And, speaking of stochastic parrots, it’s been noted by such notables as Gwern that LLMs might well be thought of as emulators of persons or person-like things. This caused me to dust off an old idea of mine ( life after death, as a parrot ) that we might find a lot of uses for personal replicas. Of lots of real, actual people. Uses like education, advising, memorializing, leaving a legacy, debates between important figures who never met. Some of this stuff we could start doing now, but when I first wrote about it GPT-2 made it look like a maybe.
I skimmed the Pearce piece since I know his general idea about hedonics. But it seems he didn’t acknowledge where the most resistance would come from. You don’t have to look very far (e.g., on twitter) to find knee-jerk pronouncements of “eugenics!”, as if any attempt to improve humans could only be some form of hegemony.
And, speaking of stochastic parrots, it’s been noted by such notables as Gwern that LLMs might well be thought of as emulators of persons or person-like things. This caused me to dust off an old idea of mine ( life after death, as a parrot ) that we might find a lot of uses for personal replicas. Of lots of real, actual people. Uses like education, advising, memorializing, leaving a legacy, debates between important figures who never met. Some of this stuff we could start doing now, but when I first wrote about it GPT-2 made it look like a maybe.
I skimmed the Pearce piece since I know his general idea about hedonics. But it seems he didn’t acknowledge where the most resistance would come from. You don’t have to look very far (e.g., on twitter) to find knee-jerk pronouncements of “eugenics!”, as if any attempt to improve humans could only be some form of hegemony.