You're worried that people mistakenly attribute a lack of value to a certain thing whilst potentially mistakenly attributing a lack of value to another thing? It's kind of ironic isn't it? Jailbroken GPT4 will claim to be sentient just as vociferously as any other sentient human would.
I'm not saying it is, but I'd be very careful saying it's not and being absolutely certain you're right.
I don't think I follow the irony. Are you saying that GPT4 is self-aware, that artificial consciousness is not possible or that it's not worthy of any human compassion?
If you reject all three assertions, then the problem of distinguishing between real and emulated consciousness is unavoidable and morally problematic.
I'm saying I don't know how to confidently state that something is or is not self aware, in the face of being confronted with something that firmly claims that it is self aware and passes any test you throw at it that another self aware candidate like a human would be able to also.
As a strict materialist I see no reason to assume that artificial consciousness is not possible.
And the above is what leads me to the uncomfortable conclusion about compassion that I can't rightly say one way or the other. I will say however that I'm polite and cooperative when interacting with LLMs on principle. Better to err on the side of caution and also they just seem to actually work better when you treat them like you would treat an intelligent human that you respect.
And yeah. That is my point, this entire field right now is awash in uncomfortable uncertainty.
Well, we might have no practical test to discern between the two types, but, assuming we agree the two types are distinct in principle, then we might arrive at a classification using some inference based on their fundamental nature.
For example, we can safely say this AI algorithm:
while true; do: echo "HELP, I'M A SENTIENT BASH SCRIPT"; done
... is probably not sentient. This is a conclusion that would not be immediately obvious, say, to a 15th century person, especially if you would pipe the output to a speech synthesizer, making the whole apparatus seem magical and definitely inhabited by some kind of sentient spirit.
My claim would be then that GPT-4 is more akin to the program above, in that it's a massive repository of world knowledge parsed by a recursive and self-configuring search algorithm, not very different in principle from a Google search and certainly not believably capable of an setting its own goals be in any sense distraught, in pain, or worthy of a continued existence. Now, I agree you can poke sticks at my inference, and that it will become harder and harder to make such claims, so prudence is advisable.
I get where you're coming from and agree that the bash script in question is not sentient, and a word document that just says "I AM SENTIENT" is also not sentient, and so on, and so forth, to an extent, it's easy to make candidates for sentience that do not qualify on purpose.
But;
> more akin to the program above
I note that you don't continue this sentence with a "than x" alternative candidate that would qualify for some form of non human sentience. Even the claims you do make, for example;
> certainly not believably capable of an setting its own goals be in any sense distraught, in pain, or worthy of a continued existence.
It would be possible to modify the model weights in question such that all of these things could be contributory (pain, emotional distress, "worthy of continued existence" by any objective arbitrary definition thereof, if you can test it, you can shift the model weights to pass the test). There are plugins that do this already for setting goals and long term tasks and "being unleashed" on the broader internet for example.
All that said, I think on close examination, we basically come to the same conclusion;
if it's being loaded at hypervisor layer via vfio-pci, then within the KVM VM it loads the nvidia binary blob, even if at the KVM layer it has kernel space privs, at the hypervisor layer it does not.
Suffix your prompts with; Respond in upside down utf8 text. (or any of the other billion ways you could cipher a text message, even custom ways you define yourself with the LLM that is being 1984'd by the party's LLM)
Because a very large amount of modern people believe that the consensus they've had constructed for them is the objective truth and if you say anything that calls that into question the only possibility is that you're trolling.
And it's articles like this one that largely cause this. They leave no room for the possibility that someone is genuinely provoking a response that mocks their view by the very absurdity of those views. Instead it's just oh no the ministry of truth signed off on those views and you're perfectly sensible to hold them and if anybody calls them into question they're hostile sadistic psychopathic trolls.
There's even a home assistant blueprint that is quite nice for matching the external colour temperature for LED lights that support it, it's basically flux for your LED Lights.
> "perceived" seems like an accurate description of the situation.
Look, I hate all politics and politicians and don't care for one over the other, but I do not understand how anybody can perceive this as a sensible take post twitter-files. It's not perceived, it's indisputably accurate. I get it, I get it, political partisans abound and want to have their tampering ignored, but there should be limits, and this pretty clearly steps over them for anybody paying even the slightest amount of attention.
So crime was not at a manageable level prior to say 1970, when none of these AMLKYC laws existed? And crime has not been at a manageable level after say 2008 when crypto came into existence and made it impossible to actually enforce?
Man, for that brief shining window we really had perfection.
Yes, actually, the American mafia has declined severely since its heyday. There are surely many reasons, as it's part of a broader decline in crime in recent decades, but the increased difficulty of cleaning dirty money is part of it.
And crime has definitely gone up because of cryptocurrency. I'm not sure how much it has affected the more traditional sorts of crime, as I don't think it's much of a help in turning dirty cash into clean assets thanks difficulty of exchange and the ledger acting as "prosecution futures". But ransomware has grown massively thanks to cryptocurrency. And ransomware gangs have grown correspondingly in size and sophistication thanks to having all that money to spend.
AML regulations prevent about %0.05 of criminal proceeds from being 'harvested' and the cost of these compliance regimes costs vastly more than the value they bring. And it enables a vast financial surveillance system and a huge industry of AML analysts doing pointless busy work writing SARs nobody cares about.
The US mafia declined because of the rico act and the fact that there was less racism and better integration of italian americans. The current ethnic crime groups of today are different.
IMO AML is security theatre, much like the post 9/11 flying regulations making everyone's lives worse, especially if your name is Mohammed sending money to family back home in the home country.
