It's not the weed wacker's fault or even the dog's fault when someone got hurt, it's the fault of the guy who put a weed wacker on a dog and let it run wild.
An LLM on the other hand, is just inert data on disk until a human takes deliberate action to run it and prompt it.
We can't really know the dogs inner life so we just kinda have to reduce it to a set of behaviors selected stocastically.
The dog meanwhile has no ability to understand the weedwacker or what it's doing on its back.
So when the guy puts the weedwacker on the dog and the dog predicably does dog things and that results in disaster the guy isn't able to clutch his pearls and say "I guess the system broke containment!"
Nah, I’m pretty sure that most medium or larger dogs get that the noise means danger - even if they can’t give a TED talk on how the mechanism would work that would hurt them.
Dogs are similarly interested in / aware of potential energy (things falling from heights or sliding off of angles) - if they’ve seen it enough times for their level.
wtf is with this nonsense where humans are some how special snowflakes always all the time
Sorry, what? You don't think you have thoughts?
Descartes will want a chat about that.
That kind of unsymbolized thoughtform is fragile in my experience, as it strongly tends toward crystallizing into some kind of mental imagery. But I find it's possible in the right conditions to be conscious of chains of wordless, imageless propositional thoughts (by which I mean thoughts with truth values, of course, but also ones that are "propositional" in the sense of considering a plan of action or a causal chain).
Does it mean that dogs are evaluating truth conditions in the same manner but merely lack the linguistic components? I don't know; maybe that's wishful thinking. But they appear to have structured modeling/reasoning of causal and spatial relations in a way that's at least functionally equivalent to propositional thought.
1. That is, rather than just "images" or visualizations, the full spectrum of sensory/perceptual/motor emulations that can be experienced. See, for example, <https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/codebook.html>, though I'm not sure if this covers everything. I think there is, for example, a kinesthetic form of mental imagery -- which I would suggest is what coaches [don't know they] really mean when they tell you to visualize an action -- that consists of aborted motor commands that are still expressed just enough for their purpose (cf. the mostly aborted motor commands to the vocal cords, lips, etc. that can be observed in a person subvocalizing while reading).
Probably it's this linguistic component, together withs shared intentionality/cooperation, that makes all of the difference when it comes to the power of human cognition, so I wouldn't say animals merely lack this component, but it's true that they appear to have pretty much everything else we do.
They'll be laying down happily napping. Then they get up, walk to a different room, and some seconds later come back carrying a toy. They return to where they used to lay, lay down again, and put the toy on their front paws.
I don't know what else that was than the thought of wanting one of their favorite toys there for comfort. (Familiar-smelling things are comforting to dogs.)
Assume dogs have agency. Despite this, it's still the dog owner's responsibility to prevent their dogs from engaging in some actions: biting, peeing and shitting in unapproved areas, violating noise disturbance laws, etc.
The owners responsibility is not contingent on the dog's agency. Likewise, human operators of LLMs maintain responsibility independent of LLMs agency status. It's a red herring.
We also run agents, but for shorter spans between supervisions, and with much lower total budget.
> The difference is volume. They spent hundreds of billions of tokens on these agents. If you put "a million weed whackers on dog backs" you would see the difference.
So put one weed whacker on one dog, you're to blame. Put a million weed whackers on a million dogs backs and ... you're still to blame? Arguably even more so?
This way you do not absolve your responsibility, you just manipulate the way to enforce it.