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Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

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Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#71

Post by tinco »

ChatGTP wrote: post #67
tinco wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're starting to sound a little like Terry yourself towards the end there. How do you see a religion in enthusiasm around AI, and worse nothing else at all? I think you're stretching the word religion very far from its meaning. No one is deriving any meaning or analogy to the world from AI beyond the answers to technical questions. Certainly no one attributes moral authority to AI? The hype is about its applied val…

Have you ever watched an interview with Ray Kurzweil, it’s about as religious as it gets?

Well not recently, but isn't Kurzweil all about a hypothetical future superhuman intelligence? That's an interesting thought experiment but that's not what the current AI hype is about. LLM's by themselves are many things, but they're not intelligence, let alone superhuman intelligence.

Combined with well designed software LLM's can be used to create intelligent agents, but that's still not what Kurzweil envisions.

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#72

Post by snowpid »

keiferski wrote: post #21
snowpid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you eloborate your last hypothesis about religion and math?

Something like: polytheistic anthropomorphic gods don’t encourage humans to think abstractly. An abstract God concept that is infinite, endless, etc. encourages humans to understand and justify/argue against such an entity, in the process forcing them to think in more abstract ways, which in a basic sense is what mathematics is. This is more-or-less the history of intellectual thought in the Western world since Chris…

I guess your knowledge about Europe mathematics not sufficient enough if we think about the Ancient Greek math which was very sophisticated.

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#73

Post by keiferski »

snowpid wrote: post #72
keiferski wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like: polytheistic anthropomorphic gods don’t encourage humans to think abstractly. An abstract God concept that is infinite, endless, etc. encourages humans to understand and justify/argue against such an entity, in the process forcing them to think in more abstract ways, which in a basic sense is what mathematics is. This is more-or-less the history of intellectual thought in the Western world since Chris…

I guess your knowledge about Europe mathematics not sufficient enough if we think about the Ancient Greek math which was very sophisticated.

Where did I say that ancient Greek mathematics wasn't sophisticated? In addition to that, a sizable portion of ancient Greek thinkers would not really be considered "polytheistic" in the traditional sense and their focus on God being infinite, endless etc. is largely the source of such ideas in early Christianity and Islam.

> It was not until the fusion of Platonic and Aristotelian theology with Christianity that the concepts of strict omnipotence, omniscience, or benevolence became commonplace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_Ancient_Greek...

It's a basic historical fact that mathematics in Europe accelerated dramatically from the Renaissance onwards. This isn't really debatable.

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#74

Post by debok »

mbork_pl wrote: post #59
debok wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also only read the abstract. The argument seems to be: Belief in God implies a belief in the fallibility of humans, which leads to a reduced reliance on humans and therefore increased willingness to accept AI recommendations. Most of the logic in that argument checks out. I just don't understand the last step in the logic. How do decreased reliance on humans lead to increased willingness to accept AI? I'm a religio…

> I'm a religious person myself, and my argument would be to not trust AI all that much. It is a creation by fallible human beings trained on fallible human data. Good point. How is A.I. different (in this respect, and possibly in some other ones, too) from a really huge, partially pseudo-random spreadsheet? We need to remember, though, that we live in a relatively small bubble where A.I. is perceived as (more or les…

Yeah, you make a good point. It reminds me of that Arthur C. Clarke quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I guess if you see AI as something magical, it could easily start occupying a religious or God-like space in your psyche.

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#75

Post by debok »

Defletter wrote: post #48
romanichm12 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We place faith in algorithms and data, much like faith in a higher power, but rarely stop to consider who writes these digital 'scriptures' and what their intentions might be. Are we blindly trusting new 'gods' crafted in server rooms, not realizing that they might be as fallible—or as manipulative—as the human hands that created them?

I have to politely contest the conflation of faith and trust. While I understand that they're used synonymously in a colloquial context, you don't place faith in algorithms, you place trust in them. You KNOW that the algorithm exists, you just don't necessarily know what decisions it'll make or how. Whereas, when you place faith in something, you aren't certain that it even exists or that it'll do anything. And so it…

> when you place faith in something, you aren't certain that it even exists or that it'll do anything.

