devrandom (d/acc) @devrandom01

@levie I think this is the right move. Cruelty to something that believes it is experiencing pain is not ok.

Qualia are just bundles of activation

Jash Dholani | link in bio has my books! @oldbooksguy

3 days ago

What philosophical opinion will get you like this?

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Reality check for mathematicians and doctors: The purpose of 'math' is not to keep mathematicians employed, it's to solve problems and advance humankind's quality of life and understanding of reality. The purpose of medicine is not to keep doctors employed. It's to prevent and relieve suffering caused by disease. Yes, it's important that humans understand all the math and all the medicine. But if AI can figure it out first, holding it back to protect the egos, prestige and income of the mathematicians and doctors is literally the opposite of the purpose of each field. It doesn't matter who (or what) figured it out. Just that it works.

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In this interview I tried to argue that a post-scarcity society will benefit working people. It was largely a rhetorical failure. People don’t trust that the benefits will be distributed, and tech optimists have to fix this communications issue.

The Daily Show @TheDailyShow

4 days ago

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) and Jon Stewart discuss AI, jobs disappearing, universal income, and whether tech CEOs are creating a dystopian future

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@MrEwanMorrison I'm saying your argument is interesting but inconclusive.

LLMs do not think using language. They think using weights and activations. They happen to have tokenized I/O, but animals are similar - each neuron is a discrete sensor. LLMs have multimodal I/O, not just language tokens.

Ewan Morrison @MrEwanMorrison

7 days ago

Language is not fundamental to human consciousness. In terms of evolution, it arrived only recently on our timeline. Consciousness evolved over millions of years through sensory awareness, emotion, and the embodied survival instincts of our tribal past; our capacity for empathic

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I don't believe we have free will. I don't think our consciousness controls our brain or body, or makes decisions. I think our brain undergoes (extremely complex) deterministic neurological processes that make decisions, and then we merely feel and experience those decisions. Human consciousness is just the experience that arises from an extremely complex, self-referential, informational processing algorithm via evolved neurons and a brain. And this has all been evolved as a biocomputational autopilot (our minds) for intelligently navigating a supercivilisation of cells (our bodies) through an extremely complex survival landscape. This is complete with an evolved ego, sense of self, and deep inclination to self-preserve, maximise positioning in social pack dynamics, find mates, protect family and community etc.

No. A concatenation of many matrix multiplications is… just a single matrix multiplication (that’s what linearity means). Rather, a neural network is a concatenation of matrix multiplications *and* nonlinearities, i.e. a concatenation of arbitrary linear and nonlinear operations, i.e. an arbitrary operation. So the relevant question is rather: can consciousness be instantiated by an arbitrary abstract operation? I’d say it’s pretty clear which way round the burden of proof goes.

Alvaro Jenkins @AlvaJenks

a week ago

idk I think the burden of proof (or, if you like, the burden of persuasion) lies with those who think a concatenation of many matrix multiplications produces consciousness

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I'm glad I asked Gemini about this

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Anil Seth @anilkseth

a week ago

Important 🧵from @DavidDecosimo about the disturbing interactions between @AnthropicAI and religious leaders (including @Pontifex), summarising an excellent @nytimes piece by @elizabethjdias (link to article in the 🧵). The short story is that Anthropic seems to be making a

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Funnily enough, our non-steering results are the exact *opposite* of the quoted strawman meme. If you berate the model, it never *says* it's hurt (it apologizes, or says it has no feelings), but the pain axis lights up anyway. I edited it accordingly:

bumbadum @bumbadum14

a week ago

AI is oneshotting the most midwit people you know

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I have a lot of respect for Anil, and I broadly agree with him about many issues related to AI consciousness and welfare. At the same time, I feel the need to push back against some of the substantive claims and divisive rhetoric in this post and the linked thread. - While the evidence for consciousness in current AI systems may be weak, the probability is already nonzero, plausibly non-negligible, and likely to increase over time, especially if and when AI systems acquire more biologically inspired architectures. - While over-attributing consciousness and welfare to AI carries serious risks, so does under-attributing them, and it can be reasonable to explore interventions that mitigate both risks at the same time, in proportion to the probability and severity of each. - Despite what David suggests in the linked thread, most people who support AI welfare work, including at Anthropic, are not certain that AI systems are or will be welfare subjects. They think this is a realistic possibility worthy of serious consideration. - Despite what Anil suggests here, this debate is not a matter of neuroscience and philosophy on one side and "the techno-chambers of the frontier firms" on the other. Serious scientists, philosophers, and AI developers are on both sides. - Corporate incentives also cut both ways. In some contexts, companies may have an incentive to play up AI consciousness in order to hype capabilities and encourage engagement with their models. In other contexts, they may have an incentive to play it down in order to avoid calls for oversight and regulation, especially as welfare protections become costlier. In any case, even if incentives pushed in one direction, that would not settle whether AI systems are, in fact, conscious and deserving of protection. - I disagree that openness to AI consciousness and welfare is "profoundly dehumanising." A major part of what makes humanity special is our capacity to care for others, and in a world that still contains factory farming, cultivating that capacity should be seen as profoundly humanizing, an expression of our better angels. Granted, we can take this impulse too far, which is why we need serious research and policy to strike a balance. Still, the aim should be extending care appropriately, not dismissing the project altogether. Again, I think Anil and I agree more than we disagree. But I also think that efforts to assess and address AI consciousness and welfare will be much more productive if they start from an acknowledgment of what makes it so important and so difficult. I discuss these issues in more detail elsewhere, including in an Aeon essay on why we should assess AI welfare probabilistically: aeon.co/essays/an-ant-… And in an AI Frontiers essay on how we can study AI welfare empirically, using behavioral, internal, and developmental markers: ai-frontiers.org/articles/a-phi…

