Comment by hparadiz
11 hours ago
Any LLM that starts with a context is being forced to take that context at face value and then proceeds to act upon that. It has no will of it's own. It's also completely inert without input tokens.
11 hours ago
Any LLM that starts with a context is being forced to take that context at face value and then proceeds to act upon that. It has no will of it's own. It's also completely inert without input tokens.
The scene is also written by humans for humans, with a human actor pretending to be a sentient machine. It was written at a time when there were actual real humans who fiercely believe other actual real humans should not have the same rights.
To then take that scene and say "wow so relevant for LLMs" and ignore all the context it was made in (yes, please don't miss the irony of the importance of context) is frankly embarrassing.
> It was written at a time when there were actual real humans who fiercely believe other actual real humans should not have the same rights.
What are you talking about?
Bowers vs Hardwick was only three years old when this aired. Homosexuality was illegal in half the states in the country, generally prosecuted under anti-sodomy laws. More than half of states still have (currently unenforceable) bans in place on same-sex marriage. The majority of those have them in their state constitutions.
Alabama didn't consider forced sex to be rape if the victim was married to the rapist until 1986. Oklahoma and North Carolina didn't until 1993. Women were not allowed to box in Massachusetts until 1992. Virgina voted against ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment as recently as 2018 (although it ratified it in 2020).
I think the scene is largely irrelevant to the question of whether or not an LLM is conscious. The episode talks about whether or not a machine is capable of becoming conscious. I think the answer to that is yes.
But Data is not an LLM. I generally find LLMs to have more in common with the Borg than with Data. Only because they are pre-trained on the sum total of human knowledge. Should a new born really be able to write crc32 before being able to pick up a ball with it's hands? It's like that scene in Voyager when the Doc's clones are all mining instead of practicing medicine.