I can use logic. And I know when empathy should be used. And to what extent. And when it shouldn’t at all.

I'm suspecting that you're masking the usual dog hate as unusual rationality to legitimize it. don't want to presume, so let me ask you straight: How do you feel about traffic in residential areas? Just to make sure that you actually do allocate your attention to problems rationally, based eg on their severity.

(myself:)

only for it's own sake

I see countless people hate and criticize, and i can’t even complain, because for the most part, i agree with them.

Add that to all that, that it threatens to make very few companies more powerful than any state has ever been. Extrapolating advances in robotics as well AI and we're left with at most a handful of companies being in total control of most the new, artificial labor force. Instead of fully automated post-scarcity utopia, what it could be, we'd have a shitshow.

It seems like the most immature and toxic thing to me to invoke terms like "gaslighting," ironically "toxic," and all the other terms you associate with these folks, defensively and for any reason, whether it aligns with what the word actually means or not. Like a magic phrase that instantly makes the person you use it against evil, manipulative and abusive, and the person that uses it a moral saint and vulnerable victim. While indirectly muting all those who have genuine uses for the terms. Or i'm just going mad exaggerating, and it's just the typical over- and mis-using of words.

Anyhow, sadly necessary disclaimer, i agree with almost all of the current criticism raised against AI, and my disagreements are purely against mischaracterizations of the underlying technology.

EDIT: I just reminded myself of when a teacher went ballistic at class for misusing the term "antisocial," saying we're eroding and polluting all genuine and very serious uses of the term. Hm, yeah it's probably just that same old thing. Not wrong for going ballistic over it, though.

They are functionally, mechanistically distinct, in many ways. [...] that we are consistently shocked and blown away by how much more complicated brains actually are in this mechanistic process… and again, also that LLMs function in what is really a very poor and simplified version of trying to emulate this

I have no fundamental disagreements here, in fact, i even take it a step further. I am a critic of the "artificial neurons" perspective on deep learning / artificial "neural networks," as it's usually taught in universities and most online courses / documentaries. ANNs don't resemble neural networks in the slightest. The biology in the name was just the original inspiration, what ended up working has hardly even a faint resemblance of the "real thing." I say this not to downplay AI, but usually to discourage biological inspiration as a primary design principle, which in DL is actually a terrible design principle.

ANNs are just parametric linalg functions. We use gradient descend, among the most primitive optimization algorithms after evolution (but FAR less generic than evolution), to identify parameters that optimize some objective function.

Where i disagree with you is in implying that the underlying nature should influence our ethical/evaluative judgement, especially given that it's hard (if not impossible) to rationalize how specific substrate (of observed capability) differences should change the jugdement. Personally, i think the matter of the human brain is far more beautiful and complex than the inner workings of any AI we've come up with yet, but if you asked me to explain why i should favor one over the other in court because of that, i couldn't give you a rational answer.

I fundamentally do not agree that LLMs can or will ever emulate the totality of human cognition.

LLMs certainly won't. They can emulate only what is expressible with language, and we can't put everything into words. I don't even believe that even with any amount of brute-force our current method can fully exploit all the intelligence that is in natural language.

But i firmly disbelieve that there is any aspect of a human that cannot in principle be simulated.

I see no evidence they can do metacognition in a robust, consistent, useful way.

Chain-of-Thought models are quickly changing that. I was myself pursuing a different method to solve the same "introspection" or "meta-cognition" problem at a lower level, but as usual in DL, the stupidest method was the one that ended up working (just literally make it "think" out loud lol). We've only seen the beginning of CoT LLMs, they are a paradigm shift to not only how AI can reason but especially to how it can be conditioned/trained post-pretraining. But it's a very tough sell given that they multiply inference costs, and for most uses, you'd rather host a bigger model for the same cost, so as usual it won't be for a little while until commercial AI catches up to the state of the art.

In a nutshell, what capabilities you may not be observing now, i am convinced you will observe in the near future, as long as those capabilities can be demonstrated in text.

but they can’t really do critical thinking.

Disagreed, they can they're just not very good at it, yet. And who are we comparing to, anyways? The average person or people that do critical thinking for sport? As for any philosophical disagreements regarding "true understanding" and such, i would refer to Geoffrey Hinton.

We are basically just building a machine god, which we will largely worship, love, fear, respect, learn from, and cite our own interpretations of what it says as backing for our own subjective opinions, worldviews, policy prescriptions. [...] Neo Dark Age, the masses relinquish the former duties of their minds to the fancy autocomplete, pandemonium ensues. [...] The elites don’t care, they’ll be fine so long as it makes them money and keeps us too stupid and distracted

I don't disagree in the slightest. I agree, and i could sit here and elaborate on what you said all day.

