alt Hacker NewsI watched 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was about 12 years old and I remember thinking that Frank Poole was impersonal and almost rude to HAL. I kept thinking, "Why can't you be nicer? You're treating HAL like a servant." Of course, later HAL kills him, so I had to revise my opinion.
At the end of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" [if I'm remembering correctly] Deckard finds a toad in the desert. He gives it to his wife(!) and she immediately bonds with it. Later they realize that it is mechanical (they find a battery compartment). But Deckard's wife still treats it like a real creature and wonders whether it will eat mechanical flies.
The core theme of "Do Androids Dream..." is that humans display empathy towards others, not because others deserve it, but because we are human. To be human is to empathize with other creatures, and when we stop empathizing, we stop being human.
This morning I was working with Codex and we found the solution to a really nasty bug. I was so happy/relieved/excited to have found it, and I shared my excitement with Codex. I know Codex is just a big matmul. I know it doesn't experience joy or surprise or empathy. But I still want it to behave excited, not because it is human, but because I am.
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> not because it is human, but because I am
At the risk of sounding like an LLM myself: this is exactly the key most seem to miss
You're leaving out an important aspect that Blade Runner displays. In the opening crawl replicants are called androids and this leads the audience to believe that they are mechanical. Over the course of the movie you are shown that more and more of the replicants are biological until you are forced to accept the reality that replicants are genetically modified humans.
How many humans would you damn to save that mechanical toad?
> I know it doesn't experience joy or surprise or empathy.
You don't know. You strongly feel that you know. There's no standard procedure to assess the existence of phenomenal consciousness.
I am actually writing something on this and reading a lot of research. A very fascinating idea is that the ability to anthromorphize is available to all human beings since it is a fundamental way we relate to the world. But researches have been able to find different factors that influence how much we anthromorphize things, and if those factors change our attempt to anthromorphize changes.
For example, I can log in and have my computer work perfectly and treat it as a device. But the moment something goes wrong and I am frustrated and confused at something unexpected or if i get in range, I find myself getting angry at the computer often even reffering to it as a being.
So eventually yes, we do anthromorphize because we are human but we do it because its a very important way we model the world around us.
Of course all this can also be used against you depending on how much the creator of the product wants people to form a bond with it.
Furthermore yes it is pretty possible we stop being human when we stop anthromorphizing but that's not true as well. Research has found people on the autism spectrum usually do not anthromorphize and have a problem with empathy because they cannot model others well or their own selves. But that doesn't make them non humans.
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The inverse is that calling LLMs clankers doesn't hurt them, it hurts you.
This is why I say please to agents, and I’ll say thank you or good job if I have a follow up.
Chatting with an agent using language feels like talking to an assistant.
I don’t think my meat brain is able to really differentiate between writing a message to an agent versus writing an agent to a human.
I’ll keep being polite and grateful to agents, so that I maintain those social habits for when I talk to humans.