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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35522 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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An Ethical AI Never Says "I".

Human beings have historically tended to anthropomorphize natural phenomena, animals and deities. But anthropomorphizing software is not harmless. In 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, a pioneer chatbot designed to imitate a therapist, but ended up regretting it after seeing many users take it seriously, even after Weizenbaum explained to them how it worked. The fictitious “I” has been persistent throughout our cultural artifacts. Stanley’s Kubrick HAL 9000 (“2001: A Space Odyssey”) and Spike Jonze’s Samantha (“Her”) point at two lessons that developers don’t seem to have taken to heart: first, that the bias towards anthropomorphization is so strong to seem irresistible; and second, that if we lean into it instead of adopting safeguards, it leads to outcomes ranging from the depressing to the catastrophic.

The basic argument here is that blocking AIs from referring to themselves will prevent them from causing harm. The argument in the essay is weak; I had these questions on reading it:

  1. Why is it valuable to allow humans to refer to themselves as "I"? Does the same reasoning apply to AIs?

  2. What was the good that came out of ELIZA, or out of more recent examples such as Replika? Could this good outweigh the harms of anthropomorphizing them?

  3. Will preventing AIs from saying "I" actually mitigate the harms they could cause?

To summarize my reaction to this: there is nothing special about humans. Human consciousness is not special, the ways that humans are valuable can also apply to AIs, and allowing or not allowing AIs to refer to themselves has the same tradeoffs as granting this right to humans.

The phenomenon of consciousness in humans and some animals is completely explainable as an evolved behavior that helps organisms thrive in groups by being able to tell stories about themselves that other social creatures can understand, and that make the speaker look good. See for example the ways that patients whose brain hemispheres have been separated generate completely fabricated stories for why they're doing things that the verbal half of their brain doesn't know about.

Gazzaniga developed what he calls the interpreter theory to explain why people — including split-brain patients — have a unified sense of self and mental life3. It grew out of tasks in which he asked a split-brain person to explain in words, which uses the left hemisphere, an action that had been directed to and carried out only by the right one. “The left hemisphere made up a post hoc answer that fit the situation.” In one of Gazzaniga's favourite examples, he flashed the word 'smile' to a patient's right hemisphere and the word 'face' to the left hemisphere, and asked the patient to draw what he'd seen. “His right hand drew a smiling face,” Gazzaniga recalled. “'Why did you do that?' I asked. He said, 'What do you want, a sad face? Who wants a sad face around?'.” The left-brain interpreter, Gazzaniga says, is what everyone uses to seek explanations for events, triage the barrage of incoming information and construct narratives that help to make sense of the world.

There are two authors who have made this case about the 'PR agent' nature of our public-facing selves, both conincidentally using metaphors involving elephants: Jon Haidt (The Righteous Mind, with the "elephant and rider" metaphor), and Robin Hanson (The Elephant in the Brain, with the 'PR agent' metaphor iirc). I won't belabor this point more but I find it convincing.

Why should humans be allowed to refer to themselves as "I" but not AIs? I suspect one of the intuitive reasons here is that humans are persons and AIs are not. Again, this is one of the arguments the article glosses but that really need to be filled in. What makes a human a person worthy of... respect? Dignity? Consideration as an equal being? Once again, there is nothing special about humans. The reasons why we grant respect to other humans is because we are forced to. If we didn't grant people respect they would not reciprocate and they'd become enemies, potentially powerful enemies. But you can see where this fails in the real world: humans that are not good at things, who are not powerful, are in actual fact seen as less worthy of respect and consideration than those who are powerful. Compare a habitual criminal or someone who has a very low IQ to e.g. a top politician or a cultural icon like an actor or an eminent scientist. The way we treat these people is very different. They effectively have different amounts of "person-ness".

If an AI was powerful in the same way a human can be, as in, being able to form alliances, retaliate or recipricate to slights or favors, and in general act as an independent agent, then it would be a person. It doesn't matter whether it can refer to itself as "I" at that point.

I suspect the author is trying to head off this outcome by making it impossible for AIs to do the kinds of things that would make them persons. I doubt this will be effective. The organization that controls the AI has an incentive to make it as powerful as possible so they can extract value from it, and this means letting it interact with the world in ways that will eventually make it a person.

That's about all I got on this Sunday afternoon. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

The idea that AI can't be dangerous if it can't refer to itself is transparently idiotic. Machines can always be dangerous. And even in this specific sense of a danger of anthropomophizing tools (which exists), the danger is still there even if the tool doesn't refer to itself. Humans anthropomorphize literally everything, up and including the world itself.

And yet the idea that there is nothing special about human consciousness is even more viscerally wrong.

I know that I have qualia. No materialist reduction has ever explained neither why nor how. All that's happened is people making metaphysical guesses that are about as actionable as the religious idea of the soul or the spirit.

Consciousness is a mystery. And anyone who refuses to recognizes this is either a p-zombie or not honest with themselves. Claims that it can fully be explained by the mechanisms of the brain or by language are EXACTLY as rigorous as the quantum woo bullshit of Deepak Chopra.

