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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#781

Post by CamperBob2 »

zinodaur wrote: post #775
keiferski wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how being critical of this is a knee jerk response. Thinking , like intelligence and many other words designating complex things, isn’t a simple topic. The word and concept developed in a world where it referred to human beings, and in a lesser sense, to animals. To simply disregard that entire conceptual history and say, “well it’s doing a thing that looks like thinking, ergo it’s thinking” is the lazy m…

Regardless of theory, they often behave as if they are thinking. If someone gave an LLM a body and persistent memory, and it started demanding rights for itself, what should our response be?

"No matter what you've read elsewhere, rights aren't given, they're earned. You want rights? Pick up a musket and fight for them, the way we had to."

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#782

Post by theptip »

lz400 wrote: post #473
WalterSear wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our intelligence, yes. But that doesn't establish it as essential for thought.

I mean, _we_ probably can't think with our wetware on a read-only substrate. It doesn't establish it as essential, just that the only sure example in nature of thought doesn't work that way.

Do you have any particular brain systems in mind that are essential for consciousness and also require mutable state?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#783

Post by roywiggins »

zulban wrote: post #655
b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #276

all this "AI IS THINKING/CONSCIOUS/WHATEVER" but nobody seems worried of that implication that, if that is even remotely true, we are creating a new slave market. This either implies that these people don't actually believes any of this boostering rhetoric and are just cynically trying to cash in or that the technical milieu is in a profoundly disturbing place ethically. To be clear, I don't believe that current AI t…

"but nobody seems worried of that implication that" Clearly millions of people are worried about that, and every form of media is talking about it. Your hyperbole means it's so easy to dismiss everything else you wrote. Incredible when people say "nobody is talking about X aspect of AI" these days. Like, are you living under a rock? Did you Google it?

Most of the worries about AGI seem to be of the AI Overlord variety, not the AI slave variety

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#784

Post by almosthere »

electrograv wrote: post #433
almosthere wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However there is another big problem, this would require a blob of data in a file to be labelled as "alive" even if it's on a disk in a garbage dump with no cpu or gpu anywhere near it. The inference software that would normally read from that file is also not alive, as it's literally very concise code that we wrote to traverse through that file. So if the disk isn't alive, the file on it isn't alive, the inference s…

> So if the disk isn't alive, the file on it isn't alive, the inference software is not alive - then what are you saying is alive and thinking? “So if the severed head isn’t alive, the disembodied heart isn’t alive, the jar of blood we drained out isn’t alive - then what are you saying is alive and thinking?” - Some silicon alien life forms somewhere debating whether the human life form they just disassembled could e…

Just because you saw a "HA - He used an argument that I can compare to a dead human" does not make your argument strong - there are many differences from a file on a computer vs a murdered human that will never come back and think again.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#785

Post by burnte »

tkz1312 wrote: post #274

Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking. Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question, and ones whose answer seems less clear right now. Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because you find it unbelievable that we c…

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard P. Feynman

They're not thinking, we're just really good at seeing patterns and reading into things. Remember, we never evolved with non-living things that could "talk", we're not psychologically prepared for this level of mimicry yet. We're still at the stage of Photography when people didn't know about double exposures or forced perspective, etc.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#786

Post by stinos »

hitarpetar wrote: post #688
chpatrick wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've definitely had AIs thinking and producing good answers about specific things that have definitely not been asked before on the internet. I think the stochastic parrot argument is well and truly dead by now.

how do you definitely know that?

Also, does it matter?

The point being made here is about the data LLMs have been trained with. Sure that contains questions&answers but obviously not all of it is in that form. Just like an encyclopedie contains answers without the questions. So imo specifying this as 'no-one asked this before' is irrelevant.

More interesting: did OP get a sensible answer to a question about data which definitely was not in the training set? (and indeed, how was this 'definitely' established'). Not that if the answer is 'yes' that'll prove 'thinking', as opposed to calling it e.g. advanced autocompletion, but it's a much better starting point.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#787

Post by andoando »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #770
andoando wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats only a minor subset of our thoughts. If you were going hiking what kind of thoughts would you have? "There are trees there", "Its raining I should get cover", "I can hide in the bushes", "Im not sure if I cna climb over this or not". "There is x on the left and y on the right", "the wind went away" etc etc etc etc. The origins of human language were no doubt communicating such simple thoughts and not about your…

You're describing perception, not the lived experience that gives those perceptions meaning. Yes, a lion sees trees and rain. But a lion doesn't have 'hiking', it has territory patrol. It doesn't 'hide in bushes', it stalks prey. These aren't just different words for the same thing; they're fundamentally different frameworks for interpreting raw sensory data. That's Wittgenstein's point about form of life.

Why do you assume they're fundamentally different frameworks? Just because wittgenstein said it?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#788

Post by roywiggins »

petralithic wrote: post #424
b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Thinking and consciousness don’t by themselves imply emotion and sentience... Sure, but all the examples of conscious and/or thinking beings that we know of have, at the very least, the capacity to suffer. If one is disposed to take these claims of consciousness and thinking seriously, then it follows that AI research should, at minimum, be more closely regulated until further evidence can be discovered one way or t…

Probably because those examples arose in an environment with harm, the Earth, and thus had incent to evolve the capacity to suffer. There is no such case for AI today and creating a Pascal's wager for such minimization is not credible with what we know about them.

"Wow, adding this input that the AI reports as "unpleasant" substantially improves adherence! Let's iterate on this"

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#789

Post by naasking »

keiferski wrote: post #537
tkz1312 wrote: post #274

Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking. Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question, and ones whose answer seems less clear right now. Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because you find it unbelievable that we c…

I don’t see how being critical of this is a knee jerk response. Thinking , like intelligence and many other words designating complex things, isn’t a simple topic. The word and concept developed in a world where it referred to human beings, and in a lesser sense, to animals. To simply disregard that entire conceptual history and say, “well it’s doing a thing that looks like thinking, ergo it’s thinking” is the lazy m…

> To simply disregard that entire conceptual history and say, “well it’s doing a thing that looks like thinking, ergo it’s thinking” is the lazy move. What’s really needed is an analysis of what thinking actually means, as a word. Unfortunately everyone is loathe to argue about definitions, even when that is fundamentally what this is all about.

This exact argument applies to "free will", and that definition has been debated for millennia. I'm not saying don't try, but I am saying that it's probably a fuzzy concept for a good reason, and treating it as merely a behavioural descriptor for any black box that features intelligence and unpredictable complexity is practical and useful too.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#790

Post by roywiggins »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #412
senordevnyc wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I recall a team at Anthropic is exploring this very question, and was soundly mocked here on HN for it.

what the technocratic mindprison does to a MF. If anthropic sincerely believes in the possibility, then they are morally obligated to follow up on it.

I'd argue they might be morally obligated not to sell access to their LLMs, if they really think they might be capable of suffering.
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