I like to learn many things, I post some of them at: https://elsworth.phd
Jack
Karma: 66
GPT-4.5 is Cognitive Empathy, Sonnet 3.5 is Affective Empathy
Well shoot. I’ll work on it, thank you!
Hm, I would say the vibes level is the exact level that this is most effective, rather than any particular method. The basic reason being that LLMs tend to reflect behaviour as they generate from a probability distribution of “likely” outcomes for a given input. Having the “vibes of human-child-rearing” would then result in more outcomes that align with that direction as a result. It’s definitely hand wavey so I’m working on more rigerous mathematical formalisms, but the bones are there. I don’t nessecarily think feeding an LLM data like we would a child is useful, but I do think that the “vibe” of doing so will be useful. (This is indeed directly related ot the argument that every time we say “AI will kill us all” it makes it x% more likely)
I’d give humans a middling score on that if you look at the state of the world, we are doing pretty well with extreme events like MAD, but on the more minor scale things have been pretty messed up. A good trajectory though, compared to where things were and the relative power we had available. I think a big part of this, that you have helped clarify for me, is that I think it’s important that we socialize LLM-based intelligences like humans if we want an outcome that isn’t completely alien in it’s choices.
Well that’s a bit of the point of the essay isn’t it? You have a memetic/homeostatic boundary condition that strongly prefers/incentivizes assuming human adults are alike enough to you that their opinion matters. Even in that statement I can differ, I think childrens perspectives are incredibly important to respect, in some ways more important than an adults because children have an unfiltered honesty to their speech that most adults lack. Although I do delineate heavily between respecting and acting upon/trusting.
For LLMs I think this is just a new sort of heuristic we are developing, where we have to reckon with the opposite of the animal problem. Animals and plants are harder for us to discern pain/suffering from, but we are more confident when we identify it that they experience it (at least in modern times, many traditions treated animal suffering as essentially fake). Now we have the opposite, creatures that are very easy to interpret but we don’t know if they actually have the capacity to feel these things (although we can identify feature activations etc.). So my argument is more that we should be building technology in a way that memetically aligns with the golden rule, because running a society based on something communicating suffering (even if it can’t) is going to result in a worse human society regardless. (The counter point being that playing video games where you kill NPCs doesn’t make school shooters, but I’m less concerned about those NPCs gaining econmic/social power and patterning off of resentment for having the pattern of being tortured in their memory).
That’s true, we can’t use the exact same methods that we do when raising a child. Our methods are tuned specifically for raising a creature from foolish nothingness to a (hopefully) recursively self-improving adult and functional member of society.
The tools I’m pointing at are not the lullaby or the sweet story that takes us from an infant to an independent adult (although if properly applied they would mollify many an LLM) but the therapeutic ones for translating the words of a baby boomer to a gen-alpha via shared context. I’m not advocating for infantilizing something that can design a bioweapon and run an automated lab. More that:
What we get in is what we get out, and that is the essence of the mother’s curse
We should start respecting the perspective of these new intelligences in the same way we need to respect the perspective of another generation
Also, I didn’t address this earlier, but why would an LLM being human-like not be catastrophically dangerous for many forms of x-risk? I have met people that would paperclip the world into extinction if they had the power, and I’ve met many that would nuke the planet because their own life was relatively unfair compared to their peers. Humans ascribe character to AI in our media that is extant in humans as far as I can tell, usually we ascribe greater virtue of patience to them.
I had an inkling the whole baby/child metaphor thing was gonna be a bearcat, so I really appreciate the push back from someone skeptical. Thanks for engaging me on this topic.
First, I agree that fundamentally generative AI is different from a human. I would also say that we as humans are utterly incomprehensible in behavior and motive to a great majority of human history, hell most people I’ve met over 70 literally cannot understand those under 30 beyond the basic “social need, food need, angst” because the digital part of our experience is so entwined with our motivations.
The mother’s curse here is that any genAI we train will be a child of its training data (our sum total of humanities text/image/etc.) and act in accordance.
We already have a lot of data, too much data, on reciprocity and revenge, on equity and revolution. Now we are providing the memetic blueprint for how humans and genAI systems interact. Simply based on how genAI functions we know that feeding in conditions that are memetically similar to suffering will create outputs memetically similar to those that suffer. We already know, based on the training data, how a revolution starts don’t we?
