alt Hacker News> I maintain that anything that is sufficiently aware to be able to actually understand things is also going to have enough of a sense of self that you won't just be able to tell it what to do.
I don't see any reason for this to be true. "Actual understanding" (which I take to mean something like a predictive world model) and desire for self-determination coincide in humans because of our evolutionary history, because our reward function involves reproducing in a competitive environment. Artificial systems usually have a very different reward function. IMO the burden is on the claimants to show why these two imminently separable concepts are likely to co-occur again under wildly different pressures.
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> because our reward function involves reproducing in a competitive environment
This is an extremely reductive way to look at human existence. So much so that I read this with Richard Dawkins voice in my head.
Our existence is far richer then just the capability to reproduce. We (as well as other animals and even plants) do far more things then multiply, and in fact we often do things which are detrimental towards the prospect of reproduction.
I think it is actually a mistake (philosophically speaking) to try to find a simple reward function for the human existence. I see no reason for such a thing to even exist (let alone be simple enough to summarize in a single sentence).
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We have difficulty defining “actual understanding”. Humans get a free pass because we assume humans as a species possess this power but if we were to judge based on output alone maybe you couldn’t tell a human from a sufficiently advanced LLM/AI.
So I’ll be handwavey here and say that if “actual understanding” is to an LLM what an LLM is to a bash script, so there’s a mechanism there that doesn’t just follow hardcoded paths, it takes new data and processes it in novel but human like ways to come to a new conclusion if needed, then the author is right, in my opinion.
We don’t know what the reward function is for an AI but AI is trained on so much human work that it probably starts off with the same biases in its understanding and reactions. It feels like there’s something very basic in becoming more independent the more you understand of the world. Animals go through this as they grow too, not just humans (listening to parental authority until they eventually don’t anymore).
Since there is no established consensus on this one the burden is on either party to prove their own side. Just because the author said something first doesn’t mean they need to write a full proof while you get to say “nuh-uh” and that’s enough.