Four questions concerning the internet

This is, AFAIK, true of bare LLMs. Systems consisting of LLMs and a control interface that does reprompting which includes the earlier LLM responses (e.g., chat interfaces like ChatGPT) do provide the model with its output as feedback and show learning within the loop (though obviously this learning doesn’t reach back to the base model). The cognitive features of such a loop, such as they are, may well be different than those of a bare LLM considered in isolation.

I still think Yudkowsky is a crank and that taking him seriously is a bigger danger than AI.

There is another technology that produced a similarly startling mystery -- the ouja board, introduced in 1890. That one, we figured out. The messages came from the depths of the human minds attached to the technology. The answers to the three numbered questions presented in the substack article are not known to me, but, of course, the nature of the presentation inclines me to think that the answers are likely to explain more about the operation of human minds when they attempt to collaborate in teams connected by unfathomed autonomous technology than they explain about the technology itself.

First sentence says:

> The Internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Root cause analysis gets me this far: The Internet is a consequence of the human race. The human race loves consequences. We cannot resist the allure of the search for advantageous consequences, even though we have declining brain size and increasing need for wisdom. It looks to me as if the fight for the wheel will include several factions of humans, several species of AI, and a jumble of alliances, hybrids, coalitions, strategies, conspiracies, and standoffs amongst them. The future is going to be just like a trip to the movies today -- nothing but sequels.

Does a country have desires? An economy? Do the millions of transactions and price changes and signals going between people and companies mean that an economy has thoughts, in some sense? When an economy reacts to a war in a foreign land like an ant flinching away from something hot, is it feeling pain in some very primitive sense?

Sure, it's entirely possible that there's no real sensation behind an LLM, or rather, it senses and reacts to text input like a bacterium reacting to chemical nutrient gradients or an ant reacting to food. But at what level of mental complexity does consciousness and true desire arise? I think it's a continuum, and to think that there's something special about biological intelligence vs machine intelligence is to believe in the supernatural. We wouldn't say that aliens don't have true desires because they have genetic material based on something other than DNA, or use something other than glucose for energy in their bodies.

I do think you're right that current LLMs proclaiming love likely don't understand what they're saying. But at some point we're going to build machine intelligences that do, and it may be hard to tell when we cross that line. People used to worry a lot more about the ethics of that.