[HN Gopher] Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?
___________________________________________________________________
Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?
Author : zwieback
Score : 156 points
Date : 2023-11-15 20:17 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| I wonder when the rate of improvement of SOTA benchmarks will
| exceed the rate of improvement of irl early childhood cognitive
| development
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Jared Diamond mentions several attributes which make a species
| suitable for domestication. Humans fit all but one: we are
| almost too altricial to be suitable for economic exploitation.
|
| Imagine the contribution to GNP if we in practice, like
| Bokanovsky* (by Ford!) in fiction, could greatly reduce the
| 10-30 year lead time currently required to produce new
| employees...
|
| Edit: * cf
| https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/notes/notes47/notes47.html
| carlossouza wrote:
| Great essay; impressive content.
|
| The fact that it's very unlikely for any of the current models to
| create something that even remotely resembles this article tells
| me we are very far away from AGI.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| don't underestimate exponentials
| breuleux wrote:
| Let's not see exponentials everywhere either. It's not
| because things seem to be progressing very fast that
| exponentials are involved. More often than not they are
| logistic curves.
| dekhn wrote:
| or the power of sigmoids to replace exponentials when the
| exponential peters out.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Did you miss the disclaimer at the bottom that both visual
| artwork and prose were produced by a combination of generative
| AI tools and creative prompting? The entire seamless watercolor
| style piece was just a long outpainting
| carlossouza wrote:
| hahaha that's why I love HN :)
| iwanttocomment wrote:
| I read the article, read your comment, went back to review
| the article, and there was no such disclaimer. If this is /s,
| whoosh.
| LASR wrote:
| Often the "stochastic parrot" line is used as a reduction on what
| an LLM truly is.
|
| I firmly believe that LLMs are stochastic parrots and also that
| humans are too. To the point where I actually think even
| consciousness itself is a next-token predictor.
|
| Where the industry is headed - multi-modal models. This really I
| think is the remaining frontier of LLM <> Human parity.
|
| I also have a 15 month old son. It's totally obvious to me that
| he's definitely learning by repetition. But the sources of
| training data is much more high bandwidth than whatever we're
| training our LLMs on.
|
| It's been a couple of years since GPT-3. It's time to abandon
| this notion of "stochastic parrot" as a derogatory. Anyone stuck
| in this mindset really is going to be hindered from making
| significant progress in developing utility from AI.
| Probiotic6081 wrote:
| > I firmly believe that LLMs are stochastic parrots and also
| that humans are too. To the point where I actually think even
| consciousness itself is a next-token predictor.
|
| Almost every time I'm on hackernews I end up baffled by
| software engineers feeling entitled to have an unfunded opinion
| on scientific disciplines outside of their own field of
| expertise. I've literally never encountered that level of
| hubris from anyone else. It's always the software people!
|
| Consciousness is far from being fully understood but having a
| body and sensorimotor interactions with the environment are
| already established as fundamental preconditions for cognition
| and in turn consciousness.
|
| Margaret Wilsons paper from 2002 is a good read:
| https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03196322.pdf
|
| peace
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I suspect you don't know what OPs field of expertise is. I
| also doubt OP would disagree with that statement that the
| only conscious things we know of have a body and sensorimotor
| interactions with the environment.
| Chabsff wrote:
| The befuddlement goes even farther for me. LLMs are,
| effectively, black-box systems that interface with the world
| via a stochastic parrot interface.
|
| You'd _think_ that software engineers would be a group that
| easily understands how making radical assumptions about
| implementation details when looking at nothing but an
| interface is generally misguided.
|
| I'm not saying that there isn't a strong case to be made
| against LLMs being intelligent. It's pointing at the
| stochastic parrot as evidence enough in of itself that
| confuses me.
| lainga wrote:
| Ah, but HN is a platform for not just any software
| engineer, but the entrepreneurial type.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _You 'd_ think _that_ [...]
|
| As a stochastic parrot I'm unable to do that.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Are you saying that ie. paralyzed people don't have
| consciousness?
| bena wrote:
| First of all, paralyzed people do have bodies. And
| sensorimotor functions.
|
| Second of all, it wouldn't matter if individually they did
| or did not. The species does and now our species has
| developed consciousness. It's part of the package.
|
| If you wanted a counterexample, you should look to plant
| life. There is some discussion on whether or not plant
| systems have a form on consciousness. But, then again,
| plants have bodies at the very least.
| zhynn wrote:
| There is a spectrum between conscious and unconscious. You
| could say that under general anesthesia you are a 0/10 on
| the conscious scale, asleep is 1 or 2, just woken from
| sleep is maybe 3.... and up to a well rested, well fed,
| healthy sober adult human near the top of the scale. These
| are common sense notions of objective consciousness and
| they are testable and noncontroversial outside of a
| philosophy argument.
|
| Does this make sense as a rebuttal to your reductio
| argument?
| fragmede wrote:
| To be fair, it's any of the exalted professions that the
| blessed extend their expertise to. Doctors, lawyers, software
| engineers. they (we) start with the notion that I'm a smart
| person, so from first principles, I can conquer the world.
| nevermind that that's an existing body of work, with their
| own practitioners to build off of.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Yeah, it's only software people. No one else has unfounded
| opinions.
|
| But... a parrot has a body. And sure, you'll say "they don't
| literally mean parrot".. but it's a vague term when you
| unpack it, and people saying "we are stochastic parrots" are
| also making a pretty vague comment (they clearly don't mean
| literally). Anyone who has a small child and understands LLMs
| is shocked by how much similar they seem to be when it comes
| to producing output.
