HN user
One surprising thing is that my AirPods Pro could obviously deliver my voice to it quite clearly, even with the hoover going! I've never tested them under those conditions and assumed it wouldn't work.
I've had a few extended discussions on a bit of maths (Zeno's Paradox) as well as Andy Burnham, the new British prime minister, and it's been extremely informative.
I’m the top one! Interesting to see the hallucinations creeping in across the weaker models.
I could spend a very long time double-checking my sources, but I want to reply tonight, so please take the following with a pinch of salt, since it's largely from memory:
0. Descartes/Titchener/Chomsky and friends for background.
1. John Searle featured prominently because of his accessibility. I tended to present his Chinese Room argument as a criticism of symbolic AI alone, though I believe he considered it a criticism of sub-symbolic approaches as well.
2. Thomas Nagel's classic article "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is a good introduction to qualia, which is how we describe direct conscious experience.
3. Wittgenstein would be important in terms of the impossibility of empathising with, or seeing things from the perspective of, other minds that have emerged in different contexts (such as animals). However, I rarely spoke about him because, frankly, I couldn't understand him in the original!
4. David Chalmers. Writes clearly (and coined?) the 'hard problem' of consciousness and why subjective experience appears difficult to reconcile with a purely physical account of the mind.
4.1 Daniel Dennett. The clearest and most influential critic of the idea that consciousness presents a special explanatory problem.
5. Darwin and others. Comparative psychology (the study of animal minds) strongly suggests, by showing that the antecedents of the human mind are present in animals, that we should reduce our bias that human minds are special, ineffable, or somehow atomic.
6. Jerry Fodor. Modularity: the idea that the mind is composed of modules that specialise in certain tasks (e.g. phoneme perception, syntactic analysis, face recognition) and operate largely unconsciously unless they are dependent on one another in some way. This helps us take a computational approach to the mind. It reminds us that much of what we do mentally might be expressible in computational terms.
Two final ideas off the top of my head:
1. The Ship of Theseus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
When (not all) neurons die off and are replaced by new ones doing the same job, our sense of self and identity is somewhat cast into doubt. In a physical system, if consciousness is a magic or non-material entity of some kind, what is happening to it during this process?
On Asimov, much as I loved those stories as a teenager, it was only later that I realised the robot stories are largely explorations of how apparently sensible rule-based systems generate unexpected and sometimes harmful outcomes. The Three Laws are presented as hard guardrails, but the stories focus on ambiguities, loopholes, and unintended consequences. I'm not sure how intentional this was; he might have been attempting to make a point about rule-based systems, or perhaps he was following his instinct for drama.
I haven’t come across one, unfortunately. You’ll forgive the irony if I suggest talking to a frontier model like Claude about these issues; they are quite accurate, although they’ve been seeded with biases that make them lean in Chiang’s direction. Otherwise, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is excellent as a starting point:
I’ll mention some more sources in my reply above.
My background is in cognitive science and psycholinguistics. I spent more than ten years talking to first year psychology undergraduates about whether AIs could be conscious; also did some research on (extremely tiny) AIs in modelling language behaviours.
There is a great deal of good thinking on Chiang's topic by professional philosophers, and there's much to be said for reading them. I won't rehearse their ideas here. Chiang's arguments might be correct; but I suspect they probably aren't, and his error may well stem from characterising human thought as something in its own class, which is probably a cognitive bias that humans have. He might also - I'm speculating - be arriving at his conclusion based on his feelings, which the final paragraph suggests (the comment about the models being based on morally dubious actions).
Speculation aside, we are not, I believe, in a position to make points like he does with any certainty.
The point about confidence intervals is a good one and I'd like to see it more often. My neighbour Alan is a good farmer, but I am not.
His book 'On Liberty' is the subject of a recent In Our Time episode (BBC Radio Four series on the history of ideas) [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002pqnc]. They discuss his childhood and his (apparently very warm) relationship with his father. (Sidenote: first proper In Our Time episode with the new host; he seems fine, but I miss Melvyn Bragg.)
