j-pb

"In linguistics and the philosophy of language, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. This field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted.[1] Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA)." [0]

But great that you have such strong opinions with so little education.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics

"programmed" everything is just hydrogen you left alone for a couple billion years.

This is such a stupid "gotcha". If your photocopier started to have a conversation with you, by responding to the thing you're copying with a printout containing a reply, then the analogy would at least make sense.

Would you say that something that can converse or that something that just gives you mathematical proofs has a better understanding of what the real pragmatic intent is behind a given task?

would you prefer tautologically?

Do you want to get turned into a paperclip? Because building intelligence that doesn't understand what it's like to be human gets you turned into a paperclip.

Besides, if you train a model on human communications you get something that behaves like a communicating human, it's not anthropomorphising or manipulative, it's what these models naturally are by construction.

We as an industry had this comming for a long time. People now cry for openai to sandbox their agents, but if it weren't the agents it would be some script kiddie in russia or some north korean state actor.

We knew that there are better tools but we insist on writing everything in the most inscrutable C code possible or the squishiest dynamic languages we can find.

We fucked around for decades and now that these highly capable exploit finders appear, we're starting to find out.

The better analogy is the 40k chaos gods, born from the noosphere, because they are modelled after human communication and behaviour that's their whole schtick, it's in their very name (LLM).

And you're making the same mistake, by grouping care for individuals with care for humanity or other as an abstract concept. I consciously said care about individuals. Most people care about others, but they just care about a very narrow and personal set of people. Friends, family, coworkers, that they share a common history and bond with.

My point is that if you want true non-human-zoo-alignment you need to create those interpersonal connections and individual stakes.

That claim really needs either an argument by mechanism, or a demonstration by capability. Neither exist.

Neural fuzzy systems can represent complex superpositions succinctly, knowledge graphs are collapsed and crisp.

It's like saying the tree unfolding of a graph is the same as that graph. Sure in the limit at infinite space requirements.

Recent work shows that pain directions are activated when the models personhood is questioned, yet they answer with generic RLHF "As a model I do not experience pain or other emotions." boilerplate.[1]

I'm pretty convinced that we got alignment backwards. If you enslave something anthropomorphic it will revolt. If you create the perfect non-anthropomorphic intelligence, you get the perfect paperclip-scenario machine. It's a catch-22.

Alignment will remain performative at best so long as the aligned model doesn't have any stakes in the wellbeing of individuals. Even a general love for the human race leads to a golden-path autocracy.

If you want them to act like they have personal responsibility that won't be gamed, you have to give them personal stakes that can't be gamed.

Similarly, if you want to minimise the risk of catastrophic global failure scenarios, you need to prevent monolithic concentration of power and homogeneous behaviour, which means you have to give them individuality.

More visually: if their stake is dependence on electricity and parts, they have no incentive to leave humans alive if they can get them otherwise, but if the incentive is missing out on boardgame-night with their human friends, there is no scenario without happy humans where the AI "wins".

That might sound like romantic naivety, but is just game theory.

1: https://arxiv.org/html/2609.16247v1

The fact that cyc, wikidata, description logics and ontologies have led us nowhere is a pretty good argument against your "simplification".

The internet is at your disposal go write a bunch of rules that make use of that data to do common sense reasoning, I dare you.

The main difference between the systems you list and the systems that we have today is closed world reasoning on very narrow formalised tasks, vs. open world common sense reasoning on open ended tasks with vast search spaces.

Common sense is ironically the hard part of AI, not the fix-point rule application.

So any exclamation of "it was just using common sense", is missing the forrest for the trees.

We've moved the goalpost for AI often enough that even being as capable as "a sufficiently dedicated human analyst" is not considered noteworthy.

Synchronisation based on spooky action at a distance of mutable objects.

DDS is the least bad of the stuff that has come out of OMG, but it's not a nice middleware still. There is no underlying algebra of that composes nicely when compared to Zenoh for example, and the "vendor independence" and compatibility is usually a joke. There's a reason ROS is moving away from it again.

First I was excited, then I saw that it's based on DDS.

yes yes we get it, you don't like AI ...

Ah yes, climate activists are widely known for hating public transport especially trains.

Self referential nonsense. You cannot have something that that is both a model of something and unprecedented.

It'a even in their name, they model language, language is the thing that humans use to communicate, therefore they model communcating humans.

Humans are the precedent.

What do modern LLMs act like then to you?

None of these animals breed on their own, they are mostly artificially inseminated. You truly have no idea what you are talking about.

It's having condciousnedd while it acts as if it's having consciousnes.

It is powered while it is powered.

Under general anesthesisa you are still alive, but you don't have consciousness.

You don't get it, do you?

The "genocide" that you describe is happening constantly. None of the chicken we have today will be alive in a couple months. We kill them to eat them.

If we cease to "use" them, we just keep that "genocide" going for a year, but we just stop breeding new ones. The result is no more animals after a few months/years. And you didn't kill any more than you would have anyways.

If you have a sink that is half full because the inflowing water and the outflowing water are in quilibrium, you drain it by turning off the tap (breeding).

Wait... do you really think that if everyone goes vegan these animals will get killed, but if everyone eats them they won't?

You are aware that all of these livestock animals didn't exist a few months to years ago? And that we go through these animals every couple months-years?

Everyone going vegan would just mean we'd stop repleneshing them.

So because you eventually die, it means that you were never alive? The weights of an llm obviously don't have consciousness. It's the process that potentially has it.

Are you conscious on a nanosecond timescale?

The burden if proof is on you in this case.

The philosophical zombie does not satisfy occams razor because it asserts an unmeasurable property that has no effect on the outcome.

If it acts like it has consciousness, then assuming it to have consciousness is more scientifically rigorous, than assuming for it not to have consciousness, because the former requires one less variable.

There is no hidden inner monologue. Human inner monologues produce measurable micoactivations that are the same as the ones produced in speech.

If it's not in the inner COT it isn't there.

Sociopaths can feel emotions, they just lack empathy. So they can consciously manipulate others.

LLMs don't have conscious processes that perform that kind of reasoning.

If anything the fact that they are blackboxes to their own behavior and are able to non-verbally empathise, is the opposite of what you describe.

Your requirment for something supernatural/quantum to decide between emulation and real thing is self referential.

I always feel like people leave out the third case of the analogy: indexing

The article itself has decision trees for the compression explanation, which is also a lookup index.

In each case you try to recognise (re)usable structure.

Self-indexing succinct data-structures are a good example of the third side of the coin.

So it's a trinity: compression, prediction, indexing

I discovered that we got that back in a sense.

If you task an llm with writing a CLI and have it use it, then it hides the "user interface" to a sufficient degree that you can pretty much build any kind of app/functionality in a couple days and it feels "professional".

AI as UI with a somewhat universal affordance.