| dekhn wrote:
| Some of us who believe that humans are at least partly
| statistical parrots have PhDs in relevant fields- for
| example, my PhD is in Biophysics, I've studied cognitive
| neuroscience and ML for decades, and while I think embodiment
| may very well be a necessary condition to reproduce the
| subjective experience of consciousness, I don't think "having
| a body and sensorimotor interactions are established as
| fundamental preconditions for cognition and in turn
| consciousness". Frankly I think that's an impractical
| question to answer.
|
| Instead, I work with the following idea: it seems not
| unlikely that we will, in the next decade or so, create non-
| embodied machine learning models which simply can't be told
| apart from a human (through a video chat-like interface). If
| you can do that, who really cares about whether it's
| conscious or not?
|
| I don't really think philosophy of the mind is that important
| here; instead, we should treat this as an engineering problem
| where we assume brains are subjectively conscious, but that's
| not a metric we are aiming for.
| nix0n wrote:
| > software engineers feeling entitled to have an unfunded
| opinion on scientific disciplines outside of their own field
| of expertise
|
| There's an XKCD about this behavior[0]. The title is actually
| "Physicists", but I also have seen it on HN (especially with
| psychology).
|
| [0]https://xkcd.com/793/
| User23 wrote:
| Well with psychology it's more fair. Thanks to the
| replication crisis we can say with a straight face that
| psychologists aren't even experts on psychology. As usual
| the demonstrable expertise in the field lies with the
| pragmatic types. For psychology that means salesmen, pickup
| artists, advertisers, conmen, propagandists, high school
| queen bees, and so on.
| dekhn wrote:
| This is known as the "Why don't you just assume a spherical
| cow?"
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Embodiment is an intellectual dead end in explaining
| consciousness/sentience. Sure, its relevant to understanding
| human cognition as we are embodied entities, but it's not
| much relevant to consciousness as such. The fact that some
| pattern of signals on my perceptual apparatus is caused by an
| apple in the real world does not mean that I have knowledge
| or understanding of an apple in virtue of this causal
| relation. That my sensory signals are caused by apples is an
| accident of this world, one we are completely blind to. If
| all apples in the world were swapped with fapples (fake
| apples), where all sensory experiences that have up to now
| been caused by apples are now caused by fapples, we would be
| none the wiser. The wide content of our perceptual
| experiences is irrelevant to literally everything we know and
| how we interact with the world. Our knowledge of the world is
| limited to our sensory experiences and our deductions,
| inferences, etc derived from our experiences. Our
| situatedness in the world is only relevant insofar as it
| entails the space of possible sensory experiences.
|
| Our sensory experience is the medium by which we learn about
| the external world. We learn of apples not because of the
| redness of the sensory experience, but because the pattern of
| red/not-red experience entails the shape of apples. Conscious
| experience provides the medium, modulations of which provide
| the information about features of the external world. It is
| analogous to how modulations of electromagnetic waves
| provides information about some distant information source.
| Understanding consciousness is an orthogonal matter to one's
| situatedness in the world, just like understanding
| electromagnetic waves is orthogonal to understanding the
| information source being modulated into them.
| function_seven wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. It feels wrong to contemplate that our
| consciousness might not be a magical independent agent with
| supernatural powers, but is rather an emergent property of
| complex-but-deterministic actions and reactions.
|
| Like it somehow diminishes us. Reduces us to cogs and levers
| and such.
|
| But I can't imagine how it could be otherwise, though. I'm
| still baffled by the existence of qualia, phenomenology, etc.
| Awareness. But bafflement on that front isn't a good reason to
| reject the possibility that the only thing that separates me
| from a computer is the level of complexity. Or the structure of
| the computation. Sometimes things are just weird.
| jocaal wrote:
| > emergent property of complex-but-deterministic actions and
| reactions
|
| I think you mean non-deterministic. The last century of
| physics was dominated by work showing how deterministic
| systems emerged from non-deterministic foundations. It seems
| that probability and statistics were the branches of maths
| behind everything. Who would have thought.
| function_seven wrote:
| Thanks. I did actually mean to use "deterministic", but
| only as it sits in opposition to "free will". Is there a
| better word for what I meant?
|
| Of course there is randomness as well. So, yeah, I should
| clarify: We don't impose upon the world any kind of
| "uncaused cause", even if it feels like we do. Everything
| we think and do is a direct result of some other action.
| Sometimes that action can trace its lineage to a random
| particle decay. (Maybe--ultimately--all of them can?) Maybe
| we even have a source of True Randomness inherent in our
| minds. But even so, that doesn't lend any support to the
| common notion of our minds and consciousnesses as being
| somehow separate from the physical world or the chains of
| information that run through everything.
| jocaal wrote:
| I get what you are saying. I was just thinking about the
| stochastic parrot analogy for consciousness, but I see
| your comment is more about there not being special sauce
| to conciousness. But hey, the fact that such behaviour
| can emerge from simple processes is still pretty damn
| cool.
| dale_glass wrote:
| I think "deterministic" is the more correct option.
|
| Yes, of course deep down there's unimaginable numbers of
| atoms randomly bumping around. But so far everything
| suggests that biological organisms do their damnedest to
| abstract that away and operate on a deterministic basis.
|
| Think like how you keep changing -- gaining and losing
| cells, changing chemical balance, and on the whole it takes
| a lot of damage, even brain damage, to produce measurable
| results.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| I don't think we're ever going to arrive at a satisfactory
| answer for where qualia comes from, for much the same reason
| it's impossible to test the quantum suicide hypothesis
| without actually putting yourself through it enough times to
| convince yourself statistically.
|
| The only "real" evidence of qualia you have is your own
| running stream of it; you can try to carefully pour yourself,
| like a jug of water, into the body of another, and if you go
| carefully enough you may even succeed to carry that qualia-
| stream with you. But it's also possible that you pour too
| quickly, or that you get bumped in the middle of the pouring,
| and poof - the qualia is just gone. You're left with a
| p-zombie.
