Speaking through Zarubin, Dneprov writes that "the only way to prove that machines can think is to turn yourself into a machine and examine your thinking process", and he concludes, as Searle does, that "even the most perfect simulation of machine thinking is not the thinking process itself."
That feels similar to what Chiang is saying. The physical state of being a human is part of human consciousness. An LLM would require many more "levels" that haven't been achieved yet. An LLM with a body, sense organs, physical tools, social dynamics, etc. would all be steps on the path to a "conscious" LLM.
I'm surprised at the largely negative sentiment HN has for this essay. He stakes out his claims in a refreshing and readable way. Most of the criticisms here, and general "philosophical" LLM writings that pop up on HN are dense, unfocused and fairly inscrutable.
His certainty seems like a rhetorical style rather than a series of facts. It would be very annoying and not persuasive if he started every paragraph with some variation of, "I think" or "I believe."
I like that he makes the emotional component of his argument plain. I'm deeply suspicious of anyone would try to argue about the concept of personhood and consciousness using only logic and empirical "correctness."
Are you saying that a sufficiently advanced version of sentence continuation is indiscernible from actual understanding?
He isn't saying sentence completion is what keeps LLMs from understanding, he saying that's all they do (regardless of how advanced it is), and that isn't enough. You also need a body with senses and organs that produce a physiological response to emotions, and emotions are necessary for consciousness.
I like the Hebrew syntax of the golden rule! I've never seen it before.
I've always like the idea of taking it a step further and trying to do unto others as they would like done unto them. However, the current state of the world has made me realize that lying to people that want to be lied to creates a flywheel of negative outcomes.
I guess the better way to improve the golden rule is to use empathy to internalize and understand the things other people are looking for, that way you can keep the golden rule simple, while not assuming that others want the same as you.
...we find that we may misjudge a man's attitude, his background knowledge, his aims, his standards ; and we may learn from our mistakes and take care even beyond the golden rule. (Karl Popper)
I unironically love arguing on the internet, because you're replying to the author of the essay, but I think the text supports your comment and not his hahah.
"We lose any sense of economic purpose, and with that, social status and a perceived future." Sure sounds like someone weighing-in on the meaning of work and life outside of it...
Sim City 3k is my least played Sim City game, but this is inspiring me to take another look. I really like the sweaty micromanagement and bigger scope of 4, but maybe I will prefer 3k's simplicity in my old age.
The picture caption with a 9/11 joke is a little off-putting, but it's at least proof that this isn't AI generated content...
Your comparison just helped me understand how I feel about AI a little better. I too own a car but don't like driving, and don't like how my environment is shaped by what cars need. I use AI daily and I'm excited about it, but reshaping our whole world around it will make our lives worse.
It also gives me a better sense of what to do about it. It's not too late to stop the AI equivalent of how cars killed streetcars, vibrant communities, and literally children walking to school.
I, maybe naively, think if AI users and AI abstainers can actually talk about what it can do and what it shouldn't, we have a shot at making the world better, not worse.
I find this kind of research and political science to be ill-equipped for explaining how people and society work. Fiction like Nabokov's Bend Sinister is able to get much closer to the truth of totalitarianism because it isn't shackled by having to present a thin veneer of data and science, and is more clearly influenced by the author's experiences and POV. Social Science often acts as a cover to smuggle these personal experiences into academia and the news.
It's absurd to act like a dataset of Argentinian military promotions is rigorous or valid enough to make any kind of conclusion about how authoritarianism works. This type of "science" is no help in how we all live and work together and our individual experiences are all we really have to help us navigate society.
This made me wonder about Boris Cherny's professional career pre-Claude Code, so I did a customary "Boris Cherny wiki" Google. I'm shocked to learn he doesn't have a Wikipedia page! Is this my Hacker News bias? He's a ubiquitous online topic and has had an outsized impact on the world over the last year, but maybe I don't understand Wikipedia's criteria for biographical articles. I have a conspiratorial suspicion that Wikipedia has a (well-earned) anti-LLM bias so AI topics are unrepresented there.
>> wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious.
> You've sort of nailed it, but this isn't a bad thing. An alternative for these customers does not exist.
Yes! I'm locked into WordPress, which I hate, because it's the only platform that will allow a non-developer to maintain it if I get hit by a bus.
I bounced off of this article because I didn't like the conclusion, then provided myself a rationalization that it was probably mostly AI generated. What inspired you to engage with the article more deeply? You agree with the conclusion, but not with any of the supporting arguments.
I'm also fascinated by your compliment on of the dynasty simulator, which I found completely inscrutable. What kind of background knowledge would help understand it, economics training?
The shear volume of writing, the false rigor and vestigial artifacts (preface, interactive charts, MORE filler hidden behind accordion dropdowns) are a tell. I would be more annoyed but I'm fascinated by this kind of false productivity that AI is encouraging.
I don't agree with the conclusion anyway, as AI is CURRENTLY providing wealth to me with side projects that wouldn't have been possible to take on 2 years ago.
"The US has been acting powerful recently..." sure_jan.gif
I can commiserate with this person cooking up a rant based on a faulty initial premise but it's a doozy. Kidnapping heads of state and indiscriminate bombing campaigns with massive collateral damage certainly don't fit my conception of "acting powerful."
What a strange thing to post on a corporate CEO blog - proof that AI is making it too easy create things without asking why. How does it serve Fivetran to post open letter about why Slack sucks? This only happens if it's easy to write a couple bullet points and have Claude fill in the rest... If an LLM wasn't used they would have realized it wasn't worth a post during the process of writing it.
Those are just examples of academic/progressive jargon that I hear often in the Bay Area and in progressive circles. "Decolonizing," could mean for instance changing world history curriculum to cover non-western civilizations. "Centering" seems like maybe it just means focusing on, but there is a whole academic apparatus for designing curriculum around say, indigenous practices, and centering is the word used for that entire concept, which includes specific techniques.
I think to get the full meaning of both, you'd need to be fairly steeped in a world that uses those words all the time AND it is often used to identify people who "get it" from those who don't.
I've managed to go my whole career using regex and never fully grokking it, and now I finally feel free to never learn!
I've also wanted to play with C and Raylib for a long time and now I'm confident in coding by hand and struggling with it, I just use LLMs as a backstop for when I get frustrated, like a TA during lab hours.