This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I don't know, neither do you, and that's exactly why.
I'm by default skeptical of the ability to reproduce processes we do not even understand.
That's completely fair.
But the argument on the other side is that a blind tinkerer known as natural selection managed to get us as far as an intelligent entities like Isaac Newton, Richard Feymann, Jon Von Neumann. And getting that far was enough for humans to create nuclear weapons.
It seems probable that humans can improve upon the work of a million years of random chance in this department, to me.
And unlike Pascal's mugging, you aren't solely and completely relying on the mugger's words for your decision, you have access to all the same records and evidence that AI alarmists do, they're not hiding the ball in that way.
We had to understand the physics of the atom before even beginning to design such weapons.
Nobody stumbled upon atomics. It was a deliberate effort and even back then people weren't sure if the theory would hold up to experimentation. Here we don't even have theory.
It seems wildly unlikely to me. Our crude attempts at making our own Sun have so far been met mostly with failure, after all. Let alone anything better than what nature has wrought.
And we understand the Sun in pretty excruciating detail.
I maintain that history will regard AI safety with the same bemusement as we do predictions of human equivalent mechanical intelligence by 1975.
Or worse, it will see the safetyists as the guilty myth makers of the coming totalitarianism.
This is a poor analogy. We would have been able to reconstruct the Sun easily if we had access to requisite time, resources and tools to wield them. Fusion is very different from the Sun, it's an attempt to recreate the core principle at vastly smaller scale, with vastly more sophistication-dense processes. ML is an attempt to recreate some interesting aspects of a thing that can be produced by a 1.5L of jelly on 20W of power, on a significantly simpler substrate, whatever the scale and cost.
We have a track record of successes with such things in experimental physics, materials science, biology and other domains.
We understand, and LLMs prove, that plenty of high-level cognition is reducible to computation. It's proven that neural networks can approximate arbitrary computable functions. So even if the current paradigm doesn't pan out for some contingent reasons, it's provable that the solution cannot be far away.
If. We don't live in the land of theory, but in that of practice. The relative hypothetical difficulty of problems is irrelevant. This is exactly why we disagree: you think one can model future engineering based on our current models of present engineering. I see this as hubris. History shows this to be a terrible way to predict the future, and the history of this particular field shows it to be especially wrong in this case.
Feel free to join the people expecting Britain to be invaded by Napoleon using scaled up hot air baloons. I won't.
A thing you have basically no idea the working of. And that is based on a completely different substrate. For all we know it might not even be possible to port or emulate one using the other.
Myself I intuit that the types of intelligence or reasoning possible on silicon are vastly different in nature to those that supposedly rely on neurons. But neither of us, and nobody alive today, really knows.
No. Hell no. Language and cognition are not the same thing. Chomsky is right about that and it's no surprise his NYT article on LLMs is based on one of the most hard won results of linguistics. What LLMs prove is that a general purpose model of language is possible. Which is a lot, but it has nothing to do with cognition qua cognition.
Unless of course you're a Whorfist. But then you're just empirically wrong.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link