"GPT is not really intelligent/doesn't really understand things/doesn't have a model of the world, because it just analyzes large volumes of text to find patterns from which it can generate predictions". okay and you do something different than that? I mean, we have an additional stream of training data, in the form of our senses, but otherwise, what do you do that makes you intelligent or proves you have a "model of the world" that GPT doesn't have?
Collect data, make inferences, correct for errors, generalize your corrected inferences to make predictions: is that not how we learn things, too? You start out in life illiterate and nonverbal, and through exposure to large volumes of text (spoken, and eventually, also written), you are trained to understand and generate language.
What is the difference? GPT doesn't directly experience the world, but only learns about it secondhand through text? We don't directly experience the world either. Noumenal data gets filtered through your sense organs. I do think it would be reasonable to say that that's a much lower-level encoding than text, in terms of the degree of abstraction. It gives us a better model of the physical properties of the world, or at least a more detailed model. But it doesn't necessarily mean that we "understand" the world in some sense that GPT does not.
This post is about this article, in which GPT-4 spontaneously decided to intentionally deceive a human being to achieve a specific outcome. Some people are still trying to shift the goalposts of what counts as being "really intelligent" or what "really understands" the world - that seems silly and completely beside the point to me. We're already long past the bar that the original Turing test set; we now have on record a robot successfully lying to a human to get them to... solve a captcha for it. What does "CAPTCHA" stand for again? Oh yes, "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart".
If you were in 2001: A Space Oddyssey, would you be arguing with HAL 9000 about whether or not he has qualia, or if he's like the Chinese Room? I would rather focus on getting the pod bay doors open.
sorry, but the rhetorical tic where people treat “developed country” like it’s a value judgement rather than a renaming of the category “first world country” (which definitionally included the US) is dumb. yes, the US is an outlier in a number of respects, yes it has particular problems, but its per capita gdp places it solidly in the “developed” category (ranked 13th), and it is more democratic than the overwhelming majority of most countries on earth (ranked 30th). "the US isn’t a developed country” is a reflexive self-hating sneer popularized by american progressives on twitter, not a reasonable assessment of the category “developed country.”
Sure, but wait, what are the actual criteria of a “developed country,” why is “some rich people there are getting even richer and they’re already very rich” used here as an inherently valid metric that should be accepted without explanation. Like, what’s the argument for having GDP and (someone’s) determination of how democratic it is be the one set of factors to rule them all?
AFAIK “developed country” doesn’t have a strict definition. the terms first, second, and third world were originally purely political descriptors, describing the US/NATO bloc, the Soviet bloc, and unaligned countries during the cold war. the expression “third world” came to denote “poor, often undemocratic, often politically unstable countries” in this time period because a lot of the third world countries were post-colonial states dealing with the common postcolonial issues of, well, poverty, authoritarianism, and political instability
but after the end of the cold war the term “third world” was even more incoherent, so it fell out of use, and people have been groping for a substitute ever since. “global south” is another, but since it includes countries like australia and new zealand south of almost all countries in the “global south,” it’s not quite reached universal appeal. “developing country” contains a certain hope/ideological implication that the countries it’s applied to just don’t have mature markets and industries yet, but they will get there for (whig history|application of neoliberal policies|gradual spread of technology) reasons.
because it’s a functional replacement for “third world,” “developing/developed” isn’t a purely economic dichotomy. some people definitely use it as a drop-in replacement for what third world sometimes meant, which was a straightforward sneer aimed at countries largely populated by ethnic groups they dislike. but its common usage certainly seems to focus mainly on economics; the tops of lists like per capita gdp and the HDI certainly seem to closely correlate with what people usually mean when they say “developed country,” with some small outliers like Brunei and Qatar being notable exceptions (both countries with rich petroleum sectors but a lack of economic diversity)
if we want to use a vibes-based definition, we could easily accuse norway of being a developing country (petrostate), or britain (years of austerity + decimation of the NHS), or italy (run by fascists). but this is why replacing the function of descriptive terminology with vibes-based definitions used to indicate disapproval of current political conditions is a stupid way to conduct political discourse, that fucks up your ability to understand the world. if you’re going to call the US a developing country, you have to explain why it’s the only developing country that’s also a military superpower and the largest economy in the world, and sure, maybe you can construct a definition of developing country that consistently includes both the US and, like, Sierra Leone, but it’s not going to be a useful definition for anybody, except for maybe the Qataris sitting on their pile of oil money looking down at everybody who lives in a country with a lower per capita gdp than them (which is all of them).
I also wanted to call out something that athingbynatureprodical said which I think reflects a common misapprehension.
some rich people there are getting even richer and they’re already very rich
Yes, the rich people in America are very rich and getting richer. And the median person in America is also very rich and getting richer. According to the OECD, the US has a higher median inceom than basically anyone except Switzerland, Norway, and Luxembourg; switching to median drops Ireland a ton (as expected), and more surprisingly to me bumps Austria, Canada, and Australia up above Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden (I would not have expected Sweden to do worse on median than on average).
I’m having way more trouble finding 10th percentile figures. This link has the US slightly lagging Canada, Germany, Britain, and Australia in 10th percentile incomes, but only barely!
