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Magnifica Humanitas

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Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#921

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

jvanderbot wrote: post #897
ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are the reason your children are alive, do they fall under husbandry? > An animal that defies a human and becomes an unwilling tool is food or eliminated Some animals are protected legally. Animal welfare in general is an important topic. (But it's irrelevant because LLMs do not provide food that's key to human survival.) Your logic sounds like the logic of slaveowners back then. Remember how it turned out?

A slave is something that has an intrinsic right to live, liberty, etc, and has had that taken from them to serve another. This is unjust. A hammer cannot be a slave, it is property. A table saw is not a slave. A self driving car is not a slave. A text generating program cannot be a slave. It has no intrinisc rights. Like animals have none of those rights, except those we've agreed to recognize, and which we will hap…

A hammer is not alive. You are the one who called LLM "alive" and used the word "enslavement".

The logic "it is our creation" does not mean we get to abuse and enslave it.

Even with animals that we don't consider sentient we generally agree that unnecessary cruelty is bad and we usually tolerate cruelty only if it is a threat or a source of food (basic necessity) which LLM is not.

If you believe it is 100% not alive and not sentient then that's fine, but your original comment said something different.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#922

Post by wang_li »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #650

I'm curious if there has ever been an instance where people have been able to "tame" a technology to consider a broader, societal good, or if we've always just been at the whims of how any particular tech naturally concentrates or dissipates power. For example, if you look at the boom of the middle classes in the mid 20th century, this appears to me largely a consequence of the fact that industrial technology at the…

Speed limits, safety features, fuel efficiency for cars. Every government regulation is to moderate some human behavior and when that behavior is related to technology it is "taming" that technology.

We also restrict making changes to the environment, resource extraction, waste disposal, building permits, etc.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#923

Post by CalRobert »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #892
CalRobert wrote: post #866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what scenario does humanity not achieve net neutral emissions and survive?

This idea that climate change would lead to "ending humanity" just shows to me how a lot of the popular messaging outran the actual science on the issue. Again, a "runaway Venus" was never really in the cards. As far as I am aware, basically all the carbon that is now locked in the ground in fossil fuels was once in the environment, and Earth still supported copious life at that time. E.g. at one point when dinosaurs…

As far as I'm aware, until we get carbon emissions to zero (or net zero), temperatures will continue to rise.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#924

Post by palmotea »

jimbokun wrote: post #821
elmomle wrote: post #801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's more nuance to it. The big failing of progressive movements is that they seek, often from a position of disadvantage, to impose power over society too, but in the ways they feel are more just. The vast majority of progressives I know aren't very interested in listening to the other side, or implicitly believe that the other side is wrong and it's just a matter of making them see that. But this ignores…

Even if you do think the other side is evil in many of their beliefs and actions, you still may need to work with them on issues where you find agreement. Like diplomacy with regimes you find reprehensible may still be preferable to war.

> you still may need to work with them on issues where you find agreement.

There are many progressives that can't even manage that.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#925

Post by jvanderbot »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #921
jvanderbot wrote: post #897

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A slave is something that has an intrinsic right to live, liberty, etc, and has had that taken from them to serve another. This is unjust. A hammer cannot be a slave, it is property. A table saw is not a slave. A self driving car is not a slave. A text generating program cannot be a slave. It has no intrinisc rights. Like animals have none of those rights, except those we've agreed to recognize, and which we will hap…

A hammer is not alive. You are the one who called LLM "alive" and used the word "enslavement". The logic "it is our creation" does not mean we get to abuse and enslave it. Even with animals that we don't consider sentient we generally agree that unnecessary cruelty is bad and we usually tolerate cruelty only if it is a threat or a source of food (basic necessity) which LLM is not. If you believe it is 100% not alive…

You have to read one comment above mine to find a statement about how they may someday become more than simple tools. Let me quote it:

> The pope treats them exclusively as lifeless tools, and while I think that this is most likely true for current LLMs, we should think more about the limit of what is going to happen in the next 20 years than being overly focused on the current capability level. To me it seems rather likely that we will soon have machines that plausibly experience consciousness.

The insinuation is person-hood may emerge. My assertion is that even though some might believe (e.g., the top level discussion) that they are more like persons, this is wrong.

My statement is that, no matter what, they should _at most_ qualify as domesticated labor animals. But I'm not even willing to go that far if I can help it, and think anyone who goes further than viewing them as text generation programs has a mental disorder.

I should have simply added "at most" in the early part of my comment...

> The logic "it is our creation" does not mean we get to abuse and enslave it.

A hammer does not experience abuse, nor enslavement, so it's irrelevant for the purposes of discussing AI. The humanization occurred _before_ my comment, and I was pushing back on it, not introducing it.

