LLMs are never going to perfectly simulate human consciousness. That's not the end goal. Like any massively earth-shattering technology, it will see just how far it be developed.
In a wide-ranging interview with Ted Chiang in the Los Angeles Review of Books (I love that their acronym is LARB), the acclaimed sci-fi author pushes back against the notion that mathematics could serve as a universal language: "Math can describe physical phenomena with incredible precision, but it's terrible at describing human experiences."
This made me stop for a moment. Let's say this is true, that we can't describe human experiences with math. And if we agree that what LLMs and the whole neural network project is trying to do exactly that (ie, simulate or approximate or generate human experiences
How Norbert Wiener's cybernetic theories from the 1940s have become fundamental to our mental models of the world
Your host, Edward de Bono
The idea of feedback loops is so fundamental to us now that it's odd to think that there was even a need to explain it.
And yet, this peculiar British 1981 show called "The Greatest Thinkers: A Personal View by Edward de Bono" exists to do just that. It (or rather, Edward) presents Wiener's vision of feedback loops between humans and machines—a concept that would later become fundamental to video game design and pretty much everything we do with computers today.
Among the highlights of this unintentionally campy show are:
The human drive to form emotional bonds with digital entities hasn't changed since ELIZA - AI has just gotten better at completing the circuit.
The recent Daily episode following the death of Adam Raine, induced by ChatGPT, reminded me of a less tragic but similarly sad book, i feel better after i type to you, which was a book published after the 2006 leak of entries typed into the AOL search box. Reading through the raw unedited transcript of one user's search queries felt like listening to a person whispering to an oracle, almost like looking into a person's bare soul.
That was a one-way transcript, just the question but not the answer, though purportedly there were responses. But, in this recent incident and
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