Comment by Certhas
7 hours ago
Humans are biological machines that generate further humans.
Lawyers and diplomats and politicians and bureaucrats are humans, that only generate text.
We are seeing LLMs have cognitive abilities that significantly exceed human abilities. At the same time, they are clearly not the same type of mind that humans are. They are something new.
I think the widespread "they are just text generators" and "they are just tools" are comforting lies rather than an honest look at what we are seeing right now. Intellectually lazy.
And by the way, there has been a long-standing consensus among ethicists, philosophers, and sociologists that technology is not value-neutral [1]. Of course Silicon Valley has a long-standing tradition of denying this.
[1] For example Footnote 1 in https://www.jstor.org/stable/27106634
or
> Lawyers and diplomats and politicians and bureaucrats are humans, that only generate text.
You think they have no lives outside their work? You think even their work has no interactions that are not written?
What is this 'mind' you speak of? As everyone else is intellectually lazy, how do you define the transformer architecture under the hood of LLMs?