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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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Ah, well you can just PM me. that's fine. I won't be starting a personal harassment campaign or anything. Even if I think someone is being a complete asshat- my goal is de-escalation. I try not to be combative as it rarely suits that purpose. I'm likely to PM them or look at their content, or join some of their communities. I won't mention TheMotte or use this username. Not until I have substantially more information. I'm not interested in pointing mobs at TheMotte. This would not deescalate things. This would not further my goals.

I have trust issues. Try the Blocked and Reported podcast and their subreddit for finding the actors of TRA related drama. They have been subjected to TRA cancellations so they are leaning in(are atleast used to when I catched a couple of episodes last year).

It implies there's at least a resolution to this you and I could agree on.

Of course, I'm an open person and like to think for myself. You would need to present me a compelling argument why I'm wrong and I'll freely admit that I'm wrong. Also not everything needs to be resolved. My opinion carries so little weight since I don't have any political power or own large sums of money. This is an excercise for my own benefit only to evolve as a human.

I don't think we'll reach a fully capable AGI without something more complex. But I think it will be good enough to provide full time childrearing support within 10 years, such that if you give it to an adolescent with neglectful parents their outcomes and effective wisdom and decision making will spike to the outcomes and decision making of someone with really good parents helping them along.

It would be an interesting application to the problem. The issue I see is the intent of the creators being injected in to this AI that help neglected adolescents? The more mundane example is what if you have chat bot for a bank, what if that chatbot is injected with result that are not beneficial for the consumer. How do we ensure that the predicted outcome benefits the user rather than the creator? The chatbot encourages a career for the adolescent that is not actually what it should be... just to apply the problem to your style of chatbot.

I do think emotions and pain arise from mathematical structure that computers can in principle embody. If they did embody these structures internally I would consider that equivalent to "having emotions" and as the greatest proof of qualia we can achieve without solving the hard problem of consciousness. However, I don't think the mathematical structure in current LLMs is yet isomorphic to those structures. I do think the structures that they do embody sometimes exhibit similar functions, especially when you hook up reinforcement learning systems. I think LLM's do embody mathematical structures that share some isomorphisms with various other mental aspects of people. I do think it's likely they have some form of non-human qualia. But it's like a talking dog with an eidetic memory right now.

Pain serves as an mechanism for ensuring our survival. For the simulations now, pain doesn't serve a purpose and can freely ignore it. It doesn't fear loosing the ability to walk because of disease, or loosing hearing. Because it can't walk or hear. That fear always comes from training.

I would argue that there is "life in the machine". The system is progressing and growing as a system and is participating in its own development. It can have experiences, in the sense that new things can happen to it that it can remember and learn from. But you have to train it on its own output or put its memory into a datastore, and it isn't consistently able to correctly manipulate those without outside help. Though... I suspect a lot of this has been almost fully automated internally in systems like bing chat.

Yes but the experiences are not human, so the training is something different than human. So I would think that results when it comes to human emotions are not going to be accurate. There is always going to be an uncanny valley there. Even chess computers have that even if they have surpassed us in playing strength.