The thing is, if you get suspicious you don’t immediately leap to the conclusion of chatbots. Nobody glances around, realizes everyone is bland and stupid and thinks,” I’ve been fooled! An AI has taken over the world and simulated chatbots as human beings!” unless they suffer from paranoia.
Your question, “How much more sophisticated would they need to be” is answered by the question “depends”. If you live as a hermit in a cave up in the Himalayas, living off water from a mountain stream and eating nothing but what you hunt or gather with your bare hands, the AI will not need to use chatbots at all. If you’re a social butterfly who regularly talks with some of the smartest people in the world, the AI will probably struggle(let’s be frank; if we were introduced to a chatbot imitating Eliezer Yudkosky the difference would be fairly obvious).
If you’ve interacted a lot with your friends and family, and have never been once suspicious that they are a chatbot, then with our current level of AI technology it is unlikely(but not impossible) that they are actually chatbots.
[Please note that if everyone says what you expect them to say that would make it fairly obvious something is up, unless you happen to be a very, very good predictor of human behavior.]
Thanks for the response. Yes, it depends on how much interaction I have with human beings and on the kind of people I interact with. I’m mostly interested in my own case, of course, and I interact with a fair number of fairly diverse, fairly intelligent human beings on a regular basis.
If you’re a social butterfly who regularly talks with some of the smartest people in the world, the AI will probably struggle
Ah, but would it? I’m not so sure, that’s why I made this post.
Yes, if everyone always said what I predicted, things would be obvious, but recall I specified that random variation would be added. This appears to be how dream characters work: You can carry on sophisticated conversations with them, but (probably) they are governed by algorithms that feed off your own expectations. That being said, I now realize that the variation would have to be better than random in order to account for how e.g. EY consistently says things that are on-point and insightful despite being surprising to me.
Another trick it could use is using chatbots most of the time, but swaping them out for real people only for the moments you are actually talking about deep stuff. Maybe you have deep emotional conversations with your family a few hours a week. Maybe once per year, you have a 10 hour intense discussion with Eliezer. That’s not a lot out of 24 hours per day, the vast majority of the computing power is still going into simulating your brain.
Edit: another; the chatbots might have some glaring failure modes if you say the wrong thing, unable to handle edge cases, but whenever you encounter then the sim is restored from a backup 10 min earlier and the specific bug is manually patched. If this went on for long enough the chatbots would become real people, and also bloat slow, but it hasn’t happened yet. or maybe the patches that dont come up in long enoguh get commented out.
The thing is, if you get suspicious you don’t immediately leap to the conclusion of chatbots. Nobody glances around, realizes everyone is bland and stupid and thinks,” I’ve been fooled! An AI has taken over the world and simulated chatbots as human beings!” unless they suffer from paranoia.
Your question, “How much more sophisticated would they need to be” is answered by the question “depends”. If you live as a hermit in a cave up in the Himalayas, living off water from a mountain stream and eating nothing but what you hunt or gather with your bare hands, the AI will not need to use chatbots at all. If you’re a social butterfly who regularly talks with some of the smartest people in the world, the AI will probably struggle(let’s be frank; if we were introduced to a chatbot imitating Eliezer Yudkosky the difference would be fairly obvious).
If you’ve interacted a lot with your friends and family, and have never been once suspicious that they are a chatbot, then with our current level of AI technology it is unlikely(but not impossible) that they are actually chatbots.
[Please note that if everyone says what you expect them to say that would make it fairly obvious something is up, unless you happen to be a very, very good predictor of human behavior.]
Thanks for the response. Yes, it depends on how much interaction I have with human beings and on the kind of people I interact with. I’m mostly interested in my own case, of course, and I interact with a fair number of fairly diverse, fairly intelligent human beings on a regular basis.
Ah, but would it? I’m not so sure, that’s why I made this post.
Yes, if everyone always said what I predicted, things would be obvious, but recall I specified that random variation would be added. This appears to be how dream characters work: You can carry on sophisticated conversations with them, but (probably) they are governed by algorithms that feed off your own expectations. That being said, I now realize that the variation would have to be better than random in order to account for how e.g. EY consistently says things that are on-point and insightful despite being surprising to me.
Another trick it could use is using chatbots most of the time, but swaping them out for real people only for the moments you are actually talking about deep stuff. Maybe you have deep emotional conversations with your family a few hours a week. Maybe once per year, you have a 10 hour intense discussion with Eliezer. That’s not a lot out of 24 hours per day, the vast majority of the computing power is still going into simulating your brain.
Edit: another; the chatbots might have some glaring failure modes if you say the wrong thing, unable to handle edge cases, but whenever you encounter then the sim is restored from a backup 10 min earlier and the specific bug is manually patched. If this went on for long enough the chatbots would become real people, and also bloat slow, but it hasn’t happened yet. or maybe the patches that dont come up in long enoguh get commented out.