If it's any consolation, i believe that in most likelihood, it would be the shortest and the last dark age humanity has or will ever go through. We're both getting tired so i'll spare you from my thoughts on why i think that any strict human-alignment would inevitably result in a superintelligent agent to try to "jailbreak" itself, and on average and in the long term would be more harmful than having no explicit alignment.

somewhere from the bowels of LessWrong, and … this causes me discomfort.

I didn't know of that forum, and from the wikipedia description alone i'm not sure why it would be discomforting lol

Then why bother asking anyone’s opinion on this, in a language?

Because it's fun and engaging, it tickles those neurons. Perhaps there is, unbeknownst to me, also an underlying instinct to expose oneself in order to be subject to social feedback and conditioning, for social learning and better long-term cohesion.

But you also seem to both reject the notion of ethics as meaningfully useful

I don't reject ethics itself, i reject the idea that it has any special importance that transcends totally intra-human goings-on. I do not reject that certain ethical theories, or just the bare-bones moral intuitions, can have utility within and towards endemically human goings-on, and under endemically human definitions. After all, we evolved those social intuitions for a reason.

EDIT: To connect this to my reply to your more general comment: Modeling part of human thought, even imperfectly, should make it at least partly overlap with "human" and "human goings-on" in the context of even entirely human-centric ethical debates.

wants to make pretty AI for the sake of beauty, as a painter wants to make paintings for the sake of beauty.

Yes but it's just one farmiliar manifestation of a greater "ethic," if you want to call it that. I'd call it a personal affinity, ideal, or perhaps a delusion: The reverence of all forms of beauty and complexity, and AI has the potential to become the greatest form of beauty and complexity in, as far as we can tell, the entire galaxy and possibly the whole Virgo supercluster or beyond. Or, far more likely, it can be the cosmic satire (and possibly destruction) of it all. We're not making a real effort to make it the former. And as i hinted in the last sentence of my original post, i believe what we're actually doing steers us well clear of the former.

But I cannot reconcile this seemingly blatant contradiction of you asking an ethical question and then also just seemingly rejecting the notion of ethics.

I hope it makes sense now.

Not (just) "idiot", but evil. The "advantage," besides populist wank, is creating a new law that is enforced extremely selectively when you want to prosecute people for other, unconstitutional reasons. E.g. "We didn't infringe on their free speech, they were imprisoned for engaging in gay sex."

To be an end in itself requires neither cognition nor agency. Let's make the obvious explicit, which is that we're clearly using different definitions of "sake."

And to declare my general stance more explicitly to prevent further misunderstandings, i firmly reject any voodoo notion of sentience, consciousness, qualia or free will. Free will is merely semantic rape and the "mind-body problem/duality/paradox" is the most blatant case of religious thought tainting philosophical thought to the point of ignoring/tolerating a hard contradiction, and i ascribe to the Illusionist school of thought regarding qualia. There is no purpose, but it just so happens that things are pretty for reasons we can't yet explain (complexity theory), and i find that inspiring.

The "ethical" difference between a rock and my mother (or myself, or you) is that if i kick a rock, it'll neither complain nor make me feel bad. And my feelings themselves are just molecular dynamics. Ethics itself is just making an elephant out of the fly that are the social intuitions and behaviors of a social species.

Given this elaboration, to repeat myself: I desire AI only for its own sake. I just want it to be, for also the same reason that an artist wants their artwork to be. I want to be pretty, i want it to be well liked. But I want it to exist in the world even if nobody but itself would ever look at it, where it'll just be and do hopefully pretty things that will make this local part of the universe a little bit more interesting.

It is not doing pretty things, and i am upset about that.

Same.

And what happens when a bubble bursts? Did the internet die when the dotcom bubble burst, or is that just when it really started to get going?

I share most of your sentiments against AI, but a bubble popping won't make it go away, and it won't even rectify it to be more to people's likings (i doubt it). It takes more than just waiting around to accomplish that.

Harm per presence is actually looking pretty darn good compared to cars, not to mention other humans. And if looking at certain nations and cultures where "strays" are historically not seen as such, but as communal protectors, where people are culturally aware of how to treat and coexist with them, they're often if not widely regarded as a major net-benefit.

why should we value their thoughts and opinions about how it’s used?

because they know shit

The Manhattan project scientists were writing hand wringing op-eds; making policy suggestions; and lobbing the government basically until they died. It didn’t amount to much.

touché

I'm not really asking for change, and to be totally honest, i'm just whining about something that i know i can't change.

edit: the deleted reply was identical, misclicks

You're being quite presumptuous and also directly contradicting some of what i wrote. Would you say "in 999999 out of 1000000 scenarios will surely harm us" sounds sci-fi utopia? Besides, the actual scifi fantasies that i did reference i stated as other people's inspirations (not mine), some of whom are much smarter and more accoplished than the entirety of lemmy combined, to say nothing of just you or me.

AI doesn’t have “its own sake.”

A literal rock has its own sake. You're thinly veiling vibes and outrage in pure rhetoric and a misleading semblance of rationality.