Trying to explain to a layperson why people who found Bing’s breakdowns ‘deeply, darkly amusing’[1] were not psychopaths laughing at the suffering of a conscious being, I was reminded of the ‘Tinker Bell Theory’ of animal suffering:
“we have the view that, in certain cases, at least, animals can feel more suffering for the same event. The reason for suggesting this is that humans have many interests, and being pain-free is just one of them. … Tinker Bell’s emotions completely consume her because she is so small that she has no room for complex emotion.” ~ Moral Weights of Six Animals
This provides one extreme of a helpful continuum of feeling versus verbalization, approximately: Bambi can feel, but cannot verbalize; humans can verbalize and feel; Bing can verbalize but cannot feel.
I found this a useful intuition pump for thinking about the difference between embodied beings such as you and I, and disembodied systems such as Bing, and the relative ethical weight to give them. So much of what we call suffering is physiological, and even when the cause is purely intellectual (eg. in love)-- the body is the vehicle through which it manifests, in the gut, in migraine, tension, Parkinsonism etc. Without access to this, it is hard to imagine LLMs as suffering in any similar way to humans or animals.
Not that I think it is good or wise to laugh at Bing, any more than it is good or wise to cage and torment an animal or human.
Tinker Bell Theory and LLMs
Trying to explain to a layperson why people who found Bing’s breakdowns ‘deeply, darkly amusing’[1] were not psychopaths laughing at the suffering of a conscious being, I was reminded of the ‘Tinker Bell Theory’ of animal suffering:
This provides one extreme of a helpful continuum of feeling versus verbalization, approximately: Bambi can feel, but cannot verbalize; humans can verbalize and feel; Bing can verbalize but cannot feel.
I found this a useful intuition pump for thinking about the difference between embodied beings such as you and I, and disembodied systems such as Bing, and the relative ethical weight to give them. So much of what we call suffering is physiological, and even when the cause is purely intellectual (eg. in love)-- the body is the vehicle through which it manifests, in the gut, in migraine, tension, Parkinsonism etc. Without access to this, it is hard to imagine LLMs as suffering in any similar way to humans or animals.
Not that I think it is good or wise to laugh at Bing, any more than it is good or wise to cage and torment an animal or human.
Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”