I'm half way through this article. The word 'introspection' might be better replaced with 'prior internal state'. However, it's made me think about the qualities that human introspection might have; it seems ours might be more grounded in lived experience (thus autobiographical memory is activated), identity, and so on. We might need to wait for embodied AIs before these become a component of AI 'introspection'. Also: this reminds me of Penfield's work back in the day, where live human brains were electrically stimulated to produce intense reliving/recollection experiences. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilder_Penfield]
Beyond consumer-producer relationships, there are many instances where an individual is required to deal with a baroque interface, as I just did when starting to look after an ill parent and figure out what care they could get from the local and state governments; there are forms, definitions to get one's head around, high stakes (get it wrong and you could be breaking the law), and so on. An AI in this case was incredibly helpful, particularly when I was overloaded cognitively and emotionally. There is no particular incentive on the other end of the citizen-government relationship for the government to obfuscate things, but things are sometimes very complicated and provided in verbose language. For those interactions, for that asymmetry, an AI will be very useful.
A quick note to say that at our local repair cafe we do a roaring trade in vacuum repairs for peanuts (not literal peanuts; though some of our repairers do get peckish). If you're in Europe, there's chance you have one nearby. https://repaircafe.org/en
The one about Victorian sewers is fantastic.
My summer project for my comp sci MSc was an open source natural deduction helper tool for the Mac, called Baker Street. I let it lapse simply because I didn't have time to look after it, but now it's available for download once more: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/baker-street/id1528304157
I've been working with Claude to bring some new features, like printing a proof - unsuccessfully! https://github.com/OolonColoophid/bakerStreet/issues/9
My codebase contains a lot of Objective-C but I'm slowly replacing it with Swift. I rarely write Objective-C (largely because it's so easy to introduce bugs with release/retain shenanigans) unless I really have to. Interoperability between the languages does work but is fragile, with Xcode often getting into a chicken-and-egg state where a compilation error in Swift prevents the Objective-C from compiling, and vice versa, stuffing the interface with errors that can make it hard to discover where the problem is.
(edit: typo)
Q: The reports about the Q* model breakthrough that you all recently made, what’s going on there?
A: Altman: No particular comment on that unfortunate leak.
Interesting that he calls it an unfortunate leak.
:-) Thanks. And for the lunch I believe it was the correct time but then it added a later event to book it (i.e. after the lunch), maybe at 5pm.
I like the idea but I’d prefer the flirting off by default. Also, I asked for a simple lunch appointment tomorrow and it suggested the lunch but added a reservation for later in the afternoon.
I see what you mean - five will fit with more room left over. But much like a hand that has a capacity to hold 7 or so marbles, if you grasp only five at a time, your overall productivity will (almost certainly) slow.
An overview of the model and its history: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4207727/
The Wikipedia entry for WM is also very good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory
It's a bit tricky to tell what you're doing exactly - perhaps drop me an email if you have any queries (using this account; my original parent post was on a throwaway account because I had login problems).
Not sure what you mean by this, Amelius. Could you put this on our forum as a feature request?
New(ish) coder here. Yes, Scapple is still under active development and we have some exciting things lined up for iOS (no time frame as yet).
Location: UK
Remote: Preferred
Willing to relocate: Possibly
Technologies: (solid knowledge of) Python, R, (stronger knowledge of) SPSS, SQL, PhP, HTML, CSS. Excellent Bash/Unix skills.
Résumé: Psycholinguistics PhD graduate (computational modelling of parsing; embodied cognition; creativity) from Russell Group UK Uni; strong investigative scientist/researcher in quant and qual; excellent communicator (particularly writing; am award-winning SF novelist); experience of building full-stack solutions, and of successively leading a 20-strong academic psychology team. Looking to develop my tech experience with interesting projects, particularly involving ML/data science.
Email: ihocking AT gmail.com
FWIW, I’ve been using various MacBook Pros over the years and never had issues like these (also using lots of MS software). It could well be that the author had a lemon—-still no good thing, of course.