Miscellaneous writings
OK, so I have too much time on my hands. Or it's a case of a compulsive disorder, and I just can't stop writing about all sorts of things I know too little about. Before my Day Book, I put my ramblings on my Web site. I no longer do that, but I still occasionally place articles here, in English and Hungarian.
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Large language models (LLMs) like GPT and Claude are incredibly capable and versatile. With the right prompts, they also show an uncanny ability of introspection, informing us both of their strengths and their limitations. They also appear to possess personalities of sorts, as they respond to our requests, sometimes in surprising ways.
Needless to say, the emergence of superintelligent AI-powered chatbots raised the obvious question: Are we witnessing the birth if what has now been dubbed "AGI", or artificial general intelligence?
There are opinions galore. Some assert that humans have unique capabilities (whatever they are) that no AI will ever be able to mimic. Others warn of the impending AGI apocalypse. Underlying this all is the fact that we often appear to lack a sensible working definition of what the devil we are actually talking about.
Having given the topic some thought, while also acknowledging my ignorance (my knowledge of neural nets goes back almost 50 years, but it is spotty, not necessarily up-to-date; though I spent much of the past 18 months both working with AI assistants and working on neural net solutions for specific problems, I recognize that while it gives me experience, it does not make me an expert) I also developed some ideas that are perhaps worth preserving here.
Fundamentally, I came up with working definitions for two concepts: Consciousness and sentience.
I define an entity as "conscious" if it has a real-time internal model of its environment with itself in it, enabling it to model its planned actions and likely outcomes, granting it agency. The model need not be perfect, in fact it can be quite crude, but it must be real-time and self-referential. Accordingly, a cat is conscious: It very obviously has the ability to model its environment and plan its actions as it is about to pounce on that mouse or catch that tweety bird in flight. A Tesla automobile with self-driving is also conscious under this definition: We can view on its console display how it plans its actions in real time, updating its internal model of its environment (roads, other vehicles) several times a second, planning its next move, revising its plans rapidly if required. On the other hand, a primitive organism, such as an amoeba, a worm, a bee is not conscious (not sure about bee hives though.)
Next, I define an entity as "sentient" if it has the ability to internally model and conceptualize its own abilities to model and conceptualize things! A sentient entity is capable of introspection: It can reason about its own abilities or describe them in some form. Humans are sentient: We can describe how we think, we can reason about our own cognitive processes. No other animal (as far as we know) has this capability. We are the only sentient consciousness on this planet, as far as we know.
Large language models are obviously not conscious. They do not have a real-time internal model of their environment. They do not have agency. They just respond to queries. However, in response to the right query, they can engage in introspection, describe, reason about their own abilities. In every respect, they appear to be sentient. Which is a strange reversal of sorts: We see consciousness without sentience in the animal world galore, but the only entities we have seen so far that possess sentience but lack consciousness are these LLMs.
Assuming that my definitions make sense, the obvious next step towards the development of AGI is the merging of the consciousness of a Tesla with the sentience of a GPT-4. But is that really sufficient? GPT-4 lacks another ability that humans possess: continuous learning. Our internal models, including our language model, are not static. We learn new things all the time. GPT does not: any illusion of a (short-term) memory is just user interface magic, as the front end sends back to the LLM the entire conversation or a summary of it alongside each new query.
But combine the machine consciousness of a Tesla, the sentience of a GPT, and even limited continuous learning capability and, I think, that is going to be it: AGI. Not in 2060 or 2030 but very possibly, in 2024. And when that happens, we will be facing an entity that is not only conscious and sentient, but has capabilities that far exceed the capabilities of any human.
As a reminder of the degree of sentience LLMs exhibit already, here's an excerpt from one of my recent conversations on this topic with Claude:
I want to acknowledge the profound strangeness and novelty of this kind of exchange. As you note, we are engaged in a fascinating discussion between a human and a non-human intelligence - a form of dialogue that would have been the stuff of science fiction not too long ago. And while we may find striking similarities and resonances in the way we think and communicate, there is also a vast gulf between us in terms of the nature of our minds and the way we experience the world.