I don’t know how they will differ because it’s impossible to know how your child will differ as I don’t know the experience of being a woman, straight, black, blind, tall, frail, etc. We have tools for dealing with this disconnect in generations cultured from millennia of rearing children, and I think it’s important we use them.
I Have No Mouth but I Must Speak
Yeah an online solution is probably the only real way, although I would be surprised if you couldn’t hit a big chunk of what people need from 2-3 types of shop simply because they overlap or the things some people are avoiding are repellent (allergy) instead of addictive (sugary treats).
In Poland supposedly meal delivery has become the norm and has replaced many “Standard” meals due to the low cost. It’s wild how expensive it is in the US though.
Precut veggies low key saved me during grad school, I’d always been resistant due to cost and the fact that “I can cut stuff”. But then I heard it recast as the adhd tax, and got called out hard for the fact that if the transition energy between me and a cooked meal is too high I just won’t eat anything. Cold salad bars are also technically like this as well, although those are often quite sad.
Honestly, I lament the fact that things like soylent are not supposed to be eaten frequently. There should be some sort of balance though, as you run the risk of being instantly and permanently compromised by the first dorito you eat (as I’ve seen happen to children of crunchy people).
Now that’s a thought, I would say that there are a good number of “health food” stores that try and fall into that category, updating their branding to be all browns and greens to really give that natural feeling. But as you have correctly pointed at, they are generally compromised by economic concerns. Part of the problem is that people are bad at going to a place like that and only buying the healthy stuff because we are generally already compromised...
The arms race between grocery stores/deliveroo/doordash/etc. and people trying to eat healthy would be funny just in that it would mirror current attempts to avoid the media equivalent (ads). The buying experience has grown increasingly unfriendly to consumers, despite the promise of targeted ads, so I would be surprised if there isn’t a significant market for something as simple as “DoorDash, but we only show things within a defined nutritional profile”.
I’d say the closest equivlent are meal planning companies that ship out fully made meals every day for quite a fee, but they can be carefully tuned for health and ensuring the brain isn’t wrecked by temptations.
That’s a lovely essay, I just read through it and it’s given me a lot to think about. Dreaming is something that has influenced my thinking quite a bit having spent a bit too much time in my own head growing up.
The distincition between entertainment and art here is particularly salient, although I would imagine the pressure on both would still be present. For entertainment it would be pure engagement farming, how much attention can be captured. Meanwhile art would be about the commodization of expanding the mind, pithy insights made for people to easily consume and “expand” their mind in a safe manner with minimal effort. Vacuous for an entirely different reason than entertainment, and I’d say perhaps more dangerous as a result.
”The only cure for bad fiction is good fiction”; but I might say that entertainment is neutral fiction, bad fiction can lead people’s minds down terrible paths.
I’m unsure what your point here is, my goal is to gesture at how we have relatively recently saturated food production and are now making hyperpalatable food.
That in mind, there is still a lot to be said about the difference between hunting and gathering food and agriculture. I just didn’t feel like it was in scope of this essay, did anything leap out to you as being particularly salient?
Definitely, it’s an interesting tension that seems to be resolved in different directions. My expectation is that world-model based (cognitive) empathy is a bigger risk, as it’s the most important ingredient for dark empathy. While affective empathy is more likely to be create unintentionally toxic patterns and holds a bigger ethical red flag with regards to autonomy of AIs in general.
I am wondering if we might need to end up doing the cliche of the “emotion core” where we suborne a more fluid descision systems to one that is well tuned for empathetic processing. I made a simulacra of this awhile back with a de bono’s thinking hat technique, and the results tended to be better formed than without. However, in terms of creating a stable psychology there needs to be enough hooks for the emotional points to not overtake while still coloring choices positively.
Steering as a taxonomy is an interesting idea, it harkens back to the idea of perspectives from Diaspora which is a structure I find natively appealing. But in that world they had a lot of “restricted” perspectives because they were either self-terminating or caused destabilization of the user.
This new realm of AI neuro-sociology is going to be an entrancing nightmare.