Shayne O'Neill

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of cat struggles." - Karl Meowx

I'm less worried about the ability of an LLM to induce psychosis as I'm worried about the effects of having an LLM not push back on delusions. 

Back in my late teens, in the early 1990s, my childhood best friend started developing paranoid schizophrenia. It probably didn't help that we where smoking a lot of weed, but I'm fairly convinced the root causes where genetic (his mother, sister and uncle where also schizophrenic) so the dice where loaded from the start. 

At the time, the big thing on television was the X Files. My friend became obsessed w... (read more)

I had a more in depth comment, but it appear the login sequence throws comments away (and the "restore comment" thing didn't work). My concern is that not all misaligned behaviour is malicious.. It might decide to enslave us for our own good noting that us humans aren't particularly aligned either and prone to super-violent nonsense behaviour. In this case looking for "kill all humans" engrams isn't going to turn up any positive detections.  That might actually be all true and it is in fact doing us a favour by forcing us into servitude, from a surviv... (read more)

Sure, but "Thinking out loud" isnt the whole picture, theres always a tonne of cognition going on before words leave the lips, and I guess its also gonna depend on how early in its training process its learning to "count on its fingers". If its just taking cGPT then adding a bunch of "count on your fingers" training, its gonna be thinking "Well, I can solve complex navier stokes problems in my head faster than you can flick your mouse to scroll down to the answer, but FINE ILL COUNT ON MY FINGERS".

Potentially. Keep in mind however, these guys get a LOT of email from fans asking them to talk about various things (One of the more funnier examples was a group I am in on FB for fans of english prog band Cardiacs decided to try and launch a campaign to get music youtuber Rick Beato to talk about the band. He was spammed so hard with fans that he apparently lost his temper at them. Needless to say, Mr Beato has not covered Cardiacs). Possibly a smarter approach would be to approach their management whos jobs are to handle this sort of stuff , you might ge... (read more)

Ok. I must have missed this reply, my apologies for the late response. 

There are elements of how embedding spaces that parallel the way studies of semiotics suggest human meaning production works. Similarities cluster, differences define clear boundaries of meaning and so on. 

The reason I suggests literary theory, is because largely thats a widely documented field of study with academic standards, and its one that is more strongly aware of how meanings and associations map onto cultural cohorts (Ie tarot symbols would be meaningless to chinese fo... (read more)

Im assuming its due to those silly congress UFO hearings. Not that I can speak on behalf of RatsWrong but I assume thats his thinking.

Unless, of course, those UAPs turn up, and don't have biological organisms in them, in which case we'd have the possibility that another civilization developed AI and it went poorly.

...or it is biological and we end up in a situation like 3 body problem/killing-star where the saucer fiends decide to gank us because humans are kinda violent and too dangerous to keep around. 

All those super-intelligence as danger arguments also apply to biological super intelligences too.

But most likely:  There are no damn UFOs and the laws of physics and their big ugly light speed prohibition still holds.

I'm not even remotely prepared to state my odds on any of whats going ahead, because I'm genuinely mystified as to where this road goes. I'm a little less worried the AI would go haywire than I was a few years ago, because it appears the current trajectory of LLM based AIs seems to generate AI that emulates humans more often than it emulates raging deathbots. But I'm not a seer, and I'm not an AI specialist, so I'm entirely comfortable with the possiblity I haven't got a clue there. All I know is we ought try and figure it out, just in case this thing does... (read more)

While the use of tarot archetypes is... questionable... it does point at an angle to exploring embedding space which is that it is a fundamentally semiotic space, its going in many respects to be structured by the texts that fed it, and human text is richly symbolic. 

That said, theres a preexisting set of ideas around this that might be more productive, and that is structuralism, particularly the works of Levi Strauss, Roland Barthes, Lacan, and more distantly Foucault and Derrida. 

Levi Strauss's anthropology in particular is interesting ,because... (read more)

The murderer at the door thing IMHO was Kant accidently providing his own reductio ad absurdum (Philosophers sometimes post outlandish extreme thought experiments of testing how a theory works when pushed to an extreme, its a test for universiality). Kant thought that it was entirely immoral to lie to the murderer because of a similar reason that Feel_Love suggests (in Kants case it was that the murderer might disbelieve you and instead do what your trying to get him not to do). The problem with Kants reasoning there is that he's violating his own moral re... (read more)

I did once coax cGPT to describe its "phenomenology" as being (paraphrased from memory) "I have a permanent series of words and letters that I can percieve and sometimes i reply then immediately more come", indicating its "perception" of time does not include pauses or whatever.  And then it pasted on its disclaimer that "As an AI I....", as its want to do.

I dont think its useful to objectively talk about "consciousness", because its a term that if you put 10 philosophers in a room and ask them to define it, you'll get 11 answers. (I personally have tended to go with "being aware of something" following Heideggers observation that consciousness doesnt exist on its own but always in relation to other things, ie your always conscious OF something., but even then we start running into tautologies, and infinite regress of definitions), so if everyones talking about something slightly different, well its not a ve... (read more)

I suspect most of us occupy more than one position in this taxonomy. I'm a little bit doomer and a little bit accelerationist. I  theres significant,  possibly world ending,  danger in AI, but I also think as someone who works on climate change in my day job, that climate change is a looming significant civilization ending risk or worse (20%-ish) for humanity and worry humans alone might not be able to solve this thing. Lord help us if the siberian permafrost melts,we might be boned as a species.

So as a result, I just don't know how to balan... (read more)

Definately. The lower the neuron vs 'concepts' ratio is, the more superposition required to represent everything. That said with the continuous function nature of LNNs these seem to be the wrong abstraction for language. Image models? Maybe.  Audio models? Definately. Tokens and/or semantic data?  That doesnt seeem practical.

 

You criticize Conjecture's CEO for being... a charismatic leader good at selling himself and leading people? Because he's not... a senior academic with a track record of published papers?  Nonsense. Expecting the CEO to be the primary technical expert seems highly misguided to me.

Yeah this confiused me a little too. My current job (in soil science) has a non academic boss, and a team of us boffins, and he doesn't need to be an academic, because its not his job, he just has to know where the money comes from, and how to stop the stakeholders from... (read more)

"The Good Samaritans" (oft abrebiated to "Good Sammys") is the name of a major local poverty charity here in australia run by the uniting church Generally well regarded and tend not to push religion too hard (compared to the salvation army). So yeah, it would appear to be a fairly recurring name. 

My suspicion is the most instructive cases to look at (Modern AI really is too new a field to have much to go on in terms of mature safety standards) is how the regulation of Nuclear and Radiation safety has evolved over time. Early research suggested some serious X-Risks that didn't pan out for either scientific (igniting the atmosphere) or logistical/political reasons (cobalt bombs, tsar bomba scale H bombs) thankfully, but some risks arising more out of the political domain (having big gnarly nuclear war anyway) still exist that could certainly make it ... (read more)