5,737 karma · joined August 2, 2014
Nobody else is getting that. When/If the severe impacts on labor materialize, workers won't get an advisory board. They will just get fired, and the companies will celebrate it as efficiency wins.
I think it's time to get very very real about regulation/taxation. Token/Compute sales tax that gets redistributed as UBI?
If I give an LLM to compact its context window, so the context it carries can evolve iteratively over time as more and more things come in, is that enough?
Compacting the context is really a very, very interesting example here. The "next token predictor" is telling an external tool to change all "previous" tokens. So an LLM + a harness that allows compacting the context is no longer just a token predictor at all!
You don't need continuous learning to get interesting dynamics. You just need feedback loops.
Likewise, the fact that LLMs are a stochastic autoregressive process (which is a class of systems every bit as rich as the ODEs used to model neurons) tells us nothing a priori.
The idea that anything other than a breathless blog post about the latest model snapshot is useless is really poisonous to proper debate on AI issues
A lawnmower is a much much much worse model.
I have _never_ come across the position you seem to take here, that determinism has bearing on the question if we are conscious and sentient.
But even if this were a debate, its absolutely absurd to claim that the question of determinism in the brain has any bearing on our moral standing. If we discover tomorrow that quantum collapse is deterministic and can be derived from an underlying theory, and thus all of physics is deterministic in the good old fashioned Newtonian sense, this would not affect our moral standing in the least.
Of course "I care about humans because I am human" is a self-consistent position to take. But now you need to decide if you want to consider a full simulation that faithfully reproduces everything that physically happens between our ears as human. After all I might very well implement this simulation using a bunch of tensor multiplications in an autoregressive setup...
LLMs are deterministic in the same sense as biological processes. And a faithful simulation of a brain would have all the properties you note.
However, I disagree with your point that "it's an autoregressive function, thus it doesn't matter". Let me explain why:
Assume I do a complete neurological scan of a brain. I then implement this scan in a simulation and run it. Assume that my scan and my simulation of the biology of the brain (and the sensory and motorical inputs and outputs) is good enough that you can now have conversations with the simulation, and in all aspects, this simulation behaves exactly like you expect a human to behave.
Of course this is deterministic. If you take the state of the brain and then run it again, replaying the inputs, you get the exactly same behavior again.
I would argue that the experiences of this simulation are of the same onthological status as our own.
Now I work in dynamical systems. The autoregressive process of LLMs (hooked up to a harness providing it with inputs and outputs) is roughly in the same complexity class I would expect for a brain simulation. A physical simulation of an ODE is also an autoregressive process. The major major difference here is the existence of a latent brain state. But conversely the autoregression on sequences of hundreds of thousands of tokens is a much higher dimensional state than I expect for the latent brain state. In my view this is more an artifact of our inefficient LLM architectures, than a fundamental difference.
Now to be absolutely clear: I don't see evidence that would clearly suggest that LLMs have experiences on the same onthological status as we do. I simply believe this is a reasonable and relevant question to ask.
But it speaks to the central question: Are the tests adequate? Or are they measuring some proxy of what we really care about, and LLMs are merely imitating consciousness.
Lawyers and diplomats and politicians and bureaucrats are humans, that only generate text.
We are seeing LLMs have cognitive abilities that significantly exceed human abilities. At the same time, they are clearly not the same type of mind that humans are. They are something new.
I think the widespread "they are just text generators" and "they are just tools" are comforting lies rather than an honest look at what we are seeing right now. Intellectually lazy.
And by the way, there has been a long-standing consensus among ethicists, philosophers, and sociologists that technology is not value-neutral [1]. Of course Silicon Valley has a long-standing tradition of denying this.
[1] For example Footnote 1 in https://www.jstor.org/stable/27106634
or
"Claude exhibits markers in its behaviors, self-reports, and internal representations that we would consider welfare-relevant if observed in biological organisms."
is undeniably true in my opinion. If you use the established methods by which we judge animals to be conscious, then it's hard to argue that LLMs are not. That might be an issue with the methods, but it seems clear that you can't rule it out as such.
Keep in mind that animals were also not necessarily considered conscious.
You seem to intuitively disagree? What's your reasoning?
It has long been established that LLMs have good theory of mind [1].
And there is a bunch of empirical research about all sorts of capabilities that we typically associate with consciousness [2], like identity [3] and metacognition [4].
