[FRIAM] emergent mind - ai news by ai

[Steve Smith]

/GePR/ -
> Well, I "agree" with the open letter, for different reasons than 
> Steve. Just yesterday, a colleague (who should know better) made a 
> similar assertion to Nick's (and mine, and maybe Marcus' etc.) that 
> *we* may be in the same category as a transformer decoder assembly. 
> The context was whether a structure like GPT, designed specifically so 
> that it can add high-order Markovian token prediction, can possibly 
> embody/encapsulate/contain mechanistic models.
Can you elaborate how this is an "agreement" with the open letter? I'm 
not clear what you are agreeing with or on what principle?
>
> While I don't subscribe to the fideistic write-off (or Luddite-like) 
> of such structures as vapid or even "non-sentient", there *is* 
> something we're doing they are not. I can't quite articulate what it 
> is we do that they don't. But I think there is. And I think it 
> (whatever "it" is) is being targeted by mechanism-based (or 
> physics-based) machine learning.
>
> Being either a skeptic (as I am) or a proponent (as Marcus portrays, 
> here), pre-emptively regulating (or attempting to regulate) the 
> research and training is a bad, perhaps Pyrrhic Victory, thing to do. 
> From a skeptical perspective, it slows our *falsification* of 
> transformer decoder assemblies as containers for mechanistic 
> reasoning. For proponents, it puts us behind others who would continue 
> to make progress.

I do agree that when we are in an "arms race" it feels like there is 
nothing to do except "run faster" and don't for the love of all that is 
good, take a pause for any reason.

To quote Thomas Jefferson (referring to Slavery):  "I think we have a 
wolf by the ears, we can neither continue to hold it, nor can we afford 
to let it go".

>
> So, yes, it has a feedback effect, a deleterious one.

My inner-Luddite believes that we are always in spiritual/social debt 
and that most if not all of our attempts to dig out with more technology 
has, at best, the benefit of rearranging the shape of the hole we are 
in, and generally deepening and steepening it's profile.

That said, I live my life with a shovel in one hand and a digging bar in 
the other, even if I've (mostly) put away the diesel excavator, dynamite 
and blasting caps...  I *am* homo-faber and this is *in* my destiny, but 
I want to believe that I am also the superposition of many other modes: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_the_human_species, with perhaps 
/homo adaptabalis/ most significantly?   If we do not at least consider 
our own self-regulation as a collective then I think we risk 
degenerating to /homo avarus/ or /homo apathetikos./

/-SAS/
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