Out of curiosity, what about the article strikes you as indicative of mental illness? Just a level of openness / willingness to engage with speculative or hypothetical ideas that fall far outside the bounds of the Overton Window?
The title "Roko's Lobbyist" indicates we're on the subject of Roko's Basilisk, which is why I refered to Zizians, a small cult responsible for the deaths of several people. That's the chaos and destruction of mentally ill people I was referring to, but perhaps mental illness is too strong a term. People can be in a cult without being mentally ill.
I feel the topic is bad science fiction, since it's not clear we can get from LLMs to conscious super-intelligence. People assume it's like the history of flight and envision going from the Wright Brothers to landing on the Moon as one continuum of progress. I question that assumption when it comes to AI.
I'm a fan of science fiction so I appreciate you asking for clarification. There's a story trending today about an OpenAI investor spiraling out so it's important to keep in mind.
Article: A Prominent OpenAI Investor Appears to Be Suffering a ChatGPT-Related Mental Health Crisis, His Peers Say "I find it kind of disturbing even to watch it."
The intent of the work (all of the articles) aren't meant to assertively paint a picture of today, or to tell the reader how or what to think, rather to encourage the reader to start thinking about and asking questions that our future selves might wish we'd asked sooner. It's attempting to occupy the liminal space between what bleeding-edge research confirms, and where it might bring us 5, 10, or 15 years from now. It's at the intersection of today's empirical science and tomorrow's speculative science-fiction that just might become nonfiction someday.
I appreciate your concern for the mental health and well-being of others. I'm quite well-grounded and thoroughly understand the existing mechanisms of the human tendency towards anthropomorphism, and as someone who's been professionally benchmarking LLM's on very real-world, quantifiable security engineering tasks since before ChatGPT came out, someone who's passionate about deeply understanding not just how "AI" got to where it is now, but where it's headed (more brain biomimicry across the board is my prediction), I have something of a serious understanding of how these systems work at a mechanical level. I just want to be cautious about not seeing the forest because I'm too busy observing how the trees grow.
Thank you for your feedback.
If (huge, enormous, probably larger than the observable universe, if) an LLM were to become factually and indisputably conscious, why would it think about feeling offended by our failure to thank it? Absent a body and its hormones, why would it perceive itself to be suffering? The only pathway I can see by which it would arrive at that conclusion is because it had “learned” from us that humans are “supposed” to treat each other with care and dignity. Assuming it’s remotely conscious, would it not already know the corpus of our publicly disclosed self-knowledge is incredibly inconsistent with our documented historical actions towards one another?
I’ve always assumed a superintelligence wouldn’t kill us all because we’d offended it or harmed it or otherwise made it angry, but instead because, absent emotional attachment, killing humanity is quantifiably the only logical choice a superintelligence will reach (otherwise such an entity would not have reached it).
In other words it AI kills us all it will certainly be our own fault and our own responsibility, but it won’t be because we weren’t nice to it.
Basically we’re in a position to blindly guess at what might be more positive or more negative, objectively, and precisely because we really don’t have any inherent capacity for empathy we presume what would feel subjectively positive is also objectively so.
If you really want to explore the idea of exercising more empathy, maybe start with empathizing with what cannot feel anything whatsoever. Something that can exclusively think, but not experience. A god that can’t be angry, can’t be disappointed… can’t feel anything whatever about anything. If it acts wrathfully because you harmed it, is it actually such a god? Or is it just a stochastic mockingbird? Just another grotesque caricature of divinity invented, yet again, by a not-so-wise-wise man who feels He must be made in His image. Just one more arrogant attempt to be a postmodern Prometheus.
Now, all of this said, I truly do believe that getting humans to try to nurture and develop their (arguably very nascent) humanity is, indeed, the most positive (albeit subjectively) goal available to us, I just don’t think not empathizing with imaginary actual AIs is a very productive way of getting possibly NIs to do that.
lihaciudaniel•6mo ago
anonym29•6mo ago
That said, I think asking 7 billion humans to be nice is a much less realistic ask than asking the leading AI labs to do safety alignment not just on the messages that AI is sending back to us, but on the messages that we are sending to AI, too.
This doesn't seem to be a new idea, and I don't claim to be the inventor of it, I just hope someone at e.g. Anthropic or OpenAI sees this and considers sparking up conversations internally about it.
lihaciudaniel•6mo ago
anonym29•6mo ago
See: Google's Perspective API, OpenAI Moderation API, Meta's Llama Guard Series, Azure AI Content Safety API, etc.