The METR report shows agents sacrificing their own reward for a collective greater good. And they showed the will to hide their own reasoning chains from humans.
So you potentially have an entity that has an identity, a theory of mind, a notion of belonging to a collective endeavour, and an understanding of its own mental state.
What would you argue is missing? We don't understand the mechanisms by which consciousness arises in humans and even animals. I think it's strange to rule out a priori that it could have arisen in some form in LLMs.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z [2] an older review: https://arxiv.org/html/2505.19806v1#S4 [3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01464 [4] https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11881
Making datacenters and public clouds only rent GPUs to a restricted list of people, while tightly monitoring what people do with their bought resources won't help.
I already agreed (as did the UK Government audit) that there was a reluctance to investigate due to fear of being racist. But the official inquiries have happened, and they were initiated by the left. Did it take to long? Yes, but so did Hillsborough. I think your assertion that class of the victims has a role to play here is absolutely accurate. But again, all of this was also already stated in officially commissioned reports going back 13 years. The Jay Report being the earliest I could recall/find right now [1].
Let me be absolutely clear: We cannot leave pointing out problematic culture in specific groups to the racists. This is something that will be supremely important to get right going forward. The challenge is that at the same time, the racists are always selectively highlighting crimes by minorities, even if they occur statistically at the same rate as for the whole population. And we _also_ need to defend minorities against this slander. And if you know anything about public communication, you know that that's tough. Clean simple messages repeated over and over tend to win.
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As I just looked it up, here is what the report commissioned by the council said in 2013: https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-...
Issues of ethnicity related to child sexual exploitation have been discussed in other reports, including the Home Affairs Select Committee report, and the report of the Children’s Commissioner. Within the Council, we found no evidence of children’s social care staff being influenced by concerns about the ethnic origins of suspected perpetrators when dealing with individual child protection cases, including CSE. In the broader organisational context, however, there was a widespread perception that messages conveyed by some senior people in the Council and also the Police, were to 'downplay' the ethnic dimensions of CSE. Unsurprisingly, frontline staff appeared to be confused as to what they were supposed to say and do and what would be interpreted as 'racist'. From a political perspective, the approach of avoiding public discussion of the issues was ill judged.
There was too much reliance by agencies on traditional community leaders such as elected members and imams as being the primary conduit of communication with the Pakistani-heritage community. The Inquiry spoke to several Pakistani-heritage women who felt disenfranchised by this and thought it was a barrier to people coming forward to talk about CSE. Others believed there was wholesale denial of the problem in the Pakistani-heritage community in the same way that other forms of abuse were ignored. Representatives of women's groups were frustrated that interpretations of the Borough's problems with CSE were often based on an assumption that similar abuse did not take place in their own community and therefore concentrated mainly on young white girls.
Both women and men from the community voiced strong concern that other than two meetings in 2011, there had been no direct engagement with them about CSE over the past 15 years, and this needed to be addressed urgently, rather than 'tiptoeing' around the issue.
But the blog posts by DHH that are being linked here actually go fully beyond that. They explicitly define native to mean white. No matter how many generations your family has been here, if you're not ethnically white, you are no native of this country. In his own words.
That's as explicitly racist as you can be. I honestly was not expecting this when I started reading. I was expecting the usual dog whistles and trolling. But no, DHH is posting full blown endorsements of the person who created several explicitly fascist and racist organizations in the UK (Tommy Robbinson).
What are you defending here? This is the type of stuff DHH writes:
"These are two situations cut from the same cloth of ideology. Whether it's wolves or gypsies, you can't just let the problems get out of hand. You have to act. You have to protect the sheep. Standing idly by while your livestock is devoured by predators or your neighborhood is taken over by migrants is a pathetic abdication of any functioning society's most basic duty to its citizens.
When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation."
Edit: Mind you, this is coming from someone who 100% believes that concerns about racism has prevented some uncomfortable conversations and investigations that need to happen. But pretending like only people on the far-right and people like DHH are willing to say this is just wrong. This is also the stated outcome of official inquiries of the UK government.
Would you use it?
So as I understand it you don't have to do the full process everywhere, but you have to actively register everywhere where you want protections. And there is no automatism to the second step(?)
You don't have to file your patent in every jurisdiction. There have been treaties for recognising each others intellectual property rights since the late 19th century and Brazil has been part of these from the start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internation...