LlamaTrauma

This is definitely a nuanced issue. I'm sure there's worse going on than what's in this experiment, and the food industry is certainly far worse. I just wish we'd say the quiet part out loud and put more effort into discovering where that line should be. The ethics section of this paper in its entirety is:

> This work did not require ethical approval. We minimized the number of animals used in the experiment and kept manipulations to a minimum.

edit: formatting

I'm uncomfortable with the methods used in this experiment. We don't even have a consensus on if or how insects feel pain, but we're raising them in labs for the purpose of drowning them. As far as I know freezing or crushing insects is a humane way for them to go, and I'm sure this research will be beneficial for insect conservation, but ultimately it's all in the interest of maintaining an ecosystem that humans rely on with little concern for the insects' well-being.

relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1251/

for clarity I am not Steve Richardson

This is super cool, I've wondered if this wort of thing could be possible and I guess it is. The applications given are funny though. I can't think of any applications either, but "helping people with color-blindness" reads like the ol' search and rescue excuse [1]. I think they're talking about shifting colors around so less color is perceived in the wavelengths they can't see?

[1] https://xkcd.com/2128/

The theory I've developed is that the brain circuitry passes much of the information it processes through a "seat of consciousness", which then processes that data and sends signals back to the unconscious parts of the brain to control motor function, etc. Instinctive action bypasses the seat of consciousness step, but most "important" decisions go through it.

If the unconscious brain is damaged it can impact the data the seat of consciousness receives or reduce how much control consciousness has on the body, depending on if the damage is on the input or output side.

I'm pretty convinced there's something special about the seat of consciousness. An AI processing the world will do a lot of math and produce a coherent result (much like the unconscious brain will), but it has no seat of consciousness to allow it to "experience" rather than just manipulate the data it's receiving. We can artificially produce rainbows, but don't know if we can create a system that can experience the world in the same way we do.

This theory's pretty hand-wavy and probably easy to contradict, but as long as we don't understand most of the brain I'm happy to let what we don't know fill in the gaps. The seat of consciousness is a nice fixion [1] which allows for a non-deterministic universe, religion, emotion, etc. and I'm happy to be optimistic about it.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1621/

I considered making a Tetris 99 bot for a while just for the sake of doing it, but interfacing with the switch sounded like a huge pain. Cool to see someone actually went through with it.

Instating an AI model as "Head of Scammer Relations" is hilarious. I think the point here is to collect the phone numbers of scam call centers and have Daisy call them so that scammers waste time talking to it rather than a victim.

But how do you know if GPT-3 can do better? Should you prove that an article contains information found nowhere else on the internet before posting it? There's also the existential question of if anything's worth doing when another process can achieve objectively better results.