I think the bigger problem is that people completely inflate what a human brain is and can do. IF we have an overinflated idea of what a brain are and can do, then any llm/AI will always be an ‘inferior machine’.
There are the ‘free will’ group (ability to do otherwise, in exact same situation), that thinks we have some ability to do anything other than ordinary cause & effect in our brains. Cause and effect is automatic, can’t be avoided, and kicks in from the first bit signal that either enters our brain extrinsicly or intrinsicly. Everything from there just compounds and gets evaluated not much different from a mix of current llm architectures.
The fact is that we are biological computers that have evolved many layers of computation that all leads to action states - ‘behavior’ - whether it be movement or thinking.
There’s the ‘consciousness’ group (not well defined concept), that think that being conscious is something cosmic, everlasting and super special. There are a few theories on this fluffy concept, and they mostly - to my knowledge - consist of information theory. A slightly primitive analogue would be images that comes in so fast that they become a sequence - a movie. At some point in evolution, we reach a stage where our brains detects themselves in a balanced feedback loop. This little feedback system has a ‘standing wave’ quality where input signals match our cognitive capacity, and our brains now have an ‘outer loop’ that can recognise its own activity. My guess is that consciousness is a gradient that starts very weak and very early in evolution of all life, but is not ‘special’.
Then there’s the ‘machines can’t be intelligent’ group. A bit difficult to scope what this group thinks, but ‘intelligence’ is also not very well defined in the big human diaspora, and they refuse to see a brain/body as a computing device (our whole body is a part of our ‘brain’ as everything are completely inter-connected). ‘Learning’ - or continual learning/habituation’ for current AI is still crude, but getting better.
There are other groups that hinge their anti-AI stance on the real harm the combination of Capitalism and llms generate: fear of big pscho corp - which is real, fear of loosing jobs - which is real, ‘Slop’, real and so on. These are all true, but they are all artefacts from Capitalism, as already existing problems. Without Capitalism, there is no problems in this group, but instead of attacking ‘C-slop’, ‘C-unemployment’, C-copyrights, C-climate issues and other already existing Capitalist threats, patches and behaviours, they see the real and insane acceleration of this already yucky behaviour through this new ‘AI’, and simply hones in on the new technology as the ‘bad guy’. They have drawn a line in the sand, that they will not cross. AI will never become intelligent or useful. It’s imho not that intelligent to attack the visible artefacts of a Capitalist system that causes it all. Always attack the root-cause, not the effect.
The article here tries to illude to the fact that there is more on top of the first layer of next token prediction, and that is also true. We already know that these algorithms are trained on a ‘projection-layer’ of our cognitive activities - our language and behaviour, but that they lack the evolutionary scaffold that causes that behaviour, so we could argue that AI is just a repeater of that projection only, and would never reach what our brains can compute. But that is not really true from the transformer model and onwards. Earlier ‘AI’ just (sorry for simplifying) learned entities and their relations and spit out weird content, but the transformer introduce ‘position’ between entities in the first layer. ‘position’ in our actions are a primitive temporal ability that constantly adjust output actions on the likelihood according to time, and bam! we had the first reasonable sentences. The next thing is resonance/dissonance, or ‘certainty/uncertainty’ that currently are only detected by scaling up the entity+time layers. sudden uncertainty = surprise, and the ability to react to surprise, stop->adjust cognitive scope->re-engage are the holy grail of intelligent AI.
These are the basics of an intelligent machine, but we need more. We need to run continuously, to navigate the problem-scape we are in, be able to self-adjust the amount of information so it matches our cognitive capacity and be able to return to a ‘self’ state etc (cognition is just navigation of internal states until surprises are resolved or deferred). The absolutely most crude cognitive ‘navigation’ is something like ‘moltbot’ or similar primitive architectures. It basically consist of the llm being yanked back to the “Do this” list every N’th minutes. It will become enormously better very soon. ‘Cognition’ and all other features of our brains, is just the right engineering and it will come to surpass us at some point as it already does in many areas.
I’m sure I forgot something important in this outline, but I think that the longer people stay in one or more of these denial-groups, the harder it will be to get out, the more they will sound hysterical/coping, and the bigger problems they will create for themselves later. People can believe what they want oc, but the less they’ll use AI to fight the things they don’t like in this society, the more AI will allow all the rich pschos to continue their constant sick power seeking behaviour that thrashes our world via their pet ideology - Capitalism, and we’ll all have much higher chance of ending up in a “Blade Runner” dystopian future.
