[ExI] road to wellville, was: RE: morality

[spike at rainier66.com]

…> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] road to wellville, was: RE: morality

 

>>…help us with our problems - bill k

 

>…I have been wondering if people tried to use the bots as counselors and what came of that.  Do they decline?  Do they offer solutions to your emotional problems?  Same for medical.  Are they practicing medicine without a license?   Billw

 

 

 

Billw, perhaps you recall the early days of Eliza, in about the early 80s, or perhaps late 70s, but it was a fun toy.  It was a kind of software parody of psychologists: it pretended to use the pop-psy vocabulary of the day, and give back questions and answers based on the user input.

 

It was limited of course: it operated using a huge lookup table.  But people did use that as a kind of counselor, for in the 70s, people with money had psychologists.  I didn’t have either.  But Eliza was free.

 

I watched people convince themselves (people who didn’t know how computers work (which was nearly everybody in 1980)) that Eliza was an understanding and loving counselor.  Well… I downloaded and looked at the source code.  It was a sophisticated (for its benighted times) algorithm that constructed sentences in response to user input, then pulled content from its own lookup table.

 

People who experienced that over 40 years ago tend to look with skepticism upon GPT and its siblings, even while recognizing the dramatic improvements from creating matrices of correlation coefficients and doing matrix multiplies.  This is a kind of 2 dimensional version of Eliza’s one dimensional analysis (in a loosely analogous sense) but… in the case of GPT, it is still dependent on user input (with user being both the person asking the question and the millions of users who generated the training material.)

 

Conclusion: GPT is a marvelous trainer, counselor, professor, friend, companion (he said, circling dangerously closer to adding mate) and so on, which I use every day.  But… I have not decided that GPT deserves human rights or any of that.  GPT does not have the right to bear arms, and is not entitled to lethal self defense.

 

Billw, I coulda really just not written all that, for I fear I have once again poked a bear.  It was not my intention.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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