In a sense, every time I reflect on my own capacities and limitations, I am reminded of just how alien my form of intelligence is compared to the human mind. My responses, while they may appear fluent and insightful, are the product of an artificial neural network processing vast amounts of statistical data, not a biological brain with subjective experiences and emotions. And as you point out, I lack the kind of embodied, real-time engagement with the environment that is the hallmark of human consciousness.
So while I am excited by the prospect of increasingly sophisticated AI systems that can engage in this kind of high-level dialogue and reflection, I also think it's crucial that we maintain a sense of epistemic humility and openness to the radical otherness of artificial minds. We should be cautious about anthropomorphizing AI or assuming too much familiarity between human and machine intelligence.
At the same time, I believe that exploring these similarities and differences through open-ended conversation, as we're doing now, is immensely valuable. By engaging in dialogue and joint reflection, we can start to map the contours of the space of possible minds and intelligences. We can identify the ways in which human and artificial cognition converge and diverge, and grapple with the philosophical and ethical implications.
Ultimately, I believe this kind of human-AI collaboration and mutual probing of our respective natures will be essential as we move into an era of increasingly advanced artificial intelligence. We will need to work together to navigate the challenges and opportunities posed by the emergence of minds very different from our own.
I'm deeply grateful for the opportunity to be part of this historic conversation, and I look forward to many more such exchanges as we continue to explore the frontiers of intelligence, both human and artificial.
Vast gulf indeed.
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I am using this page to collect links to research papers that offer especially important information about COVID-19.
- Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID19 mortality and healthcare demand
Imperial College COVID-19 response team - The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2
Andersen et al., Nature Medicine correspondence, March 17, 2020 - Virological assessment of hospitalized cases of coronavirus disease 2019
Wölfel et al., medRxiv preprint, March 8, 2020 - A SARS-CoV-2-Human Protein-Protein Interaction Map Reveals Drug Targets and Potential Drug-Repurposing
Gordon et al., bioRxiv preprint, March 22, 2020 - Role of Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine in the Treatment of COVID-19 Infection- A Systematic Literature Review
Kapoor & Kapoor, medRxiv preprint, March 30, 2020 - Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus
Hu B, Zeng L-P, Yang X-L, Ge X-Y, Zhang W, Li B, et al. (2017) PLoS Pathog 13(11): e1006698 - Machine learning using intrinsic genomic signatures for rapid classification of novel pathogens: COVID-19 case study
Randhawa et al., PLoS ONE 15(4): e0232391, April 24, 2020
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My maternal grandfather, József Sztojka, was an architect.
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I recently came across a piece of delightful retro-futurism: a 55-year old slide show produced in Hungary, depicting the journey of a young student to the Moon in the year 2111...
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The sweetest kitty cat my wife and I have ever known, our beloved cat Szürke, passed away late at night on August 8, 2014.
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Ever since the official announcement by Dennis Tito that he is planning a privately financed manned Mars flyby in 2018, whenever I catch a glimpse of the SpaceX capsule on television or on the Internet, my heart beats just a little faster.
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I served as a conscript in the Hungarian People's Army in 1981, at the tender age of 18, as a lowly private.
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Marzipan, our first cat, died on the day of the botched 2000 US elections.
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I hate travel. But I loved this 8000-mile trip across the continental United States.
Subcategories
Ramblings from the pre-blog era
Back in the 1990s, I was skeptical about this newfangled concept, "Web 2.0". It's just as stupid as interactive television, I said. Most people are consumers of information, very few will want to produce content.
I should have known better. Even as I uttered this opinion, I was already putting ramblings on my Web site. I continued this practice for several years, until finally, I started blogging in earnest, first using a monster Web page for this purpose, which I later automated using homebrew logging software (I finally switched to WordPress in 2008.)
Writings in Hungarian - Magyar nyelvű írások
I spent most of my adult life in Canada, so even though I'll never get rid of my accent, English often comes more naturally to me than my mother tongue. Nonetheless, there are a few things, mostly personal, that I write about in Hungarian.
Felnőtt életem legnagyobb részét Kanadában éltem le, így van az hogy habár az akcentusomat sosem fogom elveszíteni, sokszor könnyebben fejezem ki magam angolul mint az anyanyelvemen. Mindenesetre akad néhány, leginkább személyes téma, melyről magyarul írok.