Personally I hope the anti-AI groups learns to swallow their frustration, turn around and start using AI and all new technology to shape society in a better direction, organise, prevent more Trump’s, or Biden’s, prevent the existence of any of their Oligarch ‘Epstein’ fckers - the whole Epstein Class that quietly sit in the back and pulls the real strings of the president puppets. These pscho fckers WILL use AI 24/7 to their exclusive benefit no matter who/what are harmed, and we should all try to prevent that any way we can. We can’t fight back with sticks and harsh words alone…
Very well put, and people hating on this tech really need to understand that the rational thing to focus on is how to develop it outside corporate control. I wish there were more discussion regarding training models using distributed computing or optimizing local models to be more capable while using fewer resources.
The oligarchs aren’t debating AI ethics while they’re investing billions to own and control this technology, and they absolutely do not care that there’s a fringe left movement whinging about it. Our choice is to cower in nostalgia or fight to have a stake in our future. We should fight to have a say in how this technology is developed and who controls it. People who weren’t happy with proprietary operating systems didn’t just whinge about it incessantly, but rolled up their sleeves and built their own alternatives with things like Linux and BSD. That should be the guiding mindset today as well. And thanks to Chinese companies releasing open weights, we already have a good foundation to work from.
I very much agree with your argument regarding the nature of cognition and consciousness as well. People like to mystify the brain and claim there’s some intangible soul, but that’s just what we’ve always done trying to make ourselves feel special and separate from the rest of nature. The reality is that the more we learn about cognition, the more evident it becomes that it is an emergent phenomenon that exists on a gradient, from the most primitive biological feedback loops to the stunning complexity of the human mind. While LLMs are just a piece of the puzzle, they demonstrate how a lot of the things our brains are capable of can, in fact, be understood and replicated. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that we won’t be able to make systems that are capable of reasoning in the same way as us in the future.
Yeah, my main problems with AI are more about who controls it and what they do with it rather than the technology as a whole, I find techbros obnoxious but if they didn’t have the power they do they wouldn’t bother me nearly as much
I think the bigger problem is that people completely inflate what a human brain is and can do. IF we have an overinflated idea of what a brain are and can do, then any llm/AI will always be an ‘inferior machine’.
There are the ‘free will’ group (ability to do otherwise, in exact same situation), that thinks we have some ability to do anything other than ordinary cause & effect in our brains. Cause and effect is automatic, can’t be avoided, and kicks in from the first bit signal that either enters our brain extrinsicly or intrinsicly. Everything from there just compounds and gets evaluated not much different from a mix of current llm architectures. The fact is that we are biological computers that have evolved many layers of computation that all leads to action states - ‘behavior’ - whether it be movement or thinking.
There’s the ‘consciousness’ group (not well defined concept), that think that being conscious is something cosmic, everlasting and super special. There are a few theories on this fluffy concept, and they mostly - to my knowledge - consist of information theory. A slightly primitive analogue would be images that comes in so fast that they become a sequence - a movie. At some point in evolution, we reach a stage where our brains detects themselves in a balanced feedback loop. This little feedback system has a ‘standing wave’ quality where input signals match our cognitive capacity, and our brains now have an ‘outer loop’ that can recognise its own activity. My guess is that consciousness is a gradient that starts very weak and very early in evolution of all life, but is not ‘special’.
Then there’s the ‘machines can’t be intelligent’ group. A bit difficult to scope what this group thinks, but ‘intelligence’ is also not very well defined in the big human diaspora, and they refuse to see a brain/body as a computing device (our whole body is a part of our ‘brain’ as everything are completely inter-connected). ‘Learning’ - or continual learning/habituation’ for current AI is still crude, but getting better.
There are other groups that hinge their anti-AI stance on the real harm the combination of Capitalism and llms generate: fear of big pscho corp - which is real, fear of loosing jobs - which is real, ‘Slop’, real and so on. These are all true, but they are all artefacts from Capitalism, as already existing problems. Without Capitalism, there is no problems in this group, but instead of attacking ‘C-slop’, ‘C-unemployment’, C-copyrights, C-climate issues and other already existing Capitalist threats, patches and behaviours, they see the real and insane acceleration of this already yucky behaviour through this new ‘AI’, and simply hones in on the new technology as the ‘bad guy’. They have drawn a line in the sand, that they will not cross. AI will never become intelligent or useful. It’s imho not that intelligent to attack the visible artefacts of a Capitalist system that causes it all. Always attack the root-cause, not the effect.
