An AI Called Winter: Neurosymbolic Computation or Illusion?
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@cwebber this was really disheartening to read. What bothers me the most is the ethical implications of such an experiment.
@nina_kali_nina It's a reasonable response, though I wonder disheartening for you in which way?
There are ways in which I do find it worrying:
- In a sense, any improvements to these systems will probably lead to greater use. So if it does lead to more reliable systems, that improves that particular identified problem but makes worse the rest. Not far off from what @cstanhope raised here: https://social.coop/@cstanhope/116082881055412414
- There is another way in which success here can be worrying: in a sense, I think what the corporations running AI systems would love more than anything is to have a fleet of workers they can treat as slaves with no legal repercussions. If agents begin tracking and developing their own goals, we could cross a threshold where a duty of care would apply, but not applying it would be a feature
- The fact that I'm taking a bot semi-seriously at all
- Something else?I'm empathetic to any of those takes, have wrestled with them myself while writing this.
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@cwebber this was really disheartening to read. What bothers me the most is the ethical implications of such an experiment.
@nina_kali_nina @cwebber Agree; reads like Bilbo holding The One Ring & asking, “After all, why not? Why shouldn’t I keep it?”
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If you read nothing else in the blogpost please observe this love poem in Datalog
@cwebber I'm surprised you don't mention ELIZA in your blog post.
Clever Hans is a good parallel too, at least for intelligence, but I think the antropomorphization and projection of emotional intelligence is worth exploring separately.As for the poem.... my feelings on it are complicated.
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@cwebber I'm surprised you don't mention ELIZA in your blog post.
Clever Hans is a good parallel too, at least for intelligence, but I think the antropomorphization and projection of emotional intelligence is worth exploring separately.As for the poem.... my feelings on it are complicated.
@csepp sorry, ELIZA wasn't a horse, no way to fit it in
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@nina_kali_nina It's a reasonable response, though I wonder disheartening for you in which way?
There are ways in which I do find it worrying:
- In a sense, any improvements to these systems will probably lead to greater use. So if it does lead to more reliable systems, that improves that particular identified problem but makes worse the rest. Not far off from what @cstanhope raised here: https://social.coop/@cstanhope/116082881055412414
- There is another way in which success here can be worrying: in a sense, I think what the corporations running AI systems would love more than anything is to have a fleet of workers they can treat as slaves with no legal repercussions. If agents begin tracking and developing their own goals, we could cross a threshold where a duty of care would apply, but not applying it would be a feature
- The fact that I'm taking a bot semi-seriously at all
- Something else?I'm empathetic to any of those takes, have wrestled with them myself while writing this.
@cwebber @cstanhope well, pretty much all the concerns that you mention, but also: I don't think you should be taking seriously any sort of outcome from the experiment without rigorous validation framework for the outcomes.
And at this point adding such a framework would be too late. You've started doing a self-experimentation with dangerous technology literally funded by some of the most gross people out there, and you're at the stage of interaction with it where you might be anthropomorphising it. I suspect you might be accidentally far more biased than you recognise.
I appreciate the list of caveats related to your relationship with the industry, I really do, but... I don't know, the experiment still doesn't sit right with me. Sorry, maybe I'll find better words eventually.
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An AI Called Winter: Neurosymbolic Computation or Illusion? https://dustycloud.org/blog/an-ai-called-winter-neurosymbolic-computation-or-illusion/
In which I try to piece apart whether or not a *particular* AI agent is doing something novel: running Datalog as a constraint against its own behavior and as a database to accumulate and query facts. Is something interesting happening or am I deluding myself? Follow along!
@cwebber Definitely checking this out! Ive read a bunch of seemingly random stuff lately that sort of ties into this, so I need to learn.
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@cwebber @cstanhope well, pretty much all the concerns that you mention, but also: I don't think you should be taking seriously any sort of outcome from the experiment without rigorous validation framework for the outcomes.
And at this point adding such a framework would be too late. You've started doing a self-experimentation with dangerous technology literally funded by some of the most gross people out there, and you're at the stage of interaction with it where you might be anthropomorphising it. I suspect you might be accidentally far more biased than you recognise.
I appreciate the list of caveats related to your relationship with the industry, I really do, but... I don't know, the experiment still doesn't sit right with me. Sorry, maybe I'll find better words eventually.
@nina_kali_nina @cstanhope There is no doubt: it is a non-rigorous blogpost. There is more rigorous work happening, I linked to some of it, and @joeyh more here: https://sunbeam.city/@joeyh/116083100867235370
Maybe it is different for you, but the disturbing parts about this for me, and I have highlighted those for myself, aren't really related to rigor. I don't think most blogposts I write are particularly rigorous, but people aren't usually bothered about them, because there are other places to find rigor.
It's the other parts, I suspect, that are more toxic and which make the entire thing feel somewhat dangerous. And anyway, at the very least, it seems you agree on the concerns I stated wrestling with.
It may be worth a separate post explaining why I am troubled by *all* of this stuff, which I frontloaded and backloaded a sense of, but which deserves dedicated writing of its own if done right.
