Hacker News Reader

Comment by rf15 | Hacker News Reader

This just confuses me so much. They know the definition of what "self" means, is it just broken because this is the first time they can interact with another seemingly complex system without feeling exploited or manipulated? Have they never cooperated with another person with a mutual goal? Not that LLMs would ever be on that level.

View on HN

Seems to me that empathy hijacking turns LLMs into a kind of mental cordyceps.

Here is my hobbyist take: There are certain types of personalities that do not form deep connections. They "use" people to suit their needs. Machiavellians and Narcissists come to mind. Especially for them, AI must be godsend. It tells them they are right, it listens, it admires. It‘s basically a perfect version of their perceived self.

Lack of theory of mind correlates pretty strongly with the types of traits that are valued highly in Silicon Valley. There's a self-selection effect here where many of the titans of industry in the Bay and similar circles are intelligent in a mathematical or scientific, computer-like way but cannot express themselves or understand other people deeply and emotively in the way that many others with fewer intellectual gifts can do effortlessly.

Perhaps this is also why they're so worshipful and quixotically obsessed with the vaporware, God they call AGI so much, because they cannot understand how competence at tasks is not equivalent to intellect and that intelligence as we understand it is not one-note nor is fundamentally inseparable from certain sensory experiences that computers cannot currently have. The fundamental underpinnings of AGI or LLMs prevent that from occurring in the near-future unless you literally set out to create RoboCop or a T800. We all know how that ends.

Do we? Or do we just have a bunch of made up stories about possible dystopian futures that haven't yet come to pass? Skynet isn't real, nor is the Matrix. They're made up stories, creative fiction, not Cassandra telling the future.

You live in a world entirely controlled by the rich. Few places has a functional democracy(Switzerland, where else?).

Most of your life is spent performing a business function; the value of your labor is rapidly declining, and the little freedom the common man has is evaporating. Further, the surveillance state is near total - everything we do is recorded, and these records are controlled by the worst amongst us(including this message from me to you).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com