Ooo added the book to my list, thanks!
Also, Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined explores whether we’re conscious or not based on his work in neuroscience and primatology. It’s like a book length version of the quote you posted
Comment on Musk’s Chatbot Started Spouting Nazi Propaganda. That’s Not the Scariest Part.
shalafi@lemmy.world 3 days ago
They are not, however, a version of human intelligence. Nor are they truth seekers or reasoning machines.
Neither are our brains.
“Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight
LLMs are built from our words. Maybe they’re more human than human? One wonders.
benignintervention@lemmy.world 3 days ago
foofy@lemmy.world 3 days ago
It’s not the most welcoming read in terms of sci-fi but I love that book. That and its sequel (Echopraxia) do what sci-fi is supposed to do (make you think).
benignintervention@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I’m a sci fi nerd from foundation to Hyperion to the expanse but I’ve never heard of Blindsight, and you’ve absolutely sold me on it
shalafi@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Found it at the library 10+ years ago, read the flyleaf, thought, “This is pants on head idiotic. I need a break on something light. Let’s try it.” I have never been more wrong in judging a book by it’s cover.
Read it probably 13-14 times, kinda embarrassing. Anyway, the ship’s captain is a vampire. And it’s hard sci-fy, no sparkles.
explores whether we’re conscious or not
Holy shit will you love Blindsight. You are going to scream with joy. Want the epub?
knightly@pawb.social 2 days ago
LLMs are just massively-multidimensional maps of human language use. It is academically interesting to have developed both the map and a method for plotting a course through language-space using a prompt as an initial vector, but human intellience is not in language. Rather, language is part of human intelligence, and mapping it to ever more computationally-expensive distances is never going to chart a path to the digital mind that all the tech billionaires are all desperate to enslave.