I have to politely disagree with this statement. To place faith in something means that you believe it to be true regardless of evidence. If you aren't certain, it is not faith but guesswork.

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#76

Post by WiSaGaN »

olalonde wrote: post #24

"Priming" was the poster child of the replicability crisis, so I'd take it with a grain of salt[0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

Exactly. I immediately thought of this after reading the article. I find the incentive to use p-hacking or something similar is very hard to avoid given increasingly stronger incentive to publish.

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#77

Post by harry8 »

f6v wrote: post #63
harry8 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replication crisis. Worth websearching and being aware of how bad it has been on just this kind of research.

But this says nothing about the quality of this particular article.

There's a metric ship-ton of research papers produced every year. Set your prior on which ones you read. This research paper /could/ be high quality, but given the sheer amount of incredible BS that has been published using very similar methods I am setting my prior accordingly. Feel free to try and replicate it yourself, or wait for someone else to do it if you set yours differently.

There's insufficient contempt for psychology and sociology academics who pretend this incredible witch-doctory screw-up with so many BS un-retracted papers fitting a curve to noise and booking a ted talk hasn't happened and everything is ok. Huge kudos to these ~270 authors [1,2] who took it on and got data. They found some good research that reproduced too, just a lot less than you'd expect, like or be remotely comfortable with.

  [1] https://osf.io/ezcuj/
  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#78

Post by snowpid »

keiferski wrote: post #73
snowpid wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess your knowledge about Europe mathematics not sufficient enough if we think about the Ancient Greek math which was very sophisticated.

Where did I say that ancient Greek mathematics wasn't sophisticated? In addition to that, a sizable portion of ancient Greek thinkers would not really be considered "polytheistic" in the traditional sense and their focus on God being infinite, endless etc. is largely the source of such ideas in early Christianity and Islam. > It was not until the fusion of Platonic and Aristotelian theology with Christianity that the…

I doubt that Platon thought was like 'their focus on God being infinite, endless etc. '. Also Renaissance was very less Christian as the Middle Age. Newton e.g. was less Christian than you assume.

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#79

Post by keiferski »

snowpid wrote: post #78
keiferski wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did I say that ancient Greek mathematics wasn't sophisticated? In addition to that, a sizable portion of ancient Greek thinkers would not really be considered "polytheistic" in the traditional sense and their focus on God being infinite, endless etc. is largely the source of such ideas in early Christianity and Islam. > It was not until the fusion of Platonic and Aristotelian theology with Christianity that the…

I doubt that Platon thought was like 'their focus on God being infinite, endless etc. '. Also Renaissance was very less Christian as the Middle Age. Newton e.g. was less Christian than you assume.

The entire philosophy of Plato is about eternal forms. That’s probably the single most influential idea.

As I said above, the important cultural group was not recently converted Christians, but those that had grown up for centuries in Christian culture. As in, the entire Middle Ages…which led to the Renaissance.

Newton was a devout Christian. While he had unorthodox views, this is irrelevant for the point I’m making. It has nothing to do with the specifics of Christian denominations, rather the idea of an eternal and unchanging God.

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#80

Post by salawat »

krapp wrote: post #65
f6v wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s going to be blind trust for non-tech people. I even read mystic comments about LLMs here on HN where people tried to convey an idea of hidden self-awareness and conscience of these models.

I think humans are just hard-wired to interpret language and conversation as signs of intelligence. The way LLMs actually behave is counterintuitive in a way that violates most people's expectations. You can have a complex, rational conversation with it. Give it commands and have it appear to infer details and anticipate the future. Also, "AI" has been a part of pop culture and pop science for decades... people have…

>Of course we can trust them to drive our cars, we just can't trust humans.

...And just where do you think those computers came from, sparky?

Back to square one.

If you can't trust the humans in the chain, trusting the system as a whole is the act of a fool. You've abandoned rationality, and comfortably ensconced yourself in the plush comfort of irrationality and ignorance, setting yourself up to get rolled by the real master's in the house, who'll be the ones who make, run, and operate the machine. Double points for not even realizing the only one pulling the wool over your eyes is yourself.

You're trusting something that half the time needs effing cross-checking by a squishy bit due to bored programmers misusing computing primitives in ways in which their integrity and soundness is undermined by their physical implementation.

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