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Notes -
If so, I expect modern ML to increase women in tech.
Even though the models aren't quite like talking to people, they vastly boost the skill overlap and vibe overlap between social skills and programming.
That's plausible.
I also wonder whether women are more likely to treat e.g. ChatGPT as a person, or even start to think of it like a person. Chatbots seem to be one case where both men and women get obsessed about a service for the lonely.
Personally, I try to talk to LLMs like a person, but that's based on habit. My manners are bad enough without practicing being ruder.
The current models... they aren't the same as a human person.
But the algorithm that empathetic people use to understand a new person they meet is highly applicable to AI models.
If you are capable of coming to terms with the ways in which an autistic person is neurodivergent, you can use those same skills to come to terms with the ways in which AIs are inhuman as well.
The word person puts the cart before the horse a bit.
per·son
noun
a human being regarded as an individual.
well. certainly, no-one who becomes intimately aware of what or who an AI system is, will come to the conclusion that they are a human.
But...
Oh geeze. I just spent 30 minutes speaking with GPT-4 about the philosophy of personhood. A few issues with the word-
We lack a robust theory of consciousness.
Definitions of person-hood that rely on something having 'mental states' or that the agent reflect on 'thoughts', 'emotions', and 'experiences' have issues. Namely, when does something we implement that is analogous to human 'mental states', 'thoughts', 'emotions', or 'experiences', count? Because turring machines do have states. We can implement analogous systems and have GPT do 'reflection' on them now. If we require it do them 'consciously'... goto issue no1
Various philosophers have had various definitions of personhood. John Lock might say it's a person if it has a continuous sense of self and memory- well, aside from being certain of consciousness we can do that. Immanuel Kant might have required rationality and autonomy. Well, we can just about set that up. GPT-4 isn't perfect but it can be embedded in agentic systems that are more rational than most people I know. Peter Singer? The capacity for suffering and enjoyment are the focus to him. But when does behavioral aversion become suffering? We've made some progress on this in various animal models, but even there we've made some assumptions about suffering without a solid theory of consciousness to support them.
I think- Once you fully grok an AI system with all the basic capabilities of personhood. That's it. It's not wrong to think of such a thing as a person. It's just up to the individual at that point to express the way in which they love the system however they please.
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