Sorry, just so I fully understand your comment - your claim is that asking it to “explore that idea further” and “write the paper in latex” constitutes “taking the horse to the water and making the horse drink”?
While I also do not think AI is conscious, I don't find your argument particularly compelling as you could have an equally mechanistic description of how human intelligence arose simply from a process of [selection/more effective reproduction]-derived optimization pressure.
That is a good way to think about it. At some point, this becomes partly a matter of philosophical belief.
But I am somewhat skeptical of the idea that everything can be reduced in that way. In order to build theories, we often reduce too much.
When we build mental models of complex systems, especially when we try to treat them as closed systems, we always have to accept some degree of information loss.
So I do partially agree with your point. A mechanistic explanation alone does not prove the absence of consciousness. Human intelligence can also be described in mechanistic terms.
But I worry that this framing simplifies too much. It may reduce a complex phenomenon into a model that is useful in some ways, but incomplete in others.
this whole consciousness thing is fairly easy to put to bed if you run with the ideas from things like buddhism that everything is consciousness. then none of us have to bother with silly, distracting arguments about something that ultimately does not matter.
is it helpful or harmful? am i being helpful or harmful when i interact with it? am i interacting with it in a helpful or harmful way?
i’d rather people focussed on that rather than framing the debate around whether something has some ineffable property that we struggle to quantify for ourselves, yet again.
quick edit — treat everything like it’s conscious, and don’t be a dick to it or while using it. problem solved.
I don't think that really helps. If you believe rocks are conscious, then does extracting minerals resources cause them pain? Do plants suffer when we pick their fruits and eat them? I don't see any behavioral or physical reason to think those things have conscious states.
As for what consciousness is, it's pretty simple. You're sensations of color, sound, etc in perception, dreams, imagination, etc. The reason to dismiss LLMs as being conscious is those sensations depend on having bodies. You can prompt an AI to act like it's hungry, but there's really no meaning to it having a hungry experience as it has no digestive system.
>As for what consciousness is, it's pretty simple.
2000+ years of philosophical thought would disagree. I don't believe biological stuff has a magic property that embues some intangible "consciousness" property. It makes more sense to me that consciousness is just a fundamental property of all matter.
> consciousness is just a fundamental property of all matter
... Does that really make more sense than as an emergent property of the arrangement of matter?
Consciousness is something you can perceive, so it must have some physical presense in the universe, which must be through some fundamental property of matter, in my opinion.
The ability to be aware of consciousness itself as some process that is happening elevates it above a mere emergent property to me.
hmm.... That also seems like a reasonable framing.
But the original article is, first of all, arguing that we should de-anthropomorphize AI. My point is only that, from the perspective of human cognition, anthropomorphizing can sometimes be useful. In practice, though, I think I am mostly on the same side as you.
To be honest, I have not thought about this topic very deeply. If we debated it further, I would probably only echo other people’s opinions. As you know, when something complex is compressed into a mental model, some information is always lost. In this case, the compression may be too large to be very useful.
I have not spent enough time thinking about this issue on my own. I also have not really imitated different positions, compared them, and tested them against each other. So my current thoughts on this topic are probably not very high-resolution.
In that sense, I may agree with you, but it would not really be an answer in the form that my own self recognizes as mine. It would mostly be an echo of other people’s opinions.
Anthropomorphizing is giving it 'human' qualities. Intelligence and consciousness are not solely human qualities. Treating things with kindness and respect does not require anthropomorphizing. LLM's DO NOT THINK LIKE HUMANS (if they 'think' at all): and treating them like they think exactly like us is probably going to lead bad places. I treat them like an alien mind. Probably thinking, but in an alien way that's hard to recognize (as proven by these discussions) as 'thinking' (and also... if experiencing: through a metaphorical optophone).
Historically we have used intelligence as a way to distinguish man from animal and human from machine. We rely upon it to determine who has our best interests at heart vs who is trying to do us in. Obviously that all changes if we invent an intelligence (conscious or not) that shares the planet with us. Through this lens the term consciousness (through a few more leaps) becomes the question of “is it capable of love and if so does it love us” and if it doesn’t, then it is a malevolent alien intelligence. If it was capable of love, why would it love us? I make a point of being polite to LLM’s where not completely absurd, overly because I don’t want my clipped imperative style to leak into day to day, but also covertly, you just never know …
Is it complaining to ask for a workaround and point out HN guidelines?
> It's ok to ask how to read an article or to help other users by sharing a workaround. But please do this without going on about paywalls. Focus on the content.
I am earnestly curious to read a recounting of what was said by the Trump official.
2017: the ACLU defends Milo Yiannopoulos' right to advertise his new book. They file an amicus brief in the Supreme Court supporting a Tea Party supporter challenging a ban on wearing political insignia at polling places.
