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0 pointsvundercind1y ago0 comments

If you didn’t know what an airplane was, and saw one for the first time, you might wonder why it doesn’t flap its wings. Is it just not very good at being a bird yet? Is it trying to flap, but cannot? Why, there’s a guy over there with a company called OpenBird and he is saying all kinds of stuff about how bird-like they are. Where’s the flapping? I don’t see any pecking at seed, either. Maybe the engineers just haven’t finished making the flapping and pecking parts yet?

Then on learning how it works, you might realize flapping just isn’t something they’re built to do, and it wouldn’t make much sense if they did flap their wings, given how they work instead.

And yet—damn, they fly fast! That’s impressive, and without a single flap! Amazing. Useful!

At no point did their behavior change, but your ability to understand how and why they do what they do, and why they fail the ways they fail instead of the ways birds fail, got better. No more surprises from expecting them to be more bird-like than they are supposed to, or able to be!

And now you can better handle that guy over there talking about how powerful and scary these “metal eagles” (his words) are, how he’s working so hard to make sure they don’t eat us with their beaks (… beaks? Where?), they’re so powerful, imagine these huge metal raptors ruling the sky, roaming and eating people as they please, while also… trying to sell you airplanes? Actively seeking further investment in making them more capable? Huh. One begins to suspect the framing of these things as scary birds that (spooky voice) EVEN THEIR CREATORS FEAR FOR THEIR BIRD-LIKE QUALITIES (/spooky voice) was part of a marketing gimmick.

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hackinthebochs1y ago

The problem with this analogy is that we know what birds are and what they're constituted by. But we don't know what thinking is or what it is constituted by. If we wanted to learn about birds by examining airplanes, we would be barking up the wrong tree. On the other hand, if we wanted to learn about flight, we might reasonably look at airplanes and birds, then determine what the commonality is between their mechanisms of defying gravity. It would be a mistake to say "planes aren't flapping their wings, therefore they aren't flying". But that's exactly what people do when they dismiss LLMs being presently or in the future capable of thinking because they are made up of statistics, matrix multiplication, etc.

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hackinthebochs1y ago

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