|
| Or maybe not. Maybe it comes right back as soon as the
| transfer is done, like the final piece of a torrented movie.
| The important part is you won't know unless you try - and
| past success never guarantees future success. Maybe you just
| got lucky on the first pour.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Indeed our consciousness is an emergent property from a
| complex system, however the complexity of that system - the
| human brain - is almost unfathomably beyond the complexity of
| anything we might make in silicon now or in the foreseeable
| future.
|
| For example, it is possible to write down a (natural/whole)
| number that completely describes the state of an LLM - its
| connections and weights etc - for example by simply taking
| the memory space and converting into a number as a very long
| sequence of 1s and 0s. The number will be very big, but still
| indescribably smaller than a number that could perfectly
| describe the state of a human brain - not least as _that_
| number is likely to lie on the real line, or beyond, even if
| it was calculable. See Cantor for a discussion on the various
| infinities and their respective cardinalities.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Under the assumption that human brains are limited by our
| current understanding of physics, their state is finite -
| infinities are forbidden by definition.
|
| ( See the relationship between information theory and
| Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that results in the law
| of paraconservation of information :
| http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/entropy-more.html#sec-
| pha... )
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| LLMs don't create new information, they only compress existing
| complexity in their train and inference data sets.
|
| Humans definitely create new information. (Well, at least some
| humans do.)
| Gringham wrote:
| Do they though? Or do humans just combine things they have
| learned about the world?
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| How are you defining "create new information" ?
| Zambyte wrote:
| Lossy compression + interpolated decompression = new
| information
| wongarsu wrote:
| Do we?
|
| Humans can _observe_ new information, but that 's obviously
| not that unique. We can reason about existing information,
| creating new hypotheses, but that is arguably a compression
| of existing information. When we act on them and observe the
| effects they become information, but that's not _us_ creating
| the information (and LLMs can both act on the environment and
| have the effects fed back to their input to observe, so it 's
| not really unique).
|
| There is this whole field of art, but art is constantly going
| through a mental crisis whether anyone is creating anything
| new, or if it's all just derivations of what has come before.
| Same with dreams, which appear "novel" but might just be an
| artefact of our brain's process that compresses the
| experiences of the day.
| zhynn wrote:
| Life creates novelty. Humans are a member of that category,
| but all life is producing novelty.
|
| More information:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9
| chx wrote:
| let's say you wanted to count the number of coins on a
| table
|
| you organize them into piles of ten
|
| this created new information
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| More like you converted information you had about energy
| powering your muscles into that one - resulting in less
| total information for you in the end.
| chrbr wrote:
| I agree. A thought experiment I had recently:
|
| Let's say we could somehow train an LLM on all written and
| spoken language from the western Roman civilization (Republic
| + Western Empire, up until 476 AD/CE, just so I don't muddy
| the experiment with near-modern timelines). Would it, without
| novel information from humans, ever be able to spit out a
| correct predecessor of modern science like atomic theory?
| What about steam power, would that be feasible since Romans
| were toying with it? How far back do we have to go on the
| tech tree for such an LLM be able to "discover" something
| novel or generate useful new information?
|
| My thought is that the LLM would forever be "stuck" in the
| knowledge of the era it was trained in. Something in the
| complexity of human brains working together is what drives
| new information. We can continue training new LLMs with new
| information, and LLMs might be able to find new patterns in
| data that humans can't see and can augment our work, but the
| LLM's capability for novelty is stuck on a complexity
| treadmill, rooted in its training data.
|
| I don't view this ability of humans as some magic
| consciousness, just a system so complex to us right now that
| we can't fully understand or re-create it. If we're
| stochastic parrots, we seem to be ones that are magnitudes
| more powerful and unpredictable than current LLMs, and maybe
| even constructed in a way that our current technology path
| can't hope to replicate.
| davedx wrote:
| Those who don't understand a concept are doomed to reduce it to
| concepts they do understand.
|
| I'm currently reading I Am A Strange Loop, a pretty extensive
| dive into the nature of consciousness. I'm reserving final
| judgment on how much I agree with the author, but I find it
| laughable to claim consciousness itself is on the same level as
| an LLM.
| IanCal wrote:
| I disagree they're stochastic parrots, I find othello-gpt very
| convincing that these models can create world models and
| respond accordingly.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Did you teach your child to crawl? To laugh? To get excited?
| meindnoch wrote:
| That's a pretty bold statement, coming from someone with the
| subjective experience of consciousness.
| mo_42 wrote:
| > I firmly believe that LLMs are stochastic parrots and also
| that humans are too. To the point where I actually think even
| consciousness itself is a next-token predictor.
|
| I agree with the first sentence but not with the second one.
| Consciousness most probably does not arise from just a next-
| token predictor. At least not from an architecture similar to
| current LLMs.
|
| Both humans and LLMs basically learn to predict what happens
| next. However, LLMs only predict when we ask them. In contrast,
| humans predict something all the time. Even when we don't have
| any sensory input, our brain plays scenarios. Maybe
| consciousness arises because the result of our thinking is fed
| back as input. In that sense, we simulate a world that includes
| us acting and communicating in that world.
|
| Also noteworthy, the human brain handles a variety of sensory
| information and it's output is not only language. LLMs are
| restricted to only language. But to me it seems like it's
| enough for consciousness if we can give it the self-referential
| property.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| In order to predict what happens next we need to create a
| model of the world. We exist as part of the world so we need
| to model ourselves within it. We also have to model our mind
| for it to be complete, including the model of the world it
| contains. Oops, I just created an infinite loop.
| mo_42 wrote:
| Not necessarily infinite. It stops when there's reasonable
| accuracy. Similar to how we would implement this in
| software.
