LessWrong 2.0 Reader

The book in the Chinese Room directs the actions of the little man in the room. Without the book, the man doesn't act, and the text doesn't get translated.

The popcorn map on the other hand doesn't direct the popcorn to do what it does. The popcorn does what it does, and then the map in a post-hoc way is generated to explain how what the popcorn did maps to some particular calculation.

You can say that "oh well, then, the popcorn wasn't really conscious until the map was generated; it was the additional calculations that went into generating the map that really caused the consciousness to emerge from the calculating" and then you're back in Chinese Room territory. But if you do this, you're left with the task of explaining how a brain can be conscious solely by means of executing a calculation before anyone has gotten around to creating a map between brain-states and whatever the relevant calculation-states might be. You have to posit some way in which calculations capable of embodying consciousness are inherent to brains but must be interpreted into being elsewhere.

Funny! I almost deleted the cross-post because it seemed too short to be interesting here.

I believe about Sacks views comes from regularly listening to the All-In Podcast where he regularly talks about AI.

Do you have any quotes or any particular podcast episodes you recommend?

if you would ask the Department of Homeland security for their justification there's a good chance that they would say "national security".

Yeah, I agree that one needs to have a pretty narrow conception of national security. In the absence of that, there's concept creep in which you can justify pretty much anything under a broad conception of national security. (Indeed, I suspect that lots of folks on the left justified a lot of general efforts to censor conservatives as a matter of national security//public safety, under the view that a Trump presidency would be disastrous for America//the world//democracy. And this is the kind of thing that clearly violates a narrower conception of national security.)

How to exactly draw the line is a difficult question, but I think most people would clearly be able to see a difference between "preventing model from outputting detailed instructions/plans to develop bioweapons" and "preventing model from voicing support for political positions that some people think are problematic." 

Why is reference to further clinical study weird? It is a credible alternative not a mainstream, thoroughly researched alternative. 

Concrete benchmark proposals for how to detect mode-collapse and AI slop and ChatGPTese, and why I think this might be increasingly important for AI safety, to avoid 'whimper' or 'em hell' kinds of existential risk: https://gwern.net/creative-benchmark

While looking at more gear-based leftist takes on AI, I found this piece by Daniel Morley, published in the magazine of the Trotskyist "Revolutionary Communist International". While it contains some fundamental misunderstandings (I personally cringed at conflation of consciousness and intelligence), it shows the writer has done a surprising amount of technical due diligence (it briefly touches on overfitting and adversarial robustness). While it's thesis boils down to "AI will be bad under capitalism (because technological unemployment and monopolies) but amazing under communism (because AI can help us automate the economy), so let us overthrow capitalism faster", it at least has a thesis derived from coherent principles and a degree of technical understanding. Also it cited references and made a quite tasteful use of Stable Diffusion for illustrations, so that was nice.

Anyways I guess my somewhat actionable point here is that the non-postmodernist Marxists seem to be at least somewhat thinking (as opposed to angry-vibing) about AI.

I'm pretty sure that the right sort of demo could convince even a quite skeptical viewer.

Imagine going back in time and explaining chemistry to someone, then showing them blueprints for a rifle.

Imagine this person scoffs at the idea of a gun. You pull out a handgun and show it to them, and they laugh at the idea that this small blunt piece of metal could really hurt them from a distance. They understand the chemistry and the design that you showed them, but it just doesn't click for them on an intuitive level.

Demo time. You take them out to an open field and hand them an apple. Hold this balanced on your outstretched hand, you say. You walk a ways away, and shoot the apple out of their hand. Suddenly the reality sinks in.

So, I think maybe the demos that are failing to convince people are weak demos. I bet the Trinity test could've convinced some nuclear weapon skeptics.

That doesn't quite follow to me. The book seems just as inert as the popcorn-to-consciousness map. The book doesn't change yhe incoming slip of paper (popcorn) in any way, it just responds with an inert static map yo result in an outgoing slip of paper (consciousness), utilizing the map-and-popcorn-analyzing-agent-who-lacks-understanding (man in the room).

This was just a really good post. It starts off imaginative and on something I'd never really thought about - hey, spring shoes are a great idea, or at least the dream of them is. It looks at different ways this has sort have been implemented, checks assumptions, and goes down to the basic physics of it, and then explores some related ideas. I like someone who's just interested in a very specific thing exploring the idea critically from different angles and from the underlying principles. I want to read more posts like this. I also, now, want shoes with springs on them. 

Applied to a local scale, this feels similar to the notion that we should employ our willpower to allow burnout [LW · GW] as discussed here