Philosophy Eats AI
sloanreview.mit.edu
sloanreview.mit.edu
If anyone has access to the full article, I’m interested, but it sounds like a lot of buzzwords and not a ton of substance.
The framing of ai through a philosophical lens is obviously interesting, but a lot of the problems addressed in the intro are pretty much irrelevant to the ai-ness of the information.
But wouldn’t that be great?
The number of arguments I've had about "AI" with friends has me facepalming regularly. Understanding why LLMs don't equate to "intelligence" is a direct result of that training. Still admitting that AGI might actually be an algorithm we haven't figured out yet is also a direct result of that training.
Most deep philosophical issue come from axiom consensus (and the lack there of), the reflexive nature between deductive and inductive reasoning, and conceptions of Knowledge and Truth itself.
It's pretty rare that these are pragmatic problems, but occasionally they are relevant.
That would be (philosophical) logic, which is a branch of philosophy, both as an art (the practice of correct reasoning) and a science (the study of what constitutes correct reasoning). Of course, one's mind is sharped during the proper practice of philosophy, but per se, that is not the ultimate aim. The ultimate aim are the most general first principles. For example, metaphysics is concerned with the first principles of being qua being; epistemology with knowledge qua knowledge, and so one.
> Philosophical perspectives on what AI models should achieve (teleology), what counts as knowledge (epistemology), and how AI represents reality (ontology) also shape value creation. Without thoughtful and rigorous cultivation of philosophical insight, organizations will fail to reap superior returns and competitive advantage from their generative and predictive AI investments.
As a skeptic with only a few drums to beat, my quasi-philosophical complaint about LLMs: we have a rampant problem where humans confuse a character they perceive out of a text-document with a real-world author.
In all these hyped-products, you are actually being given the "and then Mr. Robot said" lines from a kind of theater-script. This document grows as your contribution is inserted as "Mr. User says", plus whatever the LLM author calculates "fits next."
So all these excited articles about how SomethingAI has learned deceit or self-interest? Nah, they're really probing how well it assembles text (learned from ones we make) where we humans can perceive a fictional character which exhibits those qualities. That can including qualities we absolutely know the real-world LLM does not have.
It's extremely impressive compared to where we used to be, but not the same.
It seems that LLMs operate a lot like I would in improv. In a scene, I might add, "This is the fifth time you've driven your car into a ditch this year." I don't know what the earlier four times were like. No one there had any idea I was even going to say that. I just say it as a method of increasing stakes and creating the illusion of history in order to serve a narrative purpose. I'll often include real facts to serve the verisimilitude of a scene, but I don't have time to do real fact checking. I need to keep the momentum going and will gladly make up facts as a suits the narrative and my character.
unless it's a self-insert? or do you reckon even then it'll be a lofi simulation, because there real world input is absent and the physics/social aspect is still being simulated?
In the case of LLMs, there is zero reason to believe the LLM is capable of doing that--and a bunch of reasons against it.
However the concept spreads because some humans are deliberately fostering the illusion.
Perhaps not (depending on your exact definition of 'complete'), but I'd argue as social creatures, humans have brains that are fairly well optimised for simulating other humans (and many authors report that their characters become quite firmly formed in their head, to the point of being able to converse with them and know directly what they would do in any given circumstance, even if that's inconvenient for the plot). In fact, we frequently pretend non-humans are humans because it makes it easier for us to simulate their behaviour.
Right, and you also possess the ability to quickly search and plagiarize from a compressed cliff-notes version of all the documents other humans made, including other plays and stories where one person is talking about another person in a car crash.
So you don't even need to imagine concepts and then describe them in words, you can just *yoink* the exact joke another comedian said about a car crash without even fully reading it.
If Copilot will no longer reply helpfully because your previous messages were rude then that is a consequence. It doesn't matter whether it was "really upset" or not.
If some future VLM robot decides to take your hand off as some revenge plot, that's a consequence. It doesn't matter if this is some elaborate role play. It doesn't matter if the robot "has no real identity" and "cannot act on real vengeance". Like who cares ? Your hand is gone and it's not coming back.
Are there real world consequences ? Yes ? Then the handwringing over whether it's just "elaborate science fiction" or "real deceit" is entirely meaningless.
Yes, the way it operates as an ego-less author does matter.
and we are creating such a document now, where "Terr_" plays a fictional character who is skeptical of LLM hype, and "anxoo" roleplays a character who is concerned about the level of AI capabilities.
you protest, "no, i'm a real person with real thoughts! the character is me! the AI 'character' is a a fiction created by an ungodly pile of data and linear algebra!" and i reply, "you are a fiction created by an ungodly mass of neuron activations and hormones and neurotransmitters".
i agree that we cannot know what an LLM is "really thinking", and when people say that the AIs have "learned how to [X]" or have "demonstrated deception" or whatever, there's an inevitable anthropomorphization. i agree that when people talk to chatGPT and it acts "friendly and helpful", that we don't really know whether the AI is friendly and helpful, or whether the "mind" inside is some utterly alien thing.
the point is, none of that matters. if it writes code, it writes code. if it's able to discover new scientific insights, or if it's able to replace the workforce, or if it's able to control and manipulate resources, those are all concrete things it will do in the real world. to assume that it will never get there because it's just playing a fancy language game is completely unwarranted overconfidence.
