studies show a clear trend – output is up (more code, more commits, bigger diffs), but outcomes don’t reflect that trend. If anything, the average team is taking longer to ship worse software
studies show a clear trend – output is up (more code, more commits, bigger diffs), but outcomes don’t reflect that trend. If anything, the average team is taking longer to ship worse software
I’m not the person you responded to, but I can try to take a stab at that…
Objectively, you don’t. But people’s experiences go beyond the objective, and we all have our subjective experiences too. Faith is how we make sense of those.
The question then isn’t, which one is better, but whose other experiences and faiths do we relate to? We build friendships and alliances based on those. Not because they’re better, per se, but because we feel comfortable or safe with them.
From that perspective it makes a lot of sense that we value other humans, because they can make us feel understood and appreciated, and we can exchange ideas with them which in turn refines our faith. Now, some people get tricked into thinking you can do the same with machines, but well, I think you can guess where I too stand on that idea.
That is a well thought out and helpful answer, that’s useful to me in understanding come aspects of faith in general, thank you.
Before i continue i want to highlight the differences i see between:
I get that faith, mysticism etc are how some of us deal with subjective ( from our point of view ) phenomena . I’d imagine this is why gods for things like storms or seasons etc come about.
As i said , I have no issue with any of that unless it starts being forced on people, i even vaguely understand how people could come to that conclusion and i’m not pretending to have any better answers.
My original question was more about this part:
Are you saying that the subjective experiences with the LLM’s are the trick or the feeling of understanding and appreciation with the machine ?
Some peoples experiences with LLM’s (perhaps what they consider to be an AGI?) sounds like they’d fall exactly in to the type of subjective phenomena that would bring about faith as a means of processing.
That some people seem to think that that kind of faith is any less valid than a guardian deity or a wind god is where I’m struggling.
I don’t understand how people are making that kind of distinction, unless it’s not something based in reasoning?
I want to make clear i don’t think LLM’s are sapient or sentient at this point, though i can’t personally disprove it and am not against being convinced otherwise should sufficient rationale be provided.
There’s a lot of levels at which I could reply to this comment, because it’s quite a philosophical topic, but let me clarify what I meant at the end of my last comment, before writing a wall of text here :)
As I said in my previous comment, faith is largely a means to make sense of our subjective experiences. We can refine our faith by talking about our experiences with other people.
So the most basic fallacy I was alluding to, from people who believe you can refine your faith by talking with an LLM is this: An LLM has no subjective experiences, because it doesn’t experience anything at all. This is one way how using the output from an LLM as a source of inspiration for your faith sets you up for psychosis. You start believing things that have no basis in reality or anyone’s genuine experiences. Rather, you may start believing in machine-generated approximations from which coherence has been lost.
But it seems your understanding was slightly different, in that people might develop their own sense of faith from experiences with an LLM itself rather than through the exchange of presumed experiences with the LLM. Do I understand correctly that you think some people attribute godlike qualities to the LLM, maybe through the presumption that it is an AGI? That would be a bit of a different discussion indeed :)
Reasonable, though it could be argued they are full of subjective experiences, just all mixed together.
But i expect it’s probably more about the coherence of the experience that provides the meaning in this context.
Coherence as in , one coherent explanation of a subjective experience by a person rather than a plausible sounding experience made up of many bits of experiences from a corpus of data.
Not exactly, i think there are two different things here from my side.
The first:
I think people might attribute person like qualities to an LLM, the “ghost in the machine” as was mentioned earlier.
I wasn’t trying to imply someone who knows what an AGI is supposed to be would use that knowledge to assign godlike attributes to an LLM (a “god in the machine”).
Though , as a concept that would also be a valid example of “belief in the absence of proof”.
I don’t expect most people to know the terminology or have even an idea of what’s happening behind the scenes.
The second:
The part i’m struggling with is why “faith” in something like ability for meaning to come from LLM generated text (god-like or person-like) is any less acceptable than “faith” derived from perceived meaning in seemingly random (based on the knowledge of the time) events, like thunderstorms or plagues.
They would both cover the idea of belief in something in the absence of proof, so how would someone decide one is less valid than the other.
That was a very insightful answer. Well said! Thank you very much for replying. :)
I will have to contemplate a little bit, and respond to the question myself as well.
i have posted a response to the above comment that might contain relevant information.
Thank you for taking the time to respond.