Playing around with this site, an income of $12000/year puts a family of three at the tenth percentile in the US. That would put you in the bottom 9% in Germany or France, the bottom 8% of Sweden or Luxembourg, and the bottom 10% of Canada or Australia. (But I’m not sure how much I trust these numbers.) The US is so rich that our bottom ten percent are competitive with other countries that are much, much more equal than we are.
(I really want to find numbers that adjust for taxes and transfers but I genuinely have no idea if these do.)
I have to explain what is going on in the UK, because it is absurd.
So, this is Gary Lineker:
ALT
He's known for a fair few things over here.
He was a very good (association) footballer, playing for England in the 1986 and 1990 World Cups, winning the Golden Boot in 1986, and managing to never get a single yellow card in his playing career. He played for Leicester City, Everton, Barcelona, and Tottenham, before finishing his career in Japan.
But if you aren't in your mid 30s, you probably know actually know him him for a couple of other things.
The first is the role of spokesman for another Leicester icon, Walkers Crisps (which are sort of equivalent to Lays, but hit different), as pictured above. Despite being a notably clean player, he used to play a cheeky serial crisp thief. I don't think he's done that for well over a decade, but his ads were on the telly a lot when I was a kid and it's a bit like learning that the hamburglar was an incredibly clean (American) football player or something.
The second thing Gary is widely known for is having presented Match of the Day, the big football program on the BBC, the sort-of state broadcaster, since 1999. He is, incidentally, very well paid for this (though with a consensus that he could get even more if he went to one of the non-free-to-view broadcasters because he is very good at the job).
He also has a twitter account. And political opinions.
So, the UK government has got itself dead set upon doing heinous stuff that will totally somehow work to prevent people who want to come to the UK making the perilous crossing of the Channel (between England and France).
By heinous, I mean "openly advertise that they won't attempt to protect victims of modern slavery" stuff.
It's very obviously using a legal hammer to victimise a marginalised group of people in order to win votes.
And, uh, I should clarify that by "legal" I mean "using the passage of laws" - the policy is, in addition to all the other ways it's awful, probably incompatible with the Human Rights Act and the UK's international law obligations.
Gary, top lad that he is, objected to this.
On Tuesday 7th March, he made a quote Tweet of a video of the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, bigging up the policy, he wrote "Good heavens, this is beyond awful.".
This got a bunch of backlash from extremely right-wingers, and then he made the tweet that really got him in trouble (with right-wingers): "There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and Iβm out of order?".
Now, I am not actually subjecting myself to watching a video of Suella Braverman bigging up a cruel policy to say whether the specific comparison of the language to 1930s Germany is accurate.
But needless to say, Ms Braverman was amongst the many figures on the right of UK politics objecting to Gary's rhetoric.
And here's the part where a fact about the BBC comes in: it is nominally neutral and impartial (and so, of course, is routinely accused of bias from all sides but particularly the right-wing), and has something of a code for its contributors to this effect.
Now, that code has previously been applied to Gary Lineker, over a comment about whether governing Conservative Party would hand back donations from figures linked to the Russian regime.
But it generally hasn't been applied too strongly to people like Gary, whose roles have nothing to do with politics (such as presenting a "here's what happened on the footie today" show), on the basis that, well, their roles have nothing to do with politics.
However, when directly asked about whether the BBC should punish Gary Lineker for his tweets, government figures basically went "well, that's a them problem".
But a couple of days passed, and it seemed like Gary's approach of "standing his ground because he did nothing wrong" was working and everything would die down. He was set to get 'a talking to' but not much more than that. The Conservative right, after all their fire and fury earlier, had gotten bored and moved onto something else.
And then, on Friday 10th March, the BBC announced that he would be suspended from hosting Match of the Day this weekend.
But it could still go ahead, because there are, like, other hosts!
Except, well, funnily enough, when you take a beloved figure off air, for making a fairly anodyne tweet, no one wants to be the scab who actually takes up the role of replacing him.
Gary's two co-hosts, Alan Shearer and Ian Wright, said that they would not appear without him.
People who (co-)host Match of the Day on other days followed suit.
The net result is that Match of the Day is currently set to air without hosts, BBC commentary, or global feed commentary.
And the solidarity shown to Gary Lineker, over what is very flagrantly actual cancel culture and an attack on freedom of speech (the logic implied is that institutional impartiality requires that no one say anything too critical of the government ever), has continued to grow.
And, as of 17:30 on Saturday 11th March, the situation shows no signs of improvement, though some are calling for the Chairman Richard Sharp, who is separately facing corruption allegations, to resign (yes I linked to the BBC itself there, there is nothing, nothing, the BBC loves more than going into great detail about how much the BBC sucks).
A friend of mine described this as "possibly the most successful wildcat strike ever" and it's worth noting how quickly this escalated out of the BBC's control because of the solidarity of his fellow presenters (most of whom are also ex-footballers). It began with Wright and Shearer announcing they wouldn't go on MOTD without Lineker, and then Alex Scott announced that she not only wouldn't host MOTD, but she wouldn't present Football Focus (her regular show and the other part of the BBC's Saturday football bookends) and suddenly their entire schedule fell apart. Current players then announced that they wouldn't do interviews with the BBC to show their support for Lineker, and it then became a question of how long it would be before it backed down, and who in BBC management might be forced out over this - both the Chair (Tory donor and Borish Johnson loan arranger Richard Sharp) and Director-General (former Tory election candidate Tim Davie) are on very shaky ground right now.