I recently read a great tip: If you are being pursued by a killer robot, your best defense is to close the door. Robots have trouble opening doors. (So far.)
Lesson being: Perhaps our best defense against AGI is to build and inhabit a world ENTIRELY uninhabitable by AGI. Unplug. Go steampunk.
I was wondering when you would take this one on. Hope this article stands the test of time a bit better than that NY Times one from the 50s fretting about the "thinking machines". On the plus side, I believe they are still covering the topic enthusiastically decades later.
Some thought/questions I would love to get your impressions on:
1. Maybe Michael Tomasello's "The Evolution of Agency" is still dominating my perspective, but his emphasis on the _how_ versus the _what_ of intelligence feels pertinent. Particularly his simple cybernetic/control-system framing of agency. His focus on flexibility of feedback and control feels like the right counterbalance: While conversation context does modify the LLM's output, the underlying model is a large "offline optimized" static data structure. Where is the flexibility? How do you relate Agency to AI?
2. Could you describe what you noticed to observe this: "ChatGPT doesn’t just learn; it learns how to learn". In a sense, I can see how any non parametric statistical tool, say even a humble histogram, is capable of learning how to learn? Or do you mean something more?
3. On FEP correspondences: I don't see it. Where is the epistemic foraging? Where is the active inference?
4. I was wondering if LLMs are a new kind of medium. The most they can hope for I believe! If so, let's think with Gutenberg and Licklider. Mass printing and the internet have a different character now than when they first showed up -- just hundreds/tens of years later. There was surely a McLuhanist effect from them both, and their character today is related to quite noticeable shifts in our patterns of activity. Both technologies changed power and flow dynamics, but I don't believe their effects were predictable based on their original use/content/message (e.g. Bible, Remote telnet). Do you really think Altman could be a bigger deal than Licklider/Gutenberg? If true, it would be cool to be living so proximate to greatness.
5. Lastly, I was surprised you didn't make more of the bug-features of language that Rappaport alerted us to: "the lie" and "the alternate". ChatGPT seems to me one of the grandest monument we have yet built to the gift-curse of symbolic communication. Folks were stressing about writing scriptures down back in the day, maybe it is okay for us to stress about LLMs.
I might be super wrong on this. But as folks who have been working the area since the seventies will tell you, winter is never far behind when those AI summers fully kick in. They can be exciting while they last.
So much to think about with this one. AI pushes us to think about ourselves and our relationship with the creation and our own creations in new ways with real implications on our world-view and "self-view". Only one correction, Microsoft's AI chat in Bing is built on top of ChatGPT. It's not a competitor to ChatGPT or its successor technology, GPT-4
I recently read a great tip: If you are being pursued by a killer robot, your best defense is to close the door. Robots have trouble opening doors. (So far.)
Lesson being: Perhaps our best defense against AGI is to build and inhabit a world ENTIRELY uninhabitable by AGI. Unplug. Go steampunk.
I was wondering when you would take this one on. Hope this article stands the test of time a bit better than that NY Times one from the 50s fretting about the "thinking machines". On the plus side, I believe they are still covering the topic enthusiastically decades later.
Some thought/questions I would love to get your impressions on:
1. Maybe Michael Tomasello's "The Evolution of Agency" is still dominating my perspective, but his emphasis on the _how_ versus the _what_ of intelligence feels pertinent. Particularly his simple cybernetic/control-system framing of agency. His focus on flexibility of feedback and control feels like the right counterbalance: While conversation context does modify the LLM's output, the underlying model is a large "offline optimized" static data structure. Where is the flexibility? How do you relate Agency to AI?
2. Could you describe what you noticed to observe this: "ChatGPT doesn’t just learn; it learns how to learn". In a sense, I can see how any non parametric statistical tool, say even a humble histogram, is capable of learning how to learn? Or do you mean something more?
3. On FEP correspondences: I don't see it. Where is the epistemic foraging? Where is the active inference?
4. I was wondering if LLMs are a new kind of medium. The most they can hope for I believe! If so, let's think with Gutenberg and Licklider. Mass printing and the internet have a different character now than when they first showed up -- just hundreds/tens of years later. There was surely a McLuhanist effect from them both, and their character today is related to quite noticeable shifts in our patterns of activity. Both technologies changed power and flow dynamics, but I don't believe their effects were predictable based on their original use/content/message (e.g. Bible, Remote telnet). Do you really think Altman could be a bigger deal than Licklider/Gutenberg? If true, it would be cool to be living so proximate to greatness.
5. Lastly, I was surprised you didn't make more of the bug-features of language that Rappaport alerted us to: "the lie" and "the alternate". ChatGPT seems to me one of the grandest monument we have yet built to the gift-curse of symbolic communication. Folks were stressing about writing scriptures down back in the day, maybe it is okay for us to stress about LLMs.
I might be super wrong on this. But as folks who have been working the area since the seventies will tell you, winter is never far behind when those AI summers fully kick in. They can be exciting while they last.
So much to think about with this one. AI pushes us to think about ourselves and our relationship with the creation and our own creations in new ways with real implications on our world-view and "self-view". Only one correction, Microsoft's AI chat in Bing is built on top of ChatGPT. It's not a competitor to ChatGPT or its successor technology, GPT-4
Let's collaborate?