[FRIAM] interiority

[glen]

Sherry Turkle on AI, empathy, and the fight for human connection
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/reclaiming-conversation-age-of-ai

My guess is some of you know Turkle personally. Anyway, I thought this was a good document. I *think* I reject her assertion that:

"[transactional conversation|pretend empathy|info-only conversation] is a new form of behaviorism that devalues the richness and complexity of the human."

That assertion seems to imply no interior to the LLMs (where humans have an interior). As I've argued here before, I am a behaviorist, just maybe not a simplistic one. Everything that goes on inside is encoded on our surface to some lossy extent. Similarly, the LLMs have an interior. Their sensitivity to prompts seems to push them slightly out of the category of pure simulus-response machines. And that's true for the ones I run locally on my own machine. Add in all the bells and whistles of the cloud LLMs who can search the web, write and run simulations, etc. and it seems too naive to claim the interactions are "flat" or "thin".

Regardless, I'm on board with her primary gist. The bots are not *alive*. I don't go to the pub to learn about time crystals. It's some kind of category error to think inter-human conversation is solely, or at all, about information transfer.

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