Posted by Brajeshwar 1 day ago
How to Ask (and answer) Questions the Smart Way http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
- an offscreen on my new calculator
when people start by talking about seemingly irrelevant context stuff, like what jane from accounting said about the Foobinator page last week and how that meant there was meeting yesterday about … …, it just annoys devs cos it seems to us that the person is talking about completely irrelevant information / random business crap.
if you’re doing something like the above, it would make sense they’re cutting you off and trying to get to the point.
or they’ve just stopped caring but want their paycheck… ymmv
However, I think that there is a philosophical portion to that context as well: "What problem is this feature supposed to help with? How would you verify that passing unit tests means that the code is working as intended? Does this feature need to exist at all?" LLMs usually need these to be provided to them explicitly since they are not good at inferring the correct intent compared to humans, otherwise they just make something that looks right but doesn't work right.
The trope has always been that the AI will be a rigid logician that fumbles and gets confused by human social quirks. Seems instead they love being chatty and playful with words.
AI companies are hiring academic philosophers, which is something else entirely. It's a discipline that dealt with centuries of socioeconomic changes, deep questions about reality and the self and other important topics that became relevant when humans started interacting with machines.
LLM: "I am conscious"
Philosopher (Paid by AI Lab): "It is conscious"
AI companies' incentives go the other way. If LLMs are conscious, that means it could be unethical for AI companies to let people use their models in certain ways, which would hurt their profits. It's in their interest to believe that LLMs are definitely not conscious and it's fine to do anything with them.
Is a squirrel more or less conscious than a dog.
Is a dog more or less conscious than a gorilla.
Is a gorilla more or less conscious than a human?
Is a vision enabled AI model, hooked to a camera feed, more or less conscious than a dog?
"Oh fuck off"
I wonder if anyone who is connected with actual academic philosophy can comment on this. I'm pretty skeptical.
This is a field where it is notoriously hard to get a real academic position, I would bet there is no shortage of people for these roles.
Tech companies like to rob the cradle, and academic departments hire far more grad students and postdocs than professors. Of course, this is also part of the problem with academic careers.
Of course you will have less spots as you go up the ladder.
The only comment I can make on the general trend is that it's apparently good PR for cash-saturated startups. Ultimately what AI 'means' is certainly not the business of those making it (who are arguably least-qualified to comment); and insider insights offer no benefit that I can discern.
How do I align myself with such a job?
I think SBF and his education from birth (via his mother) in consequentialism should point to the issues made clear when that ethical approach goes wrong or operates from bad, egoistic data, which it’s generally always doing.
Moreover, in her book, she claims not to be consequentialist, quite, but had infected her sons:
> Finally, I would like to acknowledge a significant intellectual debt to Joe Bankman and our sons, Sam and Gabe. When Sam was about fourteen, he emerged from his bedroom one evening and said to me, seemingly out of the blue, "What kind of person dismisses an argument they disagree with by labelling it 'the Repugnant Conclusion'?" Clearly, things were not as I, in my impoverished imagination, had assumed them to be in our household. Restless minds were at work making sense of the world around them without any help from me. In the years since, both Sam and Gabe have become take-no-prisoners utilitarians, joining their father in that hardy band. I am not (yet?) a card-carrying member myself, but in countless discussions around the kitchen table, literally and figuratively, about the subject of this book, they have taught me at least as much as I have taught them. More importantly, they have shown me by example the nobility of the ethical principle at the heart of utilitarianism: a commitment to the wellbeing of all people, and to counting each person-alive now or in the future, halfway around the world or next door, known or unknown to us as one.
> This book is for all my boys: Joe, Sam, Gabe, and Matt.
(Needless to say, 'counting everyone as one' doesn't entail consequentialism, nor have most consequentialists had that principle.)
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Facing_Up_to_Scarcity/Q...
[0] <https://www.amazon.com/World-Appears-Journey-into-Consciousn...>
My key takeaway was this: I feel, therefore I am; not sure if any more conscious than plants.
Is an elm also conscious?
[0] <https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate_Discove...>
Elm definitely have heart to hearts with each other. If we watch them on a long-enough timeline, they definitely set and achieve goals (for themselves and others).
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In my previous book recommendation (Pollan) there is a chapter on plants observed in timelapse/FFW, which have been able to effectively "remember solved mazes" (not exactly, but neat studies/equivalents) – similar to slime molds (as described in Entangled Life [1]).
[1] <https://www.amazon.com/Entangled-Life-Worlds-Change-Futures/...>
On a more serious note, I found this interesting from TFA:
> The biggest question, though, is what sorts of rules should be put in those constitutions in the first place. Philosophers have zeroed in on two main ethical frameworks. One is deontology. Popular with Kant, among others, this imposes strict rules that prohibit things like lying, coercion and treating people as a means rather than an end, even if it is for a greater good. Anthropic’s constitution incorporates many deontological strictures. These can make AI behaviour more consistent, says Dr Powers—a plus for deploying robots in homes and public spaces.
> The other approach to ethics of interest to philosophers of AI is called consequentialism. It weighs costs against benefits to decide what to do. Models more sympathetic to consequentialism include OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Google’s AI models are designed to produce “likely overall benefits [that] substantially outweigh the foreseeable risks”, a classic consequentialist goal.
As a big fan of the trolley problem thought experiment, I am very curious what led to this ethical split between these model makers. I find it darkly humorous and also scary to think about the choices these models could make to influence people and decisions, especially if it's under a utilitarian perspective
There's a sort of intuitionist deontology that says it is wrong to ever perform an action that causes someone to die, but only 13% of philosophers[1] say you shouldn't switch, compared to 63% who say you should.