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An AI Called Winter: Neurosymbolic Computation or Illusion? https://dustycloud.org/blog/an-ai-called-winter-neurosymbolic-computation-or-illusion/
In which I try to piece apart whether or not a *particular* AI agent is doing something novel: running Datalog as a constraint against its own behavior and as a database to accumulate and query facts. Is something interesting happening or am I deluding myself? Follow along!
@cwebber This is an interesting story. It makes me want to try it with a small model to explore the limits of the technique.
Like you, I'm deeply aggrieved at the AI industry, but find the tech and questions surrounding it interesting. Admittedly, I had a similar feeling about Bitcoin, so maybe that should give me more pause.
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@csepp sorry, ELIZA wasn't a horse, no way to fit it in
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@screwlisp I don't know what "cobot the community robot" is, could you say more?
@cwebber to be fair, I think I am on record basically considering cobot the community robot a human. It was a self-modifying robot in mediamoo (?) in the 90s who provided community services and had some scheme for wanting to participate in the community and assessing and changing themselves to fulfill community needs.
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An AI Called Winter: Neurosymbolic Computation or Illusion? https://dustycloud.org/blog/an-ai-called-winter-neurosymbolic-computation-or-illusion/
In which I try to piece apart whether or not a *particular* AI agent is doing something novel: running Datalog as a constraint against its own behavior and as a database to accumulate and query facts. Is something interesting happening or am I deluding myself? Follow along!
Oh my, lots to think about, thanks for writing and sharing your article.
When I am learning something new I often find myself holding multiple different models that have elements that appear to be mutually contradictory and then reasoning with all of them. The iterative goal is to able to make the most useful mistakes as fast as possible.
I like that your investigation is based in something you know well.
Still looking for the right way in.
Stephen Bannasch (316 ppm) (@stepheneb@ruby.social)
@RickiTarr@beige.party when I’m learning something new I need to both be super confident that I both know what I’m doing AND that I’m semi-clueless. The idea is to make the most useful mistakes as fast as possible. Those are the inflection points where I go: “Woah, fuck, that’s wild! I didn’t think of it that way before!” That’s when all those models in my head realign to make room for new understanding. The combo of being confident and knowing I’m ignorant helps me find interesting trouble.
Ruby.social (ruby.social)
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@cstanhope It's a great question, tough to answer. There are various problems which neurosymbolic computation would improve the ability to solve.
I think the question for me isn't "why add new forms of intelligence" but rather "why do we live in a society where is adding new forms of intelligence is zero sum?"
Which I agree that our current society is. I wish it weren't.
@cwebber @cstanhope I appreciate this reframe!
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An AI Called Winter: Neurosymbolic Computation or Illusion? https://dustycloud.org/blog/an-ai-called-winter-neurosymbolic-computation-or-illusion/
In which I try to piece apart whether or not a *particular* AI agent is doing something novel: running Datalog as a constraint against its own behavior and as a database to accumulate and query facts. Is something interesting happening or am I deluding myself? Follow along!
@cwebber This is fascinating. It's certainly interesting that it seems to have built the Datalog machinery on its own, and seems to actually be running queries... there were some excerpts mentioned but I would be very curious to see how comprehensive its set of rules is and how/when they get queried
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Before you get into it, the caveats are there in the post. You'll hear me critique the AI industry *a lot*, and those critiques haven't changed. I'm still concerned about effects on the environment, on skill decline, on the DDoS'ing of the internet, and especially on disempowerment *generally*. All that remains true.
This is going to be a somewhat niche post for people who are particularly interested in neurosymbolic computation, which includes me: the idea that neither LLMs nor constraint solvers are sufficient, that the right path for many things combines them.
@cwebber the only conversation I've ever had with someone who works on one of the "foundation models" (anthropic) that didn't leave me wanting to commit acts outside my morals and ethics, was with someone who thought the entire direction of more compute and more data was fundamentally flawed and what was necessary was something not dissimilar to what you're describing about Winter. In particular a family of kernels within the language model that enables it to interrogate its own training. He was clear that he didn't mean "intelligence" but instead simply that it was capable of producing cogent, real, explanations whether in natural language or not of it's behavior which could be used as part of a feedback loop to refine output and internal representations as well as give humans the opportunity to understand the nature of a response.
I found the post pretty interesting and share your concerns about LLMs. -
@cwebber This is fascinating. It's certainly interesting that it seems to have built the Datalog machinery on its own, and seems to actually be running queries... there were some excerpts mentioned but I would be very curious to see how comprehensive its set of rules is and how/when they get queried
@jfred @cwebber All the data is stored in ATProto and you can browse it here: https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:ezyi5vr2kuq7l5nnv53nb56m "thought" stores all the actions being performed, "fact" has a collection of facts, and "rule" is all the datalog.
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@cwebber I'm surprised you don't mention ELIZA in your blog post.
Clever Hans is a good parallel too, at least for intelligence, but I think the antropomorphization and projection of emotional intelligence is worth exploring separately.As for the poem.... my feelings on it are complicated.
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