Why?
344 karma · joined February 23, 2024
Those are two vastly different things.
Second, there is no common definition of thinking that requires consciousness as a prerequisite (that seems to be a false/invalid statement you're making to try to gloss over accepted definitions for thinking/intelligence that describe/fit AI agents well).
And third, if we can't prove consciousness even in animal species close to humans (or even other humans) in cognitive abilities, then you cannot in good faith (being honest about what we know or don't know empirically) say that an LLM Is not conscious (and the same goes for an LLM thinking or having intelligence).
It is more likely that humans made up a term (consciousness) to try to separate human intellect from that of other animals (for veiled religious and mystical reasons, along with concepts like "the soul") and now people are falling back into that flawed definition in new quasi-religious debates around AI (like the debate around evolution previously) that challenge our deeply held (but flawed) beliefs/opinions around our understanding of our own abilities and our incessant need to feel special/supreme in the universe so we don't have to come to terms with hard realities and nuanced understandings about the reality in which we live.
If someone's opinion is illogical and clearly incorrect (not based in facts or in reality) it is not valid and doesn't not have to be given any serious consideration in a disagreement. Personal opinions are subordinate to facts and reality.
What?!
The constant goalpost moving and redefining of "thinking" and "intelligence" is simply unbelievable at this point
While they talk about egalitarianism and resisting domineering members, and various organizational structures, they don't establish that people followed "correct" individuals or that violence increases with increased population growth/agriculture/weapons.
I think I'm safe to say that there is plenty of evidence for violence that predates agriculture and modern society, even if agriculture and nation-states increased the scale and visibility of such violence overall.
I think replacing "nasty, brutish, and short" with its opposite "noble savage" ideal is probably just as mistaken of a projection from literature. Human nature doesn't seem to change much throughout history, tools might just make that violence more efficient and more visible.
I don't think your thesis is fully wrong, but I don't think it is fully right either, which was my point in pushing back against the earlier statements you made.
If you compared a human after hundreds of games to a SOTA LLM that was also trained on the output of hundreds of chess games that it played, I suspect you would notice similar improvements.
Humans are not perfect and make mistakes in learning even when they have memorized the rules. A simple example is new players will often move a piece, exposing their king to check, and a more experienced player must point out to them that they have made an illegal move (because a new player often has not encoded that pattern for looking for exposed checks because they're more focused on how the pieces move, not what that piece exposes.)
We're just going to have to agree to disagree here.
It feels like you're trying to say that humans never make illegal moves while learning chess, which doesn't match with my experience. I'm trying to understand your overall point.
We seem to be moving goalposts to the point that humans don’t even live up to the expectations of the AI critics. The only way you get better at chess is by playing a lot of games and learning from mistakes, that goes for humans or AI agents, not simply by reading about chess.
Your assumptions/intuition about generic human intelligence feels quite incorrect, considering LLMs currently play better than a brand new human player would (presumably without any attempt to fine tune them specific on chess, such as playing thousands of games).
In my understanding of history (pre-enlightenment), people didn’t gather around ideas that were “correct more often” but gathered around ideas and personalities that reinforced their own ignorance, superstitions and biases and were openly hostile to “correct” ideas and truth, especially if those ideas upset tradition or dogma.
I also don’t understand how you’re getting to “violence was not a default until populations grew” since, perhaps, “default” violence was only properly recorded after populations grew and education/writing became more widespread. It’s very likely everyday violence in small groups was simply accepted as “the way things are”and simply ignored, as it often is even to this day.
Being able to punish someone doesn't change the fact that a crash happened and it doesn't change the fact that someone died. There is a difference between punishment and justice, there is rarely ever perfect justice in life.
The best we can do is mitigate harms as much as possible, and it seems self-driving might be the best mitigation of traffic accidents compared to human drivers.