| esjeon wrote:
| > Anyone stuck in this mindset really is going to be hindered
| from making significant progress in developing utility from AI.
|
| I think this specific line shouts out that this is a typical
| tribalism comment. Once people identify themselves as a part of
| something, they start to translate the value of that something
| as their own worth. It's a cheap trick that even young kids
| play, but can LLM do this? No.
|
| Some might say multi-modal this, train on that-thing, but it
| already takes tens of thousands of the most advanced hardware
| and gigawatts of energy to push around numbers to reach where
| it is. TBH, I don't see it going anywhere, considering ROI on
| research will decrease as we dig deeper into the same paradigm.
|
| What I want to say is that today's LLM is certainly not the
| last stop of AI technology, but a lot of advocates tend to
| consider it as the final form of _intelligence_. It 's
| certainly a case of extrapolation, and I don't think LLM can do
| that.
| barbazoo wrote:
| People are not gonna like that they have to scroll so much here
| :)
| ale42 wrote:
| Usually I don't, but this one I enjoyed it... also because,
| it's just pure scrolling, no strange animations that change
| while you scroll.
| Mattasher wrote:
| Humans have a long history of comparing ourselves, and the
| universe, to our latest technological advancement. We used to be
| glorified clocks (as was the universe), then we were automatons,
| then computers, then NPC's, and now AI's (in particular LLM's).
|
| Which BTW I don't think is a completely absurd comparison, see
| https://mattasher.substack.com/p/ais-killer-app
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I always enjoyed the stories of 'clock work' people (robots).
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Each successive comparison is likely getting closer and closer
| to the truth.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Or each successive comparison is just compounding and
| reiterating the same underlying assumption (and potentially
| the same mistake) whether it's true or not.
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| The jump to 'information processing machines' seems far
| more correct than anything that came before, I'm curious
| how you would argue against that? Yes, there are more
| modern and other interesting theories (e.g. predictive
| coding) but they seem much closer to cognitive psychology
| than say, the human brain working like a clock.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Very curious to know what the telos of "truth" is here for
| you? A comparison is a comparison, it can get no more "true."
| If you want to say: the terms of the comparisons seem to
| verge towards identity, then you aren't really talking about
| the same thing anymore. Further, you would need to assert
| that our conceptions of ourselves have remained static
| throughout the whole ordeal (pretty tough to defend), and you
| would also need to put forward a pretty crude idea of
| technological determinism (extremely tough to defend).
|
| Its way more productive and way less woo-woo to understand
| that humans have a certain tendency towards comparison, and
| we tend to create things that reflect our current values and
| conceptions of ourselves. And that "technological progress"
| is not a straight line, but a labyrinthine route that traces
| societal conceptions and priorities.
|
| The desire for the llm to be like us is probably more
| realistically our desire to be like the llm!
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Except LLM's are built on neural networks. That are based on
| how neurons work. The first tech that actually copies aspects
| of us.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| _sigh_
|
| Neural networks are not based on how neurons work. They do
| not copy aspects of us. They call them neural networks
| because they are sort of conceptually like networks of
| neurons in the brain but they're so different as to make
| false the statement that they are based on neurons.
| Terr_ wrote:
| *brandishes crutches*
|
| "Behold! The Mechanical Leg! The first technology that
| actually copies aspects of our very selves! Think of what
| wonders of self-discovery it shall reveal!" :p
|
| P.S.: "My god, it is stronger in compression rather than
| shear-stresses, how eerily similar to real legs! We're on
| to something here!"
| robwwilliams wrote:
| If you study retinal synaptic circuitry you will not sigh
| so heavily and you will in fact see striking homologies
| with hardware neural networks, including feedback between
| layers and discretized (action potential) outputs via the
| optic nerve.
|
| I recommend reading Synaptic Organization of the Brain or
| getting into if you are brave, the primary literature on
| retinal processing of visual input.
| smokel wrote:
| The book "The Synaptic Organization of the Brain" appears
| to be from 2003. Is it still relevant, or is there
| perhaps a more recent book worth checking out?
| martindbp wrote:
| Sigh... Everyone knows artificial neurons are not like
| biological neurons. The network is the important part,
| which really is analogous to the brain, while what came
| before (SVMs and random forests) are nothing like it.
| mecsred wrote:
| Sigh... Every man knows the mechanisms of the mind are
| yet unlike the cogs and pinions of clockwork. It remains
| the machinery, the relation of spring and escapement,
| that is most relevant. Hitherto in human history, I
| think, such structure has not been described.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Doesn't really matter to modern CS, but Rosenblatt's
| original perceptron paper is a good read on this. ANNs were
| specifically inspired by Natural NNs and there were many
| attempts to build ANNs using models of how the human brain
| works, specifically down to the neuron.
| dekhn wrote:
| I;m sure you know but one of the best ways to get neuro
| folks worked up is to say anything about neural networks
| being anything like neurons in brains.
|
| (IMHO, Rosenblatt is an underappreciated genius; he had a
| working shallow computer vision hardware computer long
| before people even appreciated what an accomplishment
| that was. The hardware was fascinating- literally self-
| turning potentiometer knobs to update weights.
| Tallain wrote:
| Not just technological advancements; we have a history of
| comparing ourselves to that which surrounds us, is relatively
| ubiquitous, and easily comprehended by others when using the
| metaphor. Today it's this steady march of technological
| advancement, but read any older work of philosophy and you will
| see our selves (particularly, our minods) compared to monarchs,
| cities, aqueducts.[1]
|
| I point this out because I think the idea of comparing
| ourselves to recent tech is more about using the technology as
| a metaphor for self, and it's worth incorporating the other
| ways we have done so historically for context.
|
| [1]: https://online.ucpress.edu/SLA/article/2/4/542/83344/The-
| Bra...