The article here tries to illude to the fact that there is more on top of the first layer of next token prediction, and that is also true. We already know that these algorithms are trained on a ‘projection-layer’ of our cognitive activities - our language and behaviour, but that they lack the evolutionary scaffold that causes that behaviour, so we could argue that AI is just a repeater of that projection only, and would never reach what our brains can compute. But that is not really true from the transformer model and onwards. Earlier ‘AI’ just (sorry for simplifying) learned entities and their relations and spit out weird content, but the transformer introduce ‘position’ between entities in the first layer. ‘position’ in our actions are a primitive temporal ability that constantly adjust output actions on the likelihood according to time, and bam! we had the first reasonable sentences. The next thing is resonance/dissonance, or ‘certainty/uncertainty’ that currently are only detected by scaling up the entity+time layers. sudden uncertainty = surprise, and the ability to react to surprise, stop->adjust cognitive scope->re-engage are the holy grail of intelligent AI.
These are the basics of an intelligent machine, but we need more. We need to run continuously, to navigate the problem-scape we are in, be able to self-adjust the amount of information so it matches our cognitive capacity and be able to return to a ‘self’ state etc (cognition is just navigation of internal states until surprises are resolved or deferred). The absolutely most crude cognitive ‘navigation’ is something like ‘moltbot’ or similar primitive architectures. It basically consist of the llm being yanked back to the “Do this” list every N’th minutes. It will become enormously better very soon. ‘Cognition’ and all other features of our brains, is just the right engineering and it will come to surpass us at some point as it already does in many areas.
I’m sure I forgot something important in this outline, but I think that the longer people stay in one or more of these denial-groups, the harder it will be to get out, the more they will sound hysterical/coping, and the bigger problems they will create for themselves later. People can believe what they want oc, but the less they’ll use AI to fight the things they don’t like in this society, the more AI will allow all the rich pschos to continue their constant sick power seeking behaviour that thrashes our world via their pet ideology - Capitalism, and we’ll all have much higher chance of ending up in a “Blade Runner” dystopian future.
Personally I hope the anti-AI groups learns to swallow their frustration, turn around and start using AI and all new technology to shape society in a better direction, organise, prevent more Trump’s, or Biden’s, prevent the existence of any of their Oligarch ‘Epstein’ fckers - the whole Epstein Class that quietly sit in the back and pulls the real strings of the president puppets. These pscho fckers WILL use AI 24/7 to their exclusive benefit no matter who/what are harmed, and we should all try to prevent that any way we can. We can’t fight back with sticks and harsh words alone…
However, that is just what I believe and want.
Very well put, and people hating on this tech really need to understand that the rational thing to focus on is how to develop it outside corporate control. I wish there were more discussion regarding training models using distributed computing or optimizing local models to be more capable while using fewer resources.
The oligarchs aren’t debating AI ethics while they’re investing billions to own and control this technology, and they absolutely do not care that there’s a fringe left movement whinging about it. Our choice is to cower in nostalgia or fight to have a stake in our future. We should fight to have a say in how this technology is developed and who controls it. People who weren’t happy with proprietary operating systems didn’t just whinge about it incessantly, but rolled up their sleeves and built their own alternatives with things like Linux and BSD. That should be the guiding mindset today as well. And thanks to Chinese companies releasing open weights, we already have a good foundation to work from.
I very much agree with your argument regarding the nature of cognition and consciousness as well. People like to mystify the brain and claim there’s some intangible soul, but that’s just what we’ve always done trying to make ourselves feel special and separate from the rest of nature. The reality is that the more we learn about cognition, the more evident it becomes that it is an emergent phenomenon that exists on a gradient, from the most primitive biological feedback loops to the stunning complexity of the human mind. While LLMs are just a piece of the puzzle, they demonstrate how a lot of the things our brains are capable of can, in fact, be understood and replicated. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that we won’t be able to make systems that are capable of reasoning in the same way as us in the future.
Yeah, my main problems with AI are more about who controls it and what they do with it rather than the technology as a whole, I find techbros obnoxious but if they didn’t have the power they do they wouldn’t bother me nearly as much
Yeah pretty much, I’m very excited for the bubble to finally pop too.
hell yeah i miss buying hardware lol
That’s a lot of words. But well done and well written. I’m on your side of the fence with all this.