The difference between speaking and thinking | Hacker News Reader

The difference between speaking and thinking

theatlantic.com

56 pointsagomez31419 comments

The difference is not really between speaking and thinking but processing data with and without experience.

An AI doesn't have experience so doesn't encode things such as empathy very well.

Because it doesn't infer rules based on experience from interacting with other things. (doesn't know what pain feels like so cannot react and decide about some things on its own for instance)

It's merely a data processor with statically coded rules. It doesn't handle the unknown very well.

Still quite impressive what can be done but there is of course some room for improvement.

On the topic of "still quite impressive what can be done", I can't more emphatically recommend (the now quite old!) lecture that Peter Norvig gave which is available on YouTube called the unreasonable effectiveness of data. He does a great job showing some toy and small examples about just how nuanced this point is, and that it is easy to underestimate the impact that simply more data can have. We tend to think of it as a quantitative impact and make all sorts of assumptions as to the second derivative of what the gains can be, but he does a great job showing that there might be all sorts of interesting inflection points and that simply more data can actually have significant qualitative differences.

I think I'd argue that AI does have experience. That's exactly what training an AI gives it. It is however true that that experience is currently less wide ranging than that of humans.

That's not really self experience though.

The same way, I can read about historical events but I probably haven't experienced these events.

So the AI might not be able to realize/derive new causations, mostly able to find out correlations at best. That's what may make it "hallucinate".

AIs can't experience everything, but that doesn't mean they can't experience anything. You can have the experience of reading a book, no? And that might well teach you something about the world.

Of note to me is that there is no theoretical reason why an AI couldn't have experiences of the real world. It's just that currently nobody has built interfaces that allow them to have that connection yet (for best learning you'd want sensors that allow it to sense the world and actuators that allow it to influnce the world - although you quickly get into considerations about whether it's a good idea to give AI's this power)

> mostly able to find out correlations at best

It may well be that human learning is just sophisticated iterated correlation finding.

Yes, the issue is that they don't actually pick up the book. Their experience of the real world is too limited to have valid inferences.

The same way a human being born without any sense but hearing wouldn't be able to interact fully with the physical world and infer things about it.

Basically, what I mean is that for now, unsupervised data acquisition is limited for AI. So it lacks "common sense" if you will.

I don't think we really disagree anyway, that's probably just semantics.

Yet. GPT-3 and their ilk, for all their novelty, are just the infancy of a new wave of AI tools.

Right now ChatGPT is technically learning from experience, although that learning is delayed, as it comes from the OpenAI team retraining it with all its new conversations. They could let it learn freely, but we've seen where that ends. Maybe once their model is perfected we will see it learning in real time.

I can watch a war movie and get into the mindset of being shot at even if I have zero experience of it. I guess those emotions are connected in some way to the experiences I had myself. But most of them are inferred from the expressions and words in the movie.

You could create signal of those emotions in the NN, it could predict them accurately. You could create a memory/association of emotions with subjects, some persistence in time.

Then add a simulation/dream of the world (like our consciousness)

At some point I don’t see much missing.

Show me an interaction between two dolphins and I'll be very unlikely to simulate what they feel/experience.

For an AI, that would probably be the same except we are the dolphins in that case.

Besides, as you hint, you still have to have had an experience of feeling pain before and have a mechanism to avoid it. Which means, having self-preservation encoded within your brain processi. And if you don't get PTSD from the movie, you won't know what PTSD feels like (let's imagine this is the only way one experiences stress). There is a need for more correlation processing between sources of data that would be similar to what a living-being may capture.

We're not there yet.

I always wondered if it's possible to think without having learnt a language to put the thoughts into words. Sometimes I catch myself speaking nonsense in my inner monologue—the sentences are grammatically correct, but it feels like I'm just putting words next to each other in a way that's similar to GPT (next token prediction) while my attention is actually elsewhere.

Edit: The paper linked in the article disagrees with me:

https://archive.is/lpfDW

ChatGPT is a wordcel. A Sophist! You can get away with a lot being a sophist in the post-literary world we live in, but still. Thinking it is not!

The market value of being a wordcel is about about to drop to nothing. This will be very shocking to many people who thought that they were thinking.

Maybe I'm old, but "wordcel" is an awful term with zero empathy or understanding.

You are right. Terms are symbols. They never have any empathy or understanding.

You have to find the person using the term and ask them how they mean it or observe.

It can be a lot of work, so people rarely do it.

It also categorically doesn't apply to an algorithm we do not believe is conscious. To be a *cel, one has to feel they are treated unfairly.

My fondest hope is that ChatGPT and others will increase the value of concise, crisp thinking and content.

We are at peak bloviation and it's unbearable.

The various word salads that are constantly spewed forth by our politicians makes me think that at least some of them are using AI to write their speeches.

paywalled. https://archive.is/T3nF7 might help.

> Humans are “good” at language precisely because we combine thought with its expression.

Human's "thought" had many pitfalls and fallacies than most people realize. An AI has to be "stupid" enough to mimic 100% human thought behavior. For example "in Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black"

Sounds like the average human to me.

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