Comment by dav_Oz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dav_Oz | Hacker News Reader

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The bots/machine vs human reminds me of that famous experiment from the 30s in which Winthrop Kellogg[0], a comparative psychologist, and his wife decided to raise their human baby (Donald) simultaneously with a chimpanzee baby (Gua) in an effort to "humanize the ape". It was set out to last 5 years but was relatively quickly abrupted after only 9 months. The explicit reason wasn't stated only that it successfully proved the hereditary limits within the "nature vs nurture" debate of a chimpanzee, the reticent statement reads as follows:

>Gua, treated as a human child, behaved like a human child except when the structure of her body and brain prevented her. This being shown, the experiment was discontinued

There have been a lot of speculation as to other reasons of ending the experiment so prematurely. Maybe exhaustion. One thing which seemed to dawn on the parents - if one reads carefully - is that a human baby is far superior at imitating than the chimpanzee baby, frighteningly so, that they decided to abort the experiment early on in order to prevent any irreversible damage in the development to their human child which at that point had become far more similar to the chimpanzee than the chimpanzee to the human.

So, I would rephrase "the internet is dead" into "the internet becomes increasingly undead" because humans condition themselves in a far more accelerated way to behave like bots than bots are potentially able to do. From the wrong side this could be seen as progress when in fact it's opposite progress. It sure feels like that way for a lot of of people and is a crucial reciprocal element often overlooked/underplayed (mostly in a benign effort to reduce unnecessary complexities) when analyzing human behaviour in interactions with the environment.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winthrop_Kellogg#The_Ape_and...

Case in point: recently, I've noticed that I'm getting more and more emails with the sign off "Warm regards." This is not a coincidence. It is an autosuggestion from Google. If you start signing off an email, it will automatically suggest "Warm regards." It just appears there -- probably an idea generated from an AI network. There are more and more of these algorithmic "suggestions" appearing every day, in more and more contexts. This is true for many text messaging programs: There are "common" replies suggested. How often do people just click on one of the suggested replies, as opposed to writing their own? These suggestions push us into conforming to the expectations of the algorithm, which then reinforces those expectations, creating a cycle of further pushing us into the language use patterns generated by software -- as opposed to idiosyncratic language created by a human mind.

In other words, people are already behaving like bots; and we're building more and more software to encourage such behavior.

Those suggestions appear in Google chat too and even if you don't click on them, the simple fact of reading the suggestion makes you much more likely to type it yourself. There's clearly a priming effect to it.

depends on your personality

On average, it doesn't. This is why advertising and magic work.

I'm a magician and a developer by training.

Now primarily employed in a marketing capacity.

Over my career I've worked with: - Doctors - Lawyers - Engineers - Fund managers - Academics (hard and soft sciences) - Mentalists/Hypnotists

All of them believed that they're specific training and temperament made them immune from simple persuasion techniques and that they were purely rational actors.

None of them struck me as any more rational/more independent thinkers than anyone else off the street

It is typical to rate yourself above your actual self.

Even when someone rates oneself down like when saying of themself that they're dumb, ugly or whatever, they generally mean it in a lesser fashion than for any other peer they'd attribute as such.

But its not above, its ascribung a mythical ability that does not exist - we don't talk about people who think they are psycic as optimistic, we call them crazy.

these guys are similar, except it's common belief.

nope, just being exposed to text influences you whether you want it or not

They're saying it might influence you to type something different. Some of us are just contrary.

Sometimes. Good luck keeping that up the majority of the time something tries to influence you.

Those suggestions are very few so I suspect they were hand-picked.

I don’t know if this is how it still works, but early attempts were modeled as classification problems with hundreds of hand picked completions. Can’t predict something really bad if it isn’t in your prediction list. This limits the surface of bad things to cases of tone mismatch like “sounds great” when talking about someone grieving a loss or something.

Doesn't GMail collect the data in some form of federated learning nowadays, like GBoard does? Federated learning does seem to be able to create the unintended positive feedback loop, converging on a single phrase and causing the users to lock themselves in a bubble.

Which is why it's important for folks to start applying AI to more interesting (but harder, more nuanced) problems. Instead of making it easier for people to write emails, or targeting ads, it should be used to help doctors, surgeons and scientists.

The problem is that these problems are less profitable. And that the companies with enough compute to train these types of models are concerned about getting more eyeballs, not making the world a better place.

The problem is not that those problems are less profitable. The problem is a combination of 1. Those problems are much harder 2. The potential harm from getting them wrong is much larger

Yup, I definitely agree that they're harder (and noted this). But I'm not sure I agree with your second point. Or rather, I think there's some nuance to it.

Sure, using AI to treat people without a human in the loop would clearly do harm. But using AI as an assistant, to help a doctor make the right diagnosis, seems like it'd do the opposite. It'd help doctors serve a larger patient population, make less mistakes, and probably equate to less harm in the long run.

Anyway, I think we can all agree that using AI for anything other than ad targeting is a net win.

A tangentially related thought:

Actors attempt to imitate humans. “Good acting” is convincing; the audience believes the actor is giving a reasonable response to the portrayed situation.

But the audience is also trying to imitate the actors to some degree. Like you point out, humans imitate. For some subset of the population, I’d imagine the majority of social situations they are exposed to, and the responses to situations they observe, are portrayed by actors.

At what point are actors defining the social responses that they then try to imitate? In other words, at what point does acting beget acting and how much of our daily social interactions actually are driven by actors? And is this world of actors creating artificial social responses substantially different than bots doing the same?

This is a common phenomena where the fake is more believable than the real thing due to over exposure of the imitation.

Famously the bald eagle sounds nothing like it does in tv and the movies and explosions are rarely massive fireballs. For human interaction it’s much harder to pin down cause and effect but if it happens in other cases it would be very surprising to not happen there.

This is famously theorized by postmodernism. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

Someone wrote once about how Wall Street people started behaving like the slick image projected of them in movies in the 80s, namely of Michael Douglas; before that they were more like the "boring accountant" type.

So maybe the Turing Test is not about AI are smart enough, but about how stupid humans become?

Not stupid; imaginative and agreeable.

These are also the elements that make a good hypnosis subject.

I can't put a dumb person under.

I need someone with an active imagination who wants to work with me (for best results)

Are we sure there's a difference?

It's the commonly believed reason; the child starting to take on habits from Gua, like noises when she wanted something, and the way monkeys scratch themselves. No authoritative source for it though, it's what I've been told during a lecture back in college, and I think PlainlyDifficult mentions it too in their video about it.

https://youtu.be/VP8DD9TGNlU

Nice post! But to me your analogy does not really stand : bots are the ones catching up with human conversation in an "accelerated way", feeding on a corpus that predates them. Bots are not an invariant nature that netizens imitate.

I sincerely regret that I had only one upvote to give you. This shit is so insidious that IMO everyone should just simply stop doing it until they've thought it through a lot more.

> ...humans condition themselves in a far more accelerated way to behave like bots than bots are potentially able to do.

Than bots can condition themselves to behave like humans, I presume. They can already behave exactly like bots. :-)

Wow this is such a mind bending perspective. Thanks for sharing it.

My mind is blown. Thanks for sharing. Especially with the movie analogy. I’m a very movie person and I imitate my personality traits a lot based on characters on movies…

thanks for the awesome analogy, I always had the sinking feeling that the bots are finding it increasingly easy to fit in among the humans because the humans on social media act increasingly like bots.

"monkey see, monkey do"

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