Tim Scarfe: belief

Transcript context

…to me, because I I really do think that this is this is taking that sort of para paradolia, a word that I'm almost sure I'm pronouncing incorrectly, but, it's it's taking this human tendency to see patterns, especially like human patterns where there aren't any, like seeing a face where in random noise and stuff like that. It's taking that and and almost exploiting it. Right? Because we're we're not only attributing agency to these things, but in the case of AI psychosis, mean I don't know exactly what's going on there, but it certainly seems like it's people attributing agency to these things and then getting caught in a kind of feedback loop where these systems are sort of regurgitating themselves, like regurgitating the user back to themselves. Right? Because, you know, that's that's what they do in a way. What Shannon Valour talks about the idea of AI as a mirror. And I think that that's a really good analogy. It sort of reflects ourselves back to us. And in this case, I think it's happening in a really unhealthy way. I I agree with that. The the thing is though, using this technology every day, it's getting better. Now you can have a memory system, so it just all every time it does something wrong, you say, no. You know, you should have done that. And over time, you're you're building a kind of simulacrum of yourself and it increasingly does the right thing. And, you know, we can talk about the intelligence thing. I mean, yeah, it is a it is a grotesque metaphor that you can take something which I believe is is a physical property of of stuff in the universe And we can create an abstraction that that seems to work reasonably well for abstract domains like playing chess and and and so on. And, you know, these these models are becoming quite adaptive and they are they have a lot of capabilities and so on. And you see, it's just so deceptive. It might be the most deceptive time in human history because it seems like it is intelligent and and it is actually automating meaningfully human labor and lots of jobs and stuff like that. So how do we make sense of this? Yeah. I mean, it's a good question. I I I don't want to diminish what LLMs are capable of, but I keep thinking about calculators. You know, calculators took something that, and I mean like pocket calculators. Right? They took something that that like we thought of as this inherent human activity of of, you know, compute like that kind of computation, like 4 function mathematics and automated it. And it used to be that that to be a good mathematician, or a good physical scientist, you had to be good at doing that kind of work with pencil and paper or in your head. And then that stopped being true. And in some ways, you know, that was a loss of certain things. But on on the other hand, it allowed for a kind of mathematical research that could not have been done before. Right? You know, you'll hear sometimes mathematicians say things like, computers are like telescopes for mathematics. And,…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.