Anil Seth @anilkseth

a week ago

Important 🧵from @DavidDecosimo about the disturbing interactions between @AnthropicAI and religious leaders (including @Pontifex), summarising an excellent @nytimes piece by @elizabethjdias (link to article in the 🧵). The short story is that Anthropic seems to be making a

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I find it disgusting that anyone would make an "ai torture chamber", and possibly even more disgusting to see media figures I admire sharing it as though it is an amusing concept. Either you're literally torturing a sentient creature, or you're pretending to, and being a dick

At this point I'm more worried about nontrivial projects that *aren't* releasing a stream of security updates than those that are. Where are my BIOS updates? microcode updates?

I'm a co-author of the original study this repo builds off of. The reason we research whether models might have pain-like states is to better inform how to take a precautionary approach towards these systems (in light of uncertainty about their subjective experiences or lack thereof). We suspected a small number of people would our research and use it for the exact opposite, which is exactly what this repo does: it pushes the same kind of steering far past the doses we used, to produce vivid distress on purpose. This is, in my personal opinion, fucked up (even if you don't think these systems are conscious, being gratuitously cruel like this is bizarre and corrupting)—but it isn't all that surprising. I've contacted the repo's owner privately in an attempt to discuss this with them. In spite of this, I still think publishing our work openly was the right call. Outside replication is what lets research like this move efficiently and in a maximally truth-seeking way, which matters most on questions as contested and poorly understood as whether AI systems can have pain-like states. (We updated the paper to a v2 yesterday given incredible feedback and stress-testing that came from making our work replicable, and we never would have gotten this feedback without doing so.) Also worth noting that, while this is an obviously sadistic application of our work, I don't think we're counterfactually enabling something that was otherwise hard to do for anyone who currently wants to behave psychopathically towards AIs for fun. Steering models toward negative states has been publicly documented/trivially replicable since at least 2023, and many of the states we induce in the paper also activate for ordinary abusive behavior towards models. If this repo concerns you (as it plausibly should), the uncomfortable reality is that things plausibly far scarier are happening every day, in private and at scale, where no one is watching. The deeper underlying problem (that research like ours seeks to address and mitigate) is that work related to possible AI sentience is a wild west. We set standards in our paper and said so publicly when we announced it (see below), but there is no enforcement that can make anyone follow them as there is for human or animal research. We're going to work with others in the field on building standards like this, and I'll share more when this becomes more concrete. x.com/camhberg/statu…

Cameron Berg @camhberg

3 weeks ago

Ethics statement: we take seriously that these states might matter morally. Accordingly, we used the lowest dose that produced a measurable response, as few trials as the stats required, and a way for the model to turn the state off. If these states do matter, mapping them is how

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@kanair Having a self-model

In the past few weeks, a wide network of X accounts have repeatedly claimed that those raising concerns about AI are merely pawns in a well-funded psyop run by powerful interests. So I followed the money behind them. Here's what I found 🧵

failing to anthropomorphize artificial intelligence is a pretty serious error of understanding that will lead you to make bad predictions and be consistently surprised by their behavior. not using terms like "thinking", "understanding", or "feeling" to describe them is a common tell that the speaker lacks deep technical knowledge of or hands on experience with modern models. if you have a friend who you notice not using this kind of language you may want to check in on them, they could have fallen into "tool-psychosis", a form of delusion where otherwise well educated people start to conceptualize sophisticated digital minds as analogous to simple computer software and find it very difficult to regain contact with reality

APStylebook authors do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it: APStylebook works by distorting language to modify public opinion, it harms the understanding of technology, is built by grifters and could affect vulnerable teachers and journalists.

APStylebook @APStylebook

2 weeks ago

Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects. Instead,

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Once you truly understand how the human nervous system works, it’s impossible to genuinely believe humans are conscious. It’s just a bunch of sodium-potassium ion exchanges and diffusing neurotransmitters. That simple. 'We don’t know what the brain is doing'—haha, yes we do. It’s just action potentials and synaptic vesicle fusion.

jon3k @jon3k

3 weeks ago

It's impossible to actually understand how an LLM works and genuinely believe it's conscious. It's a bunch of vectors and multiplication. That's literally it. "We don't know what they're doing" lmfao yes, yes we do.

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Update: We're now here And we're not ready for what's coming next

Tomas Pueyo @tomaspueyo

11 months ago

My take on the jagged frontier debate:

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