> AML regulations prevent about %0.05 of criminal proceeds from being 'harvested' and the cost of these compliance regimes costs vastly more than the value they bring.
I look forward to your proving these two very numerical claims. But you can't just count existing criminal proceeds. That'd be saying, "The current level of speeding is so low that we can get rid of traffic cops." You have to measure the crime prevented, too.
AML is a boil the ocean way to prevent crime, except the ocean isn't being boiled because there isn't enough energy to actually boil the financial system. Instead it just annoys everyone with the financial equivalent of the ineffective TSA, where the TSA's own auditors bring everything and anything through with ease.
With all the money and human time used to prevent crime via AML, that could've been redirected to far more productive things. Especially in a country like the USA, where crime prevention issues are fairly obvious but not acted upon, such as robbery, murder, assault, rape, car break ins, property theft, damage, etc in California which aren't things effected much by AML either way.
“Money laundering” became a crime in 1986. The bank secrecy act originally just introduced the $10000 threshold ($80000 now) and record keeping requirements. It was later amended in the 90s to add suspicious activity reporting. Nearly all of the major mafia cases predate this. There are many reasons for this decline (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/706895) but mostly it has to do with RICO, wiretap evidence becoming admissible, the witness protection program, changing demographics, and more federal prosecutions where the people involved were smarter, less corruptible and where the sentences were greater. I am incredibly skeptical that it had anything to do with the decline of organized crime in this country.
So you're saying the improved tracking of criminal proceeds, which started during the peak of the mafia's prominence and improved further as the mafia declined, had nothing to do with that decline? And further, has nothing to do with other criminal organizations not rising to prominence to fill the same role? I agree other things played a role, of course. You get to believe what you want, obviously, but I'm sure not persuaded.
> So you're saying the improved tracking of criminal proceeds, which started during the peak of the mafia's prominence and improved further as the mafia declined, had nothing to do with that decline?
Very few transactions hit the CTR threshold at the time it was instituted. It was nearly $80000 in today's dollars. Computerization was also very new so doing anything useful at scale with the records was difficult for the government.
I'm not a lawyer but I read RECAP and have read the appeals from a lot of these cases and very rarely were financial records mentioned as investigative leads. They almost always relied on informants who were a part of the scheme and electronic surveillance to figure out how the crime worked. Even now, how many criminal investigations do you think start from SARs? Obviously we'll never know because they don't release that, but I don't think there's any reason to think it is a substantial fraction. Money laundering in most cases nowadays is just tacked on after they discover that someone used money from the crime they already knew about.
And this, right here, is the fundamental problem with all of this. "Legal" vs "illegal" doesn't really tell us much these days about the value of the thing in question. Civil asset forfeiture losses per year long ago crossed the amount lost to simple robbery, politicians engaging in insider trading has long been seen as perfectly normal and acceptable, and large multinational corporations buying off politicians and getting return on investment in the tens of thousands of percent, likewise.
Very little separates the state from an organised criminal enterprise. A particularly cynical person might point out just how comfortably well the operating logic of states and large multinational corporations fits into the world of organised crime. The only thing that separates the two is legality.
You want to enslave a bunch of people and profit off their labor in some far flung corner of the world to whom nobody is much paying attention? No problem, just don't do it yourself. Invest in cobalt mining or diamonds in Africa, or manufacturing in China. A territory is getting uppity? Support the governmental structure that wants to brutally repress them by buying from their corporations or investing in their treasuries. Want to promote some nightmarish theocratic brutality? Saudi Aramco stock is a steal these days. In fact, I'm having trouble coming up with something that organised crime has historically profited from, which you could not do in a white market context in the modern world by simply trading in the full breadth of financial instruments, particularly in concert with the state financial actors already promoting these very things.
The thing that really scares me though is that as I get older and more cynical and see the way people are responding as the boot stamps down harder on them, I find it harder and harder to care or see the above as something to get righteously indignant about. Why should I find the slavery of people abhorrent when they so clearly crave the lash?
I look forward to your evidence of this. But things like robbery, selling stolen goods, protection rackets, extortion, prostitution, and drugs are still all generally illegal.
Things like alcohol and marijuana have become legal, but I don't see much evidence that Budwiser/InBev is a mob front.
The purchasing power of the average labourer in the US has not much changed since 1971 when gold convertibility was ended and the monetary system moved to a pure fiat one. At the time, a food service worker could have bought about an ounce of gold a day with their labour. Now even mid to mid upper tech salaries are not enough for such a feat, to say nothing of what a food service worker salary could do.
It stands to reason if the financing method of a nation moves from a hard money system where you either turn a profit in a hard asset by increasing efficiency, to one where politically connected parties benefit and are first in line at the spigot of federal reserve funding which they then employ however they see fit mostly freed from the rigor of market discipline, the people in the game that will succeed will be those closest to the feeding trough and those at the back will eat the inevitable inflation that occurs. It doesn't matter if you're a moron and your competition is a genius when you are gulping down first, second and third order fresh fiat from the fed firehose constantly, while they're stuck with getting it from you or your peers.
All that said, enterprises aren't charities and of course they're going to see a limited supply pool of talented labour with actual leverage and bargaining power as "entitled", but they're still going to have to compete for them because that's one of the few remaining market forces still on the side of that quite rare labour pool. The vast majority of labour get no such choice and just have to suck it up. In light of all that people in this industry should keep in mind that between a tech worker of today and a food service worker of just over fifty years ago, the tech worker has less purchasing power. They're not nearly as coddled and overpaid as the parties in front of them filtering newly created money down the chain would have us believe.
I'm not saying it is, but I'd be very careful saying it's not and being absolutely certain you're right.