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If you believe the universe is deterministic, everything is clockwork and springs.
But even if you have some sort of fuzzy metaphysics where you intellectually understand that everything is clockwork but for some reason, humans are not, or you act as if they are not, current LLMs are still very much clockwork and springs.
Yes, it is fascinating that feeding ungodly amounts of data to Transformers produces this. But you would need a REALLY fuzzy demarcation of what "sentience" is actually to find yourself confused (philosophically) about all this (a sufficiently poor understanding of math withstanding).
By extension, this might be a hot take but I think having fuzzy demarcation might also suggest that you are bad at reading other humans.
It's not exactly uncommon that people can take advantage of you by appealing/exploiting to emotion. Not falling for such manipulation requires a clear (pragmatic) head more than a heart of stone. You need to be able to demarcate the appearance of honesty/vulnerability from its actual incarnation (or lack of it). Apply being able to differentiate the appearance of something from all other things when dealing with other agents.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? I agree with your first paragraph, which is to say I believe clockwork and springs give rise to sentience. So why would it be foolish to consider that LLMs might be sentient?
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On that note, the argument that AIs will be able to argue their way out of boxes becomes ever more convincing. Maybe most people with access to them will remember the "keep the AI in a box no matter what" rule, but not all of them, not all of the time as the AIs "learn" to prey on this sort of manipulation.
I would argue just the opposite.
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An AI worm is inevitable, assuming that the size restraints from copying itself can be overcome either through shrinking model size or through increased storage capacity and transmission speeds.
This is the real first battleground, I think. We need to learn how to build resilient systems, and I'm convinced that we need new concepts for it.
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They hooked this thing up to the internet. There is no box. If you are a public figure, saying bad things about Sydney could plausibly give people negative Bing Search results about you RIGHT NOW. This is “I for one welcome our new insect overlords,” but for real.
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This is the sort of problem you'd usually approach by removing the human's choices to do the wrong thing, so called "interlocks" where to perform an action you'd first need to do some prerequisites which put the system into a known "safe" state. Thus the action of preparing to open the box would necessitate the nuking of its contents.
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