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Step A: build a machine which reflects a reduced and simplified
| model of how some part of a human works
|
| Step B: turn it on its head "the human brain is nothing more
| than... <insert machine here.>"
|
| It's a bit tautological.
|
| The worry is that there's a Step C: Humans actually start to
| behave as simple as said machine.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Stochastic parrot was coined by bender, gebru, et al, but it was
| probably "borrowed" from Regina Rini's "statistical parrot",
| coined 6 months before stochastic parrots hit the scene.
|
| https://dailynous.com/2020/07/30/philosophers-gpt-3/#rini
| readams wrote:
| I suspect people will argue about whether AIs are truly conscious
| or just stochastic parrots even as all human-dominated tasks are
| replaced by AIs.
|
| The AIs will be creating masterwork art and literature
| personalized for each person better than anything Shakespeare
| ever wrote or Michaelangelo ever sculpted, but we'll console
| ourselves that at least we're _really_ conscious and they're just
| stochastic parrots.
| 101008 wrote:
| Masterwork is not independent of its time, context, etc. It's
| hard to say AI will be creating masterwork, especially when
| focused for each person.
| lancesells wrote:
| > The AIs will be creating masterwork art and literature
| personalized for each person better than anything Shakespeare
| ever wrote or Michaelangelo ever sculpted
|
| I don't think it will. Art is truth and AI is a golem
| replicating humanity.
| esafak wrote:
| It depends on what you value in art. Some value the only
| artifact per se; others the story around it. Unfortunately, I
| don't see too many complaints that image generators have no
| human artist behind them.
| cperciva wrote:
| When my toddler was first learning to talk, we had some pictures
| of felines hanging on the walls; some were cats and others were
| kittens.
|
| She quickly generalized; henceforth, both of them were "catten".
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Good toddler
| djmips wrote:
| My toddler understood that places to buy things were called
| stores and understood eating - so restaurants were deemed
| 'eating stores'. And we just went with that for a long time and
| now they are grown we still call them eating stores for fun
| sometimes. :)
| jddj wrote:
| Very nice.
|
| I don't personally follow her all the way to some of those
| conclusions but the delivery was awesome
| xianshou wrote:
| Pour one out for the decline of human exceptionalism! Once you
| get material-reductionist enough and accept yourself as a pure
| function of genetics, environment, past experience, and chance,
| this conclusion becomes inevitable. I also expect it to be the
| standard within a decade, with AI-human parity of capabilities as
| the key driver.
| dekhn wrote:
| We'll see! I came to this conclusion a long time ago but at the
| same time I do subjectively experience consciousness, which in
| itself is something a mystery in the material-reductionist
| philosophy.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| I hear this a lot, but is it really a mystery/incompatible
| with materialism? Is there a reason consciousness couldn't be
| what it feels like to be a certain type of computation? I
| don't see why we would need something immaterial or some
| undiscovered material component to explain it.
| kaibee wrote:
| Well the undiscovered part is why it should feel like
| anything at all. And this is definitely relevant because
| consciousness clearly exists enough that we exert physical
| force about it, so its gotta be somewhere in physics. But
| where?
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Why does it need to be in physics? What would that look
| like, a Qualia Boson? It could be an emergent property
| like life itself. Physics doesn't "explain" life, it
| explains the physical mechanisms behind the chemical
| interactions that ultimately produce life by virtue of
| self-replicating patterns spreading and mutating. There
| is no Life is physics, and yet we see it all around it
| because it emerges as a complex result of fundamental
| rules. My expectation is that experience is emergent from
| computation that controls an agent and models the world
| around that agent, and that experience isn't a binary. A
| tree is more aware than a rock, an ant more than a tree,
| a squirrel more than an ant, and so on until you reach
| humans, but there may not be any real change in kind as
| the conditions for experience become more developed.
|
| I guess my real point is that I don't view experience or
| consciousness as something special or exceptional. My
| guess is that over time we come to understand how the
| brain works better and better but never find anything
| that definitively explains consciousness because it's
| totally subjective and immeasurable. We eventually
| produce computers complex enough to behave totally
| convincingly human, and they will claim to be conscious,
| maybe even be granted personhood, but we'll never
| actually know for sure if they experience the world, just
| like we don't know that other humans do.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Toward the end of Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach there
| is a simple and plausible recursive attentional
| explanation, but without any serious neuroscience. The
| thalamo-cortico-thalamic system is a massively recursive
| CNS system. Ray Guillery's biok The Brain As A Tool is a
| good introduction to the relevant neuroscience with a hat
| tip to consciousness written long after GEB.
| dekhn wrote:
| I mean, if you're a compatibilist, there's no mystery. In
| that model, we live in a causally deterministic universe
| but still have free will. I would say instead "the
| _subjective experience of consciousness_ is an _emergent
| property_ of _complex systems with certain properties_ ". I
| guess that's consistent with "the experience of
| consciousness is the feeling of a certain type of
| computation".
|
| Personally these sorts of things don't really matter to me-
| I don't really care if other people are conscious, and I
| don't think I could prove it either way- I just assume
| other people are conscious, and that we can make computers
| that are conscious.
|
| And that's exactly what I'm pushing for: ML that passes
| every Turing-style test that we can come up with. Because,
| as they say "if you can't tell, does it really matter?"
