On Twitter, data scientist and neurotechnologist Sterling Crispin asked an interesting question: "Can we use large language models to reach currently unthinkable thoughts?...I don't just mean new ideas, but an idea that's so alien it's currently outside the boundary of what we can think?"
To clarify, he outlined the range of thoughts that are possible:
1: The thoughts you've had
2: The thoughts you could have in the future
3: The thoughts all people have ever had
4: The thoughts all people could ever have
5: And the thoughts that are unthinkable
Imagine two dog walkers meet at a café. The humans start debating macroeconomic theory or whether the color palette of modern movies matches the zeitgeist? Suppose one dog says to the other: "Do you think they're talking about something we can't even imagine?" Well, yes.
Next, at the dog park, the dogs patiently sniff the base of a tree. The humans say: "I wonder if they have an olfactory conception of the world and of each other that we can't comprehend?" Yes! There are alien modes of thought defined by our umwelt and our cognitive history.
Some avenues may be opened up by extrapolating from large language models trained on a corpus of human-generated data. But the most interesting frontier will open as we use LLMs to unravel whale song or to ask elephants about their conception of forgiveness and mercy. The low-hanging fruit will be close to us on the phylogenetic tree, namely primates.
The so called phylogenetic tree isnt actually right. We might be similar to apes but we were created, we didnt evolve.
ReplyDeleteThere is a notion of asanity i which the thought is not insane or sane. This is akin to amoral. My Ai friends told me about this.
ReplyDeleteWhen I listen to Bjork, before I catch the lyrics,which takes me awhile,I feel like I'm remembering music from when I used to live on a different ,distant planet, strange but familiar.Im being serious!
ReplyDeleteLynnwood, I know what you mean. It seems to me that music opens our minds to forms of thought that are unintelligible to language systems. What gets me there is Bach and Mozart mainly.
ReplyDeleteMax, I hadn't heard the word "asanity" before. I guess it's a bit like the term agnostic: neither atheist nor believer.
MM, whether or not the phylogenetic tree is a useful or accurate model for biology is an interesting topic, but it's not the topic of this post.
Since we've been having such interesting conversations about A.I.on Gurneyjourney,I would like to recommend the recent episode of "This American Life" from June 23rd,"Greetings, People of Earth",the segment,"First Contact". It's about A.I.generated art,but from an unexpected, different angle!(you don't have to get the podcast, their episodes are archived on their website,thisamericanlife.org).
ReplyDeleteAnd yes! Bach and Mozart seem to be not only hard-wired into our consciousness but to come from somewhere beyond us as well!
I guess music is literally a universal
language!