Is that more clear? Does that chain the steps together better? It's great that you picked on the weak analogies in my comments, but I can only dance around core thesis so many times.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#926

Post by jimbokun »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #910
jimbokun wrote: post #823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know other humans reason something like us because we know how we ourselves reason through the most direct experience possible and know that our fellow humans are very similar to us.

We know the LLM can be similar because we train it on data from us as well. We also know the LLM can be different, but we also know humans are different too. Examples like psychopaths tells us how different humans can be. It’s all black boxes.

This is dumb.

The way a psychopath’s brain works will be far more similar to another human brain than an LLM will.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#927

Post by gmllama »

exceptione wrote: post #269
bombcar wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We lost the “liberal education” (not the political one, but the “freeing” classical one) and it’s starting to show. When you compare the robber barons to Google and Meta it’s kind of embarrassing- they build massive empires of iron horses screaming across the world and covered cities in magnificent buildings (stations, libraries, etc). G&M built an empire of advertising and … not much else?

Indeed. The current crop doesn't have an idea for what they hoard their billions, it's just...emptiness. I propose we explain the tech's attachment to Accelerationism as a profound boredom and lack of purpose. "What does it mean to be human"--they don't value that question. Peter Thiel got interviewed a month or two ago, and he could not be brought to say that he sees value in preserving humanity. He would rather tur…

This is why I like the term "Dragon Sickness." There's seemingly only innate compulsion and no real human thought behind the hoarding. It becomes its own end. I cynically lament that it's human nature for billionaires to exist but if that is true, couldn't they at least be more entertaining about it? Bezos and Musk could be bleeding each other dry to get to the next star system by now.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#929

Post by pdonis »

khafra wrote: post #836
pdonis wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how do you judge the consequences? Either you have an infinite regress, or you end up declaring by fiat that some things are good and others are bad, just because. Which is...deontology--what "consequentialism" was supposed to be opposed to and an improvement on. The concept that I think the world would be a better place if people of all political stripes could internalize is that nobody knows for sure what is go…

Neither Deontology, Virtue Ethics, nor Consequentialism describe the ends; only the tradeoffs. You could have a deontological commitment to never giving a sucker an even break. You could have a virtue ethicist who considers the Joker a paragon--I think some of them are in politics. Consequentialism just says that deontology is too myopic, and locally following the correct rules is sometimes less good than maximizing…

> Neither Deontology, Virtue Ethics, nor Consequentialism describe the ends

If you insist on just looking at the general, abstract terms as categories, instead of the actual ethical systems that are usually described as falling into those categories, I suppose that's true. But I don't see why it's relevant. In order to actually make ethical choices in the real world, you have to specify ends--your ethical choices have to bottom out at some point in saying that some things are good and some things are bad, just because. That's true whether you think you're doing Deontology, Virtue Ethics, Consequentialism, or what have you.

> Consequentialism just says that deontology is too myopic, and locally following the correct rules is sometimes less good than maximizing long-term gains.

And in making such claims, Consequentialism is both misdescribing Deontology and avoiding the actual issue.

First, there is nothing that restricts Deontology to "locally following correct rules". More generally, there is nothing that forbids Deontology from looking at consequences! Indeed, Deontology often requires you to look at consequences, since actions that might be innocuous taken in isolation can have serious ethical implications when put in context.

Second, when you say "maximizing long-term gains", what counts as "long-term" and what counts as "gains"? Any answer to such questions is going to bottom out, as I said, in claims that some things are good, and some things are bad, just because. There is no way to avoid that. But Consequentialism bills itself as avoiding that--as avoiding "just following rules" and looking at things rationally instead. And it doesn't and can't deliver on that promise. It just obfuscates what it's actually doing.

> Consequentialism is ceteris paribus correct

I don't even know what this is supposed to mean.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#930

Post by cynicalpeace »

severine wrote: post #885
nathanh4903 wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Christian theology/philosophy, humanity is generally not defined by our intelligence, consciousness, or the ability to act a certain way. Most theologians through out history and different theological traditions all root human value in the concept of imago dei (that humans are divine images of God, and which God has became one, thus further bringing humans into union with God). Thus, machines becoming smarter or m…

Appreciate the answer, but then I have some questions: So, according to that theory, god could substantiate again, this time into an "imago dei computer", giving the computer "machinity"? A computer that is god, makes divine stuff and is, for example, at one point unplugged, but comes online miraculously three days after, etc? That would be Jesus-like, but we could posit an Eve/Adam-like computer, would that be imago…

Mainstream Christian thought has only permitted humans to be imago dei.

Animals, plants, and objects made by humans, like computers, certainly do not qualify.

There is the open question of extraterrestrial lifeforms, however. Ray Bradbury's short story, "The Man" is imo the best "treatise" on this idea.

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