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Why is consciousness computation? What does it even mean to
| say something feels like being "a type of computation"?
|
| The concept of consciousness is wildly more expansive and
| diverse than computation, rather than the other way around.
| A strict materialist account or "explanation" of
| consciousness seems to just end up a category error.
|
| I take it as no surprise that a website devoted to the
| computers and software often _insists_ that this is the
| only way to look at it, but there are entire philosophical
| movements that have developed fascinating accounts of
| consciousness that are far from strict materialism, nor are
| they "spiritual" or religious which is a common rejoinder
| by materialists, an example is the implications of Ludwig
| Wittgenstein's work from _Philosophical Investigations_ and
| his analysis of language. And even in neuroscience there is
| far from complete agreement on the topic at all.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| It makes perfect sense if you can disprove your own existence
| jancsika wrote:
| I'm not convinced that this material-reductionist view wouldn't
| just be functionally equivalent to the way a majority of
| citizens live their lives currently.
|
| Now: a chance encounter with someone of a different faith leads
| a citizen to respect the religious freedom of others in the
| realm of self-determination.
|
| Future: a young hacker's formative experience leads to the idea
| that citizens should have the basic right to change out their
| device's recommendation engine with a random number generator
| at will.
|
| Those future humans will still think of themselves as
| exceptional because the AI tools will have developed right
| alongside the current human-exceptionalist ideology.
|
| Kinda like those old conservative couples I see in the South
| where the man is ostensibly the story teller and head of
| household. But if you listen long enough you notice his wife is
| whispering nearly every detail of importance to help him
| maintain coherence.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _But he could understand so much more than he could say. If you
| asked him to point to the vacuum cleaner, he would._
|
| Perhaps worth noting that it is possible to teach infants (often
| starting at around 9 months) sign language so that they can more
| easily signal their desires.
|
| Some priority recommended words would probably be:
|
| * hungry/more
|
| * enough/all done (for when they're full)
|
| * drink (perhaps both milk/formula and water+ gestures)
|
| See:
|
| * https://babysignlanguage.com/chart/
|
| * https://www.thebump.com/a/how-to-teach-baby-sign-language
|
| These are not (AFAICT) 'special' symbols for babies, but the
| regular ASL gestures for the work in question. If you're not
| native English-speaking you'd look up the gestures in your
| specific region/language's sign language:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sign_languages
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language
|
| + Another handy trick I've run across: have different coloured
| containers for milk and water, and consistently put the same
| contents in each one. That way the infant learns to grab a
| particular colour depending on what they're feeling like.
| yojo wrote:
| FWIW, I tried this with both my sons. They both started using
| the gestures the same day they started actually talking :-/
|
| I have friends who had much more success with it, but the value
| will largely depend on your child's relative developmental
| strengths. A friend's son with autism got literally years'
| benefit out of the gestures before verbal speech caught up.
| kuchenbecker wrote:
| My kids both picked it up, but my younger was similar. Being
| able to sign "please" and "all done" helps anyway because
| "eeess" and "a ya" are what she actually says.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _FWIW, I tried this with both my sons. They both started
| using the gestures the same day they started actually talking
| :- /_
|
| Could still useful: instead of shouting across the playground
| on whether they have to go potty you can simply make the
| gesture with minimal embarrassment. :)
| toast0 wrote:
| Yeah, a handful of signs is useful for adults in many
| situations where voice comms don't work. And, at least in
| my circles, there's a small shared vocabulary of signs that
| there's a good chance will work. Potty, ouch, sleep, eat,
| maybe a couple more.
| vel0city wrote:
| I also usually had success with signs when the child was
| otherwise too emotional to verbalize their desire. They're
| really upset and crying hard so it is hard to talk
| especially when talking clearly is already a challenge, but
| signing "milk" or "eat" or "hurt" or "more" can come
| through easily.
| petsfed wrote:
| Tread carefully: the sign for poop looks close enough to a
| crude gesture (cruder than just shouting "poop" at a
| playground, as it turns out) that an ignorant bystander
| might take it significantly wrongly.
| thealfreds wrote:
| Same with my nephew. He also has autism and the first thing
| the speech therapist did when he was 3 was teach him simple
| sign language. It became such a great catalyst for
| communication. He's nowhere near his his age (now 6)
| developmentally but within ~6 weeks he went from completely
| non-verbal to actually vocalizing the simple words he learned
| the sign language for.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| There's probably variation among babies. One of my nephews
| would examine his feet if you asked them where are his shoes,
| even before walking. He got so proficient with signs that it
| delayed talking; he preferred signaling and grunting :/
| brainbag wrote:
| I had heard about this before my son was born. We didn't try to
| teach him anything, anytime we remembered (which was sporadic)
| we just used the gestures when talking to him. I was amazed at
| how quickly he picked up on it, and he was able to communicate
| his needs to us months before he was able to verbalize.
|
| It took very minimal effort on our part, and was very rewarding
| for him; certainly a lot better than him crying with the hope
| that we could guess what he wanted. Definitely recommended for
| any new parents.
|
| The best moment was when he was sitting on the floor, and
| looked up at his mom and made the "together" sign, it was heart
| melting.
| esafak wrote:
| In other words, you can invent your own sign language because
| your child won't need to use it with other people.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Every kid is different. YMMV. We did some ASL gestures/words
| with our daughter and it worked very well. I'd encourage
| everyone to at least give it a try. She took to it and was
| "talking" to us (mainly "hungry" and "milk", but we got
| "enough" sometimes too) pretty quickly.
|
| I can't remember exact ages and timeframes-- that time of my
| life is "blurry". I wish I could remember all the gestures we
| used. (The only ones I can remember now are "milk", "apple",
| and "thank you".) As she became verbal she quickly transitioned
| away from them.
| pamelafox wrote:
| My toddler learnt "more" and now uses it to get me to
| repeatedly sing the same song OVER AND OVER again. They haven't
| used the word yet, though they do speak other words.
|
| I wish I'd learnt sign language before having kids so I just
| already knew how to do it, it's so cool. Props to the Ms.
| Rachel videos for including so many signs.
