

#58

Post by htk »

IMHO the article is trying to elevate the importance of philosophy in AI development and success, but its arguments are weak, and the examples are too generic. I wish the article was more rigorous and less verbose. While philosophy and AI clearly have significant overlaps, this article does little to strengthen the case for their synergy.

Re: Philosophy Eats AI

#59

Post by rcxdude »

TJSomething wrote: post #8
Terr_ wrote: post #2

> what counts as knowledge (epistemology), and how AI represents reality (ontology) also shape value creation. As a skeptic with only a few drums to beat, my quasi-philosophical complaint about LLMs: we have a rampant problem where humans confuse a character they perceive out of a text-document with a real-world author. In all these hyped-products, you are actually being given the "and then Mr. Robot said" lines from…

That's one of the things. Even in human-written fiction, the depths of any character you read about is pure smoke and mirrors. People regularly perceive fictional characters as if they are real people (and it's fun to do so), but it would be impossible for an author to simulate a complete human being in their head. It seems that LLMs operate a lot like I would in improv. In a scene, I might add, "This is the fifth ti…

>but it would be impossible for an author to simulate a complete human being in their head.

Perhaps not (depending on your exact definition of 'complete'), but I'd argue as social creatures, humans have brains that are fairly well optimised for simulating other humans (and many authors report that their characters become quite firmly formed in their head, to the point of being able to converse with them and know directly what they would do in any given circumstance, even if that's inconvenient for the plot). In fact, we frequently pretend non-humans are humans because it makes it easier for us to simulate their behaviour.

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