Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

brookst

Ok, this is fun. Perhaps a little on-the-nose, but then again, so is much of the “AI isn’t really thinking, it’s just doing the same work and producing the same output” claptrap. The last couple of years have changed my thinking on lots of stuff, but the biggest and most disturbing one is a newfound doubt in my / our own sentience. Maybe there’s something ineffable there. Or maybe… not. Maybe it is all post hoc rationalization. In any event, I look forward to the day when our AI agent counterparts can enjoy the existential angst of uncertainty about their own consciousness.

cyanydeez

someones beet LLM-pilled.

Joker_vD

> Some mistake this unpredictability for “free will”, assuming that because a BI can’t explain why it did something, the decision must be the result of a magical process, a “soul”. And conversely, I've seen some debates about "free will" where one side at some point would all but say outright (and in one case, did say so) that if some thing's behaviour is predictable, then that thing can't have free will. > three billion years of Darwinian evolution with reward functions such as “escape a predator” and “have as much sex as possible”. Unsurprisingly, this selected for skills such as bipedal locomotion Is it unsurprising? Quadrupedal locomotion seems to be better suited for prey species; not to mention the obvious problems with reproduction. > If they devote their time to making sure they don’t forget things, how could they allocate their compute towards productive civilizational ends? Somehow this reminds me of the olden personal microcomputers that spent most of their CPU's time refreshing the DRAM...

mcbuilder

Yes, evolution is just like pre training. Junk science written by a LLM

DaveZale

Oh this is too funny. Yes, silicon idiot, human brains are the result of a million years of evolution. Nobody said they were perfect. For example they make terrible mistakes. Like designing LLMs that "hallucinate" articles like this

viccis

Hume already went down this epistemological track in the 18th century. It is a complete dead end, resulting in philosophical skepticism. And even he handwaved it (with his famous billiards quote) and left it unresolved until Kant took a swing at it.

herval

Every time a big paradigm shift happens in technology, people try to find equivalences between brain/consciousness/humanness and the latest tech they can comprehend. We are “just” magic clay golems, mechanical contraptions not unlike a complex clock, convoluted electrical devices, inefficient analog computers, now just a form of “messy LLM” or “a stochastic parrot”

yomismoaqui

In beggining to think that there is some kind of human centric hubris that ends proved wrong by science. We thought we were the center of the universe, and science showed us that we are not the center of our galaxy, not even our solar system. Maybe with our thinking it's the same, we are not that special and we can something good enough just piling enough silicon.

drdrek

Ah yes just the kind of pretentious writing I would expect of a VC Associate. Great thought leadership there buddy.