| Izkata wrote:
| My mom taught us some words somewhere around 5-8 years old, so
| we could signal things to each other instead of interrupting
| conversations. The three in particular I remember are "hungry",
| "bored", and "thank you" (so she could remind us to say it
| without the other person realizing).
| petsfed wrote:
| One of the funniest interactions I had with my eldest daughter
| was the day we baked cookies together, when she not yet 2. She
| was verbalizing a lot, but also signing "milk" and "more" quite
| a bit. And when she bit into her very first chocolate chip
| cookie of her entire life, she immediately signed "more" and
| said as much _through_ the mouthful of cookie.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Nice article, great presentation.
|
| However, it's a bit annoying that the focus of the AI anxiety is
| how AI is replacing us and the resolution is that we embrace our
| humanity. Fair enough, but at least to me the main focus in my AI
| anxiety is that it will take my job - honestly don't really care
| about it doing my shitty art.
| nsfmc wrote:
| here's another piece in the issue that addresses your concern
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-consid...
| ryandrake wrote:
| More specifically, I think we're worried about AI taking our
| _incomes_ , not our jobs. I would love it if an AI could do my
| entire job for me, and I just sat there collecting the income
| while the AI did all the "job" part, but we know from history
| (robotics) that this is not what happens. The owners of the
| robots (soon, AI) keep all the income and the job goes away.
|
| An enlightened Humanity could solve this by separating the
| income from the job, but we live in a Malthusian Darwinian
| world where growth is paramount, "enough" does not exist, and
| we all have to justify and earn our living.
| ketzo wrote:
| I mean, I definitely hear (and feel) a lot of worry about AI
| taking away work that we find meaningful and interesting to
| do, outside of the pure money question.
|
| I really like programming to fix things. Even if I weren't
| paid for it, even if I were to win the lottery, I would want
| to write software that solved problems for people. It is a
| nice way to spend my days, and I love feeling useful when it
| works.
|
| I would be very bummed - perhaps existentially so - if there
| were no _practical_ reason ever to write software again.
|
| And I know the same is true for many artists, writers,
| lawyers, and so on.
| magneticnorth wrote:
| At some point someone said to me, "How badly did we fuck up
| as a society that robots taking all our jobs is a bad thing."
|
| And I think about that a lot.
| djmips wrote:
| Your job is your art.
| BD103 wrote:
| Ignoring the topic of the article, the artwork and design was
| fantastically done! Props to whoever designed it :)
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Toddlers can learn, LLM "learning" is very limited (fixed-size
| context and expensive fine-tuning)
| xigency wrote:
| Regarding dismissals of LLM's on 'technical' grounds:
|
| Consciousness is first a word and second a concept. And it's a
| word that ChatGPT or Llama can use in an English sentence better
| than billions of humans worldwide. The software folks have made
| even more progress than sociologists, psychologists and
| neuroscientists to be able to create an artificial language
| cortex before we understand our biological mind comprehensively.
|
| If you wait until conscious sentient AI is here to make your
| opinions known about the implications and correct policy
| decisions, you will already be too late to have an input. ChatGPT
| can already tell you a lot about itself (showing awareness) and
| will gladly walk you through its "thinking" if you ask politely.
| Given that it contains a huge amount of data about Homo sapiens
| and its ability to emulate intelligent conversation, you could
| even call it Sapient.
|
| Having any kind of semantic argument over this is futile because
| a character AI that is hypnotized to think it is conscious, self-
| aware and sentient in its emulation of feelings and emotion would
| destroy most people in a semantics debate.
|
| The field of philosophy is already ripe with ideas from hundreds
| of years ago that an artificial intelligence can use against
| people in debates of free will, self-determination and the nature
| of existence. This isn't the battle to pick.
| dsign wrote:
| Exactly. To that I'm going to add that the blood of our
| civilization is culture (sciences, technology, arts,
| traditions). The moment there is something better at it than
| humans, it's our "horse-moment".
| Retr0id wrote:
| This is a really beautiful article, and while there are certainly
| fundamental differences between how a toddler thinks and learns,
| and how an LLM "thinks", I don't think we should get too
| comfortable with those differences.
|
| Every time I say to myself "AI is no big deal because it can't do
| X", some time later someone comes along and makes an AI that does
| X.
| alexwebb2 wrote:
| There's a well-documented concept called "God of the gaps"
| where any phenomenon humans don't understand at the time is
| attributed to a divine entity.
|
| Over time, as the gaps in human knowledge get filled, the god
| "shrinks" - it becomes less expansive, less powerful, less
| directly involved in human affairs. The definition changes.
|
| It's fascinating to watch the same thing happen with human
| exceptionalism - so many cries of "but AI can't do <thing
| that's rapidly approaching>". It's "human of the gaps", and
| those gaps are rapidly closing.
| sickcodebruh wrote:
| One of my favorite experiences from my daughter's earliest years
| was the realization that she was able to think about, describe,
| and deliberately do things much earlier than I realized. More
| plainly: once I recognized she was doing something deliberately,
| I often went back and realized she had been doing that same thing
| for days or weeks prior. We encountered this a lot with words but
| also physical abilities, like figuring out how to make her
| BabyBjorn bouncer move. We had a policy of talking to her like
| she understood on the off-chance that she could and just couldn't
| communicate it. She just turned 5 and continues to surprise us
| with the complexity of her inner world.
| marktangotango wrote:
| We did this, and I'd add that repeating what they say back to
| them so they get that feedback is important too. It's startling
| to see the difference between our kids and their class mates,
| who's parents don't talk them (I know this from observing at
| the countless birthday parties, school events, and sports
| events). Talking to kids is like watering flower, they bloom
| into beautiful beings.
| raytopia wrote:
| Really sweet story.
