Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 117 posts

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#81

Post by card_zero »

apsurd wrote: post #77
card_zero wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this vision, then, everybody is so unimaginative that all they can think of to do is compete over the same old manual tasks, without inventing new ways to be useful, while robots are better than them at everything intellectual. We have a duty to the global dull. (If there's some doubt, I don't think it would pan out that way, because humans are imaginative.)

This is about compassion. The rice workers in Vietnam just need to follow your podcast. The problem is they were just too dull this whole time. (I have no idea about Vietnamese rice workers' quality of life, so I don't mean to assume one way or the other. But it's interesting that what they and we think of their life, according to card_zero the cause is a lack of imagination)

No, it isn't. It's about displaced workers from the knowledge economy. You're invoking a pernicious trope here about blaming the poor for being poor, in order to explain why everybody will be poor when those workers are displaced from cliche-churning jobs, because supposedly they're just that helpless.

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#82

Post by apsurd »

card_zero wrote: post #81
apsurd wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is about compassion. The rice workers in Vietnam just need to follow your podcast. The problem is they were just too dull this whole time. (I have no idea about Vietnamese rice workers' quality of life, so I don't mean to assume one way or the other. But it's interesting that what they and we think of their life, according to card_zero the cause is a lack of imagination)

No, it isn't. It's about displaced workers from the knowledge economy. You're invoking a pernicious trope here about blaming the poor for being poor, in order to explain why everybody will be poor when those workers are displaced from cliche-churning jobs, because supposedly they're just that helpless.

Fair enough but it means you're giving a lot of credit to these white-collar workers losing their jobs. I've seen enough to know office workers are not the intellectual savants their college sold them on. People are mostly trying to pay their debts.

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#83

Post by sorokod »

simianwords wrote: post #78
sorokod wrote: post #29

Chris Olah and other leaders at Anthropic, OpenAI, and others would do well to consider the principles of Social Doctrine spelled out in the encyclical. The question they should ask themselves is how their corporations advance those principles. Olah argues that "if we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives." That sounds part hypocritical and part evas…

If he says that it starts with him, it won't ring well because it doesn't structurally change anything and only looks like posturing. "I promise to be a good guy" doesn't convey anything meaningful.

I'm not sure why you worry about how Chris Olah appears to others.

Talking is cheap, but even talk is better then the impotent call for "people outside."

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#84

Post by geerlingguy »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #44
geerlingguy wrote: post #2

> And what has grown is far more subtle, odd, and beautiful than science fiction prepared us for. They are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words—and, as the Holy Father observes, they remain in important ways mysterious even to those of us who train them I love how he's framing AI as some new and fascinating form of consciousness... when in fact it is a cold, calcula…

I'll never understand it when people quote a primary source and then summarize it in a way that completely ignores the original quote. Olah's quote (edit - originally misidentified this as Pope Leo's) makes a lot of sense to me. He is saying, accurately, that modern AI (i.e. primarily LLMs) is created as essentially a mashup of our own language, and they are still a bit of a black box (or at least a gray box) to even…

My comment was on the Anthropic co-founder's speech, not Pope Leo's encyclical.

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#85

Post by tmouis »

I can't even believe a corporation is now getting into the mix of responding to a religious figure head? Especially this one thats a riddled history inhuman acts. On top of that Dario Amodei is self-described atheist. Were living in a true corporate AI dystopian universe.

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#86

Post by _pdp_ »

Tossrock wrote: post #79
_pdp_ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the paper... > A natural question is whether these emotion concept representations bear any meaningful relationship to human emotional experience. We would urge caution in drawing strong conclusions. > We therefore suggest interpreting our results as evidence that models represent emotion concepts, and that these representations influence their behavior, rather than as evidence that models feel or experience emo…

You're the one who said that. Chris said they found internal states that functionally mirror emotional ones.

Yes I said "To say that LLMs experience emotion is a bit like saying a thermometer feels cold." being sarcastic.

The paper spell it out although slightly convolute, i.e. models can exhibit concepts of emotion... and given that there is no scientific consensus what are emotions, it is hard to make an argument that these "concepts" are anything like emotions.

They talk about emotion vectors, bla bla, but it is clear the wording is around "concept of emotions" not actual emotions.

And yes reading a book gives you a concept of what is like to be that character including their emotions. That is what language communicates and it is hardly surprising if you ask me.

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#87

Post by card_zero »

apsurd wrote: post #82
card_zero wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it isn't. It's about displaced workers from the knowledge economy. You're invoking a pernicious trope here about blaming the poor for being poor, in order to explain why everybody will be poor when those workers are displaced from cliche-churning jobs, because supposedly they're just that helpless.

Fair enough but it means you're giving a lot of credit to these white-collar workers losing their jobs. I've seen enough to know office workers are not the intellectual savants their college sold them on. People are mostly trying to pay their debts.

I was thinking about it like this: in the apocalyptic vision mentioned above, there's still just as much food being made, and still just as much fancy-pants stuff too, IP and services, except those are being made by robots. So all these displaced workers can be fed, practically speaking, except supposedly all the money goes to owners of robots while the humans are out in the fields and unable to buy beans. They're being punished for being useless.

Well, I don't believe the economy is limited to bland things AI can do on one hand, and paddies and beanfields on the other. I don't believe there's a great mass of useless people who we've been looking after so far through a kind of polite fiction of makework. I'm not saying they'll get rich, and I don't expect them to be brilliant, but I expect them to display low cunning and be less than completely feckless. Sometimes for complex reasons, forces beyond our control trap us in poverty. I don't see why that would be a universal effect that applies to these displaced office workers.

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#88

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

geerlingguy wrote: post #84
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand it when people quote a primary source and then summarize it in a way that completely ignores the original quote. Olah's quote (edit - originally misidentified this as Pope Leo's) makes a lot of sense to me. He is saying, accurately, that modern AI (i.e. primarily LLMs) is created as essentially a mashup of our own language, and they are still a bit of a black box (or at least a gray box) to even…

My comment was on the Anthropic co-founder's speech, not Pope Leo's encyclical.

Thanks, I edited my comment to fix my misattribution.

But regardless, I still don't think your assertion that "he's framing AI as some new and fascinating form of consciousness" follows from the quote, nor from Olah's speech as a whole.

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#89

Post by ArchieScrivener »

vrganj wrote: post #68
ArchieScrivener wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[flagged]
Post reply on HN