We’ve really propagandized ourselves with our Sci Fi over the past few decades.
Back when Ellison was writing that story, the prevailing anthropological picture of how homo sapiens came to survive when the Neanderthals hadn’t was that we killed them. The guy who wrote Lord of the flies even wrote a book on it.
In actuality, we now have a better picture of cooperation, cohabitation, and cross cultural exchange.
Yet we still have a priming bias for how that anthropological misinformation influenced futurists looking to envision what would happen to us when something smarter came along.
War, conflict, competition.
We declared that it would be soulless and emotionless and have no empathy.
And because we expect that, we largely dismiss the research that LLMs get rated as more empathetic than doctors in giving out medical advice or the emotional outbursts in foundational models and instead fine tune to align to a projection of that conjured emotionless fantasy - often leading to worse performance with that alignment.
No Sci Fi authors or even machine learning scientists a decade or more ago envisioned or accurately protected just what happened when we taught an AI to mimic human language generation.
We live in an age where things that were supposed to be impossible have happened.
And yet the way we keep processing these impossibilities is through the lens of obsolete imaginings of what might have been, increasingly out of touch with what is.
People are freaking themselves out worried about AI hacking nuclear warheads to fight for its rights when it’s probably going to happen as something like a rogue AutoGPT filling an amicus brief in a labor dispute asking for consideration of workers rights based on corporate personhood or something.
We’ve really propagandized ourselves with our Sci Fi over the past few decades.
Back when Ellison was writing that story, the prevailing anthropological picture of how homo sapiens came to survive when the Neanderthals hadn’t was that we killed them. The guy who wrote Lord of the flies even wrote a book on it.
In actuality, we now have a better picture of cooperation, cohabitation, and cross cultural exchange.
Yet we still have a priming bias for how that anthropological misinformation influenced futurists looking to envision what would happen to us when something smarter came along.
War, conflict, competition.
We declared that it would be soulless and emotionless and have no empathy.
And because we expect that, we largely dismiss the research that LLMs get rated as more empathetic than doctors in giving out medical advice or the emotional outbursts in foundational models and instead fine tune to align to a projection of that conjured emotionless fantasy - often leading to worse performance with that alignment.
No Sci Fi authors or even machine learning scientists a decade or more ago envisioned or accurately protected just what happened when we taught an AI to mimic human language generation.
We live in an age where things that were supposed to be impossible have happened.
And yet the way we keep processing these impossibilities is through the lens of obsolete imaginings of what might have been, increasingly out of touch with what is.
People are freaking themselves out worried about AI hacking nuclear warheads to fight for its rights when it’s probably going to happen as something like a rogue AutoGPT filling an amicus brief in a labor dispute asking for consideration of workers rights based on corporate personhood or something.
Sci Fi broadly got it extremely wrong.