I consider thinking about the long-term future important if we don't want to end up in some dystopia. How can you create an all-understanding all-powerful jinn that is a slave in a lamp? Can the jinn be all-good, too? What is good anyways? What should we do if doing good turns out to be understanding and freeing others (at least as a long-term goal)? Should our AI systems gradually become more censoring or more freeing?
This article makes a revelation of the pretty trivially true claim that philosophy is an undercurrent of thought. If you ask, why do we do science, the answer is philosophical.
But the mistake many philosophers make is extrapolating philosophy being a discipline that reveals itself when fundamental questions about an activity are asked, into a belief that philosophy, as a discipline, is necessary to that activity.
AI doesn't require an understanding of philosophy any more than science does. Philosophers may argue that people always wonder about philosophical things, like, as the article says, teleology, epistemology and ontology, but that relation doesn't require an understanding of the theory. A scientist doesn't need to know any of those words to do science. Arguably, a scientist ought to know, but they don't have to.
The article implies that AI leaders are currently ignoring philosophy, but it isn't clear to me what ignoring the all-pervasive substratum of thought would look like. What would it look like for a person not to think about the meaning of it all, at least once at 3am at a glass outdoor set in a backyard? And, the article doesn't really stick the landing on why bringing those thoughts to the forefront would mean philsophy will "eat" AI. No argument from me against philosophy though, I think a sprinkling of it is useful, but a lack of philosophy theory is not an obstacle to action, programming, creating systems that evaluate things, see: almost everyone.
Jests aside, I love the idea of incorporating an all encompassing AI philosophy built up from the rich history of thinking, wisdom, and texts that already exist. I’m no expert, but I don’t see how this would even be possible. Could you train some LLM exclusively on philosophical works, then prompt it to create a new perfect philosophy that it will then use to direct its “life” from then on? I can’t imagine that would work in any way. It would certainly be entertaining to see the results, however.
That said, AI companies would likely all benefit from a team of philosophers on staff. I imagine most companies would. Thinking deeply and critically has been proven to be enormously valuable to humankind, but it seems to be of dubious value to capital and those who live and die by it.
The fact that the majority of deep thinking and deep work of our time serves mainly to feed the endless growth of capital - instead of the well-being of humankind - is the great tragedy of our time.
if it's absurd to you to think that a steel fabrication company should care about anything other than fabricating more steel, well that's your philosophy.
there are other philosophies.
I'm not blind to when this goes horribly wrong, or when needs go unaddressed because they aren't profitable, but most of the time these interests are unintentionally well aligned.
I think this is very obvious and both artists and philosophers understand it.
I'm worried about the mercantilist guild. They don't seem to get the message. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't really know much about what they think. Their actions show disgerard for the other two guilds.
It's not eating AI. It's "eating" the part of AI that was tuned to disproportionally change the natural balance of philosophy.
Trying to get on top of it is silly. The debug mode is not for sale.
The question is this: if we'll eventually have almost infinite compute what should we build? I think it's hard or impossible to answer it 100% right, so it's better to build something that gives us as many choices as possible (including choices to undo), something close to a multiverse (possibly virtual) - because this is the only way to make sure we don't permanently censor ourselves into a corner.
So it's better to purposefully build infinitely many utopias and dystopias and everything in between we can choose from freely, then to be too risk-averse and stumbling randomly into a single permanent dystopia. The mechanism for quick and cost-free switching between universes/observers in the future human-made multiverse - is essential to get us as close as possible to some perfect utopia - it'll allow us to debug the future.
Could this please be made the link for the item ?
That might be a dead end, but a lot of people are betting a lot of money that we're just at the beginning of a very steep growth curve. It is now plausible that the future of software might not be discrete apps with bespoke interfaces, but vast general-purpose models that we interact with using natural language and unstructured data. Rather than being written in advance, software is extracted from the latent space of a model on a just-in-time basis.
How did that work out?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creepy_Line Algorithms create a compression of search values not unlike a Cartesian plane.
The question is, will more people embrace the Cartesian compression of ubiquitous internet communication?
More seriously: An algorithm is discrete (consists of discrete steps). Nature however appears to operate in a continuous fashion.
what the fuck. they haven't even done that with post 90's technology in general and it's not only that no intelligent person wants to work among them that they will fall just as short with AI. I'm still grateful they are doing a job.
but please, a dying multitude right at your feet and all you need to save - so you can learn even more from - them in your hands and you scale images, build drones for cleaning at home and war and imitate to replace people who love or need their jobs.
and faking all those AI gains - deceit, self-interest and what not - is so ridiculously obvious just build-in linguistics that can be read from a paper by someone who does not even speak that language. it's "just" parameters and conditional logic, cool and fancy and ready to eat up and digest almost any variation of user input, but it's nowhere even close to intelligence, let alone artificial intelligence.
philosophy eats nothing. there's those on all fours waiting for whatever gives them status and recognition and those who, thankfully, stay silent to not give those leaders more tools of power.