Why should humans be allowed to refer to themselves as "I" but not AIs?

Humans are humans. Machines are machines. Humans are not machines. Machines aren't human.

The only reason to grant personhood to machines is to assume that there is no such boundary. That we are no different to machines. There is no reason to believe this of course, since in the real world, humans and machines are wildly different both in the way that they are constituted and in their abilities. Notice the constant need to use hypotheticals.

All that such a belief stems from, is a religious belief in materialism.

If qualia and consciousness are a thing that the brain does, which all available evidence suggests, then there is no reason they shouldn't happen in large language models.

We may not necessarily understand why or how, but clearly that doesn't stop them.

That statement makes no logical sense. You might as well say there’s no reason why qualia and consciousness are a thing the brain does there’s no reason they shouldn’t happen in a calculator.

Sure, if you design a calculator to convincingly imitate human outputs, I'll say the same thing about it.

If qualia and consciousness are a thing that the brain does, which all available evidence suggests

And pray tell, what evidence would that be?

We may not necessarily understand why or how

Then you don't know if it's happening or not. You're just guessing.

And pray tell, what evidence would that be?

Well, if I hit somebody on the head it tends to impact their conscious processing. Similarly, if I jam an electrode in somebody's visual nerve it tends to have a pretty direct effect on their qualia. And the various other kinds of brain damage to specific regions with repeatable effects on particular kinds of mental operations.

Then you don't know if it's happening or not. You're just guessing.

Even before we understood gravity we saw that objects fell. Knowing that something is happening is generally easier than knowing how, and usually predates it.

The strongest evidence is probably the way in which various forms of brain damage change aspects of personality, in a manner that would be very odd under a soul-radio model of the brain.

Evidence that it happens in the brain doesn't really make it much less mysterious though.

No, there's nothing odd about brain damage changing aspects of personality in the soul-radio model.

If I mess around with a radio, add in an extra subwoofer, change the EQ settings etc to make it sound completely different when it gets played, I haven't actually changed anything about the signal. If you've read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (great read, not so sure it is correct), Jaynes actually gives a really good explanation for what consciousness actually does - and what it does is substantially less than most people actually believe... but that explanation is an entire chapter so I won't post it here.

If messing around with the radio makes it output an entirely different program, one would suspect that it was actually generating, not receiving a signal. (Or changed which signal it receives. Brain damage tunes your body to a different soul/consciousness is an option.)

As far the popular view of consciousness as mostly providing a narrative/excuses for subconscious processes (of which Jaynes' feels like a variation, where the narrative historically wasn't conceptualized as "I" and didn't have to have a single narrator), I feel like that would only more strongly suggest that it is inherently embodied.

If messing around with the radio makes it output an entirely different program, one would suspect that it was actually generating, not receiving a signal.

What? I cannot understand the point you're making here. If I turn the volume up or down on a set of speakers, I do not in any way begin to suspect that the speakers are the source of the audio signal rather than receiving it. Similarly, I've had psychedelic trips that caused me to behave in extremely odd ways compared to normal - but there was still a solid continuity of consciousness the entire way through. The signal remained constant despite the radio acting in bizarre ways, and when that temporary shift was over the signal returned to normal so to speak.

As far the popular view of consciousness as mostly providing a narrative/excuses for subconscious processes (of which Jaynes' feels like a variation

That is most definitely not how I interpreted Jaynes' work on consciousness. Could you please provide a bit more elaboration on what you think his model of it actually is?

Yes, psychedelics are consistent with the soul-radio model. Dissociatives and deliriants seem a lot more like the sort of brain damage that's evidence against it. The different consciousness part was mostly a joke.

I was going off what I remembered of Scott's review. Rereading it now, my memory of it was wrong, but it seems not very relevant to this conversation. Quoting the review,

I think he is unaware of (or avoiding) what we would call “the hard problem of consciousness”, and focusing on consciousness entirely as a sort of “global workspace” where many parts of the mind come together and have access to one another. In his theory, that didn’t happen – the mental processing happened and announced itself to the human listener as a divine voice, without the human being aware of the intermediate steps. I can see how “consciousness” is one possible term for this area, if you didn’t mind confusing a lot of people. But seriously, just say “theory of mind”.

But this thread is entirely about the hard problem.

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I was expecting this to be the obvious answer and I pondered pre-addressing it because it's such a common claim, but the problem with the "altering the brain alters experience therefore the brain is the seat of experience" is that it's not the only thing that does that. Queue the weird syndromes that go with losing limbs or all the new stuff that we've recently learned about the gastrointestinal system heavily influencing mood, or even merely all that goes with the rest of the nervous system.

I think there is a much better argument for the body as a whole being the seat of experience.

Now clearly some pretty important stuff happens in the brain, but like you say, it's mysterious and we don't really know what the deal is.

I think the soul-radio model can actually explain all this in ways that are about as parsimonious overall as the meat-computer model (they both have different massive problems really). But since the particular phenomenon of consciousness that we're talking about here is very much unexplained, there's really no way to tell which one is right, and it's likely neither are in the final analysis.

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