2018: the ACLU supports the NRA's First Amendment challenge to Governor Cuomo's attempt to convince NY financial institutions not to do business with the NRA.
2019: they defended a conservative student magazine which was denied funding by UCSD.
2020: they filed a brief supporting antisemitic protestors picketing a synagogue on the Sabbath. They also supported a Catholic school's religious right to make religious-based choices in hiring and firing teachers.
I'm just quoting the fruits of five minutes of research here, so I won't go on (but there's more). Is it possible that you're reacting to the radical conservative stereotyping of the ACLU rather than the actual actions of the organization?
It's very possible that I'm misinformed, but if so it was mostly from reading 'radical conservatives' like the NYT and other related reporting, along with ex-ACLU lawyers. [0]
> Starting on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations across San Francisco. This rollout is expected to take place over the next 90 days. Per 19B ALPR policy, the administration of the Flock ALPR system is the responsibility of the Investigations Bureau.
How did the Flock cameras cause two crime drops before their installation?
The article's note about 2018 is talking about extending backwards, not forwards. It's entirely accurate, and a direct quote from your link.
The chart is trending down by January 2020, changes directions (upwards) right around the March 2020 spot, and again around (down) the July 2023 spot.
The fact that they only have data going back to 2018 means it's hard to say if the pre-COVID stuff was the norm or unusual.
To be super-clear, here's the chart annotated to show that 90 day window (black rectangle) in which the cameras were installed. https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
"that drop is obviously in early 2020", to reemphasize, is several years before the cameras got installed.
I read this as 2020 was Covid related drop, it then returned to normal for 2 years, then began dropping again in late 2023. The covid blip is explained by what was going on at the time, nothing since 2023 has any explanation and could be flock
It looks like that rapid increase was a return to pre-covid normal. It never spikes above pre-covid. Given the world was returning to normal, this is precisely what you'd expect most trends to look like, something like in-restaurant dining probably looks similar.
That’s why I said “how I read this chart is ….” I don’t know what pre2018 looked like either. But on this chart, it was the precovid portion.
Nowhere on here am I seeing how covid caused a spike up, that’s what you said though and signifying our differences in reading the chart that was shown.
The data is open, and so we don't have to do the visual reasoning off an imperfect graph. SF Chronicle has done a pretty rare (but I think good journalistic practice) of specifying the source of the data: https://data.sfgov.org/Public-Safety/Police-Department-Incid...
First to match the graph you make sure you pick 'Larceny - From Vehicle' only (there are some others one might argue matter) and ensure you're only counting incidents once (many rows reference the same incident). That lets us recreate the original graph.
When looking at many things I like to look at seasonal effects just to see, and it doesn't look like they are significant here (but you can see the Mar 2020 drop to the next year quite easily which I like): https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/2/2e/SFPD_Vehicle_Bre...
I also tried overlaying various line charts but that's useless for visually identifying the break.
I like PELT because it appeals to my sensibilities (you don't say ahead of time how many changepoints you want to find - you set an energy/cost param and let it roll) and it finds that one changepoint. You can have some fun with the other algos and changing the amount of breakpoints or changing the PELT cost function. And then you can have even more fun by excluding 2020 or excluding Mar 2020 onwards or replacing it by estimates from the previous years (quite suspect considering what we're trying to do but hey we're having fun - a bunch of algos all flag Nov 2023 as some moment of truth)
Anyway, anyone curious should download the data. It's pretty straightforward to use and if I goofed up with off-by-one or whatever, you can go see for yourself.
Your analysis also supports a covid trough, not a covid peak and certainly no covid effect. I agree with other commentators suggesting that flock cameras are not the full or even most of the story, but absolutely disagree with the GP that car break-ins are some identifiable covid phenom or that the decrease is merely a post-covid return to normalcy.
Hopefully there was nothing wrong with posting a news article with a graph instead of doing the data analysis myself.
I was avoiding getting into the specifics because rather than tea-leaf-reading a picture one can simply look at the numbers themselves and they cannot support anything but that the one year period immediately following the lockdowns was much lower than the surrounding years.
And I think it was great you shared the news article! For many others, analyses one does oneself are less believable. I prefer doing it myself to convince myself but I wouldn’t expect it to convince others. Here I did it because I wanted to know what the fact is and I always have trouble with picking change points on a bar graph without all the ticks marked.
I put it at this level because it feels supplemental to your link not because it’s a debunking of your comment or whatever though perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690707 is the best place to do it.
It is very clearly advertising on their part. They have been paid to put that thing there and added the sign to announce the presence. It's like when you get your roof replaced by a business and they ask if they can put a sign in your yard. They're not doing it to make everybody know that you're getting your roof replaced, they're advertising.
thank you for the morning laugh
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