| dekhn wrote:
| I think the position of Gebru, et al, can best be expressed as a
| form of "human exceptionalism". As a teenager, my english teacher
| shared this writing by Faulkner, which he delivered as his Nobel
| Prize speech. I complained because the writing completely ignores
| the laws of thermodynamics about the end of the universe.
|
| """I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and
| faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last
| red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one
| more sound: that of man's puny, inexhaustible, voice still
| talking! ...not simply because man alone among creatures has an
| inexhaustible voice, but because man has a soul, a spirit capable
| of compassion, sacrifice and endurance."""
| dekhn wrote:
| If you wonder about toddlers, wait til you have teenagers.
|
| In fact I've observed (after working with a number of world-class
| ML researchers) that having children is the one thing that
| convinces ML people that learning is both much easier and much
| harder than what they do in computers.
| calf wrote:
| I think it's reductivism to assume that neural networks cannot
| emergently support/implement a non-stochastic computational model
| capable of explicit logical reasoning.
|
| We already have an instance of emergent logic. Animals engage in
| logical reasoning. Corollary, humans and toddlers are not merely
| super-autocompletes or stochastic parrots.
|
| It has nothing to do with "sensory embodiment" and/or "personal
| agency" arguments like in the article. Nor the clever solipsism
| and reductivism of "my mind is just random statistics of neural
| firing". It's about finding out what the models of computation
| actually are.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Paraphrasing and summarizing parts of this article,
| https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/artic...
|
| Some ~72 years ago in 1951, Claude Shannon released his
| "Prediction and Entropy of Printed English", an extremely
| fascinating read now.
|
| The paper begins with a game. Claude pulls a book down from the
| shelf, concealing the title in the process. After selecting a
| passage at random, he challenges his wife, Mary to guess its
| contents letter by letter. The space between words will count as
| a twenty-seventh symbol in the set. If Mary fails to guess a
| letter correctly, Claude promises to supply the right one so that
| the game can continue.
|
| In some cases, a corrected mistake allows her to fill in the
| remainder of the word; elsewhere a few letters unlock a phrase.
| All in all, she guesses 89 of 129 possible letters correctly--69
| percent accuracy.
|
| Discovery 1: It illustrated, in the first place, that a
| proficient speaker of a language possesses an "enormous" but
| implicit knowledge of the statistics of that language. Shannon
| would have us see that we make similar calculations regularly in
| everyday life--such as when we "fill in missing or incorrect
| letters in proof-reading" or "complete an unfinished phrase in
| conversation." As we speak, read, and write, we are regularly
| engaged in predication games.
|
| Discovery 2: Perhaps the most striking of all, Claude argues that
| that a complete text and the subsequent "reduced text" consisting
| of letters and dashes "actually...contain the same information"
| under certain conditions. How?? (Surely, the first line contains
| more information!).The answer depends on the peculiar notion
| about information that Shannon had hatched in his 1948 paper "A
| Mathematical Theory of Communication" (hereafter "MTC"), the
| founding charter of information theory.
|
| He argues that transfer of a message's components, rather than
| its "meaning", should be the focus for the engineer. You ought to
| be agnostic about a message's "meaning" (or "semantic aspects").
| The message could be nonsense, and the engineer's problem--to
| transfer its components faithfully--would be the same.
|
| a highly predictable message contains less information than an
| unpredictable one. More information is at stake in ("villapleach,
| vollapluck") than in ("Twinkle, twinkle").
|
| Does "Flinkle, fli- - - -" really contain less information than
| "Flinkle, flinkle" ?
|
| Shannon concludes then that the complete text and the "reduced
| text" are equivalent in information content under certain
| conditions because predictable letters become redundant in
| information transfer.
|
| Fueled by this, Claude then proposes an illuminating thought
| experiment: Imagine that Mary has a truly identical twin (call
| her "Martha"). If we supply Martha with the "reduced text," she
| should be able to recreate the entirety of Chandler's passage,
| since she possesses the same statistical knowledge of English as
| Mary. Martha would make Mary's guesses in reverse.
|
| Of course, Shannon admitted, there are no "mathematically
| identical twins" to be found, _but_ and here 's the reveal, "we
| do have mathematically identical computing machines."
|
| Those machines could be given a model for making informed
| predictions about letters, words, maybe larger phrases and
| messages. In one fell swoop, Shannon had demonstrated that
| language use has a statistical side, that languages are, in turn,
| predictable, and that computers too can play the prediction game.
| birdman3131 wrote:
| Interesting article. However it becomes very close to unreadable
| just after the cliffhanger. Given that they use the word vertigo
| around the same point it all straightens back up I assume it is
| an explicit choice but it feels like a very bad choice for
| anybody with any sort of reading disorder. Very wavy lines of
| text along with side by side paragraphs with little to
| differentiate them from each other.
| westurner wrote:
| Language acquisition > See also:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition
|
| Phonological development:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_development
|
| Imitation > Child development:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imitation#Child_development
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33800104 :
|
| > _" The Everyday Parenting Toolkit: The Kazdin Method for Easy,
| Step-by-Step, Lasting Change for You and Your Child"
| https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/g/11h7dr5mm6&hl=en-US&q... _
|
| > _" Everyday Parenting: The ABCs of Child Rearing" (Kazdin,
| Yale,) https://www.coursera.org/learn/everyday-parenting _
|
| > _Re: Effective praise and Validating parenting_ [and parroting]
| gumballindie wrote:
| Probably, if they suffer from developmental issues. People are
| anything but, no matter how much deities of the gullible want to
| make you think they are.
| johnea wrote:
| Wow, it really seems a trend that people are unable to
| understand/contemplate reality outside of an internet meme.
|
| Beleive it or not, reality exists outside of anything you ever
| read in a whitepaper...
| dsQTbR7Y5mRHnZv wrote:
| https://archive.is/AUOPt
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