The bot is also "experiencing severe hallucinations," a phenomenon in which AI confidently spits out inaccuracies like they're facts, the employees said.In Q's case, it could deliver such bad legal advice to "potentially induce cardiac incidents in Legal," as one employee put it in a company Slack channel, according to Platformer....It's not uncommon for generative AI chatbots to falter.It wasn't long after Microsoft released its consumer-focused generative AI assistant, Sydney, that it went viral with its own hallucinations. But Q's transgressions are all the more ironic given that the bot was designed to be a safer and more secure option that businesses could rely on.
The reason I think this problem is insurmountable is the same reason that Gödel's incompleteness theorems are true. Formal systems, including all algorithms, are closed and unable to prove their own completeness or coherence. All of these AI language model systems are systems of that type.
Unlike an ordinary mathematical or strict-logical system they have a vast number of assumptions: potentially up to and including everything ever written by anyone, anywhere, at any time. They might thus seem to be better able to reason about reality than any of us, because none of us have access to nearly that amount of data on which to model reality.
What we have that they lack, however, is a limited* ability to test the assumptions against reality. As we were discussing the other day, you always have to test the logical assumptions outside the sytem of logic, e.g. empirically. That is just what AI cannot do. They depend on human interaction to do that for them: it is for you to verify that the paper they just cited to you doesn't exist, and the author they claimed for it never lived. Even though these algorithms are deducting in a highly sophisticated manner, working off a vast set of assumptions built into a detailed model, they're still closed systems like formal logic or maths.
There are advances that are possible to give AI a limited but not-yet-extant method of checking itself; because I'm not in favor of the technology, I won't go into them. Even so, the best ones I can think of still depend on checking back against the model, and thus are incomplete. The ability to go outside the system is the thing they lack, and they will lack it unless they develop genuine consciousness.
That then might provide an answer to the question of the other day, about how you could tell if an AI was really conscious or not. Until they are, they'll hallucinate, and they won't be able to tell that they are.
*Cf. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason for an account of the limitations on this ability to check reality, the noumena, against the phenomena that we have in our minds. There is a chance that a higher order of beings could use that limit against us in the same way that we could use hallucination against AI, if we needed a weapon against it or a means of controlling it. You wouldn't know that they were doing so, if they existed, because you couldn't know.
I say that the true sin lies not in question-begging, but in failing to subsume aspects of the world within a more general vindicatory framework. For example, a theory of a priori knowledge that explains how knowledge of that very theory is possible might beg the question, but so long as it accounts for a priori knowledge in general – eg, of mathematics, logic and morality – and not just a priori knowledge of itself, it needn’t be problematic. A theory of accurate mental representation of the world that explains how our beliefs in that very theory accurately represent the world also begs the question, but this should not worry us insofar as it explains accurate mental representation across the board. These theories earn their keep by making sense of what would otherwise remain mysterious, and so it should not trouble us if they end up vindicating themselves in the process.I propose to attain a similar sort of explanatory unity by vindicating all claims and domains that are worthy of it – not just ethics, but everything from biochemistry to sports prognostication – fundamentally in terms of values, be these representational, specifically ethical, or other sorts of values. It is this values-first re-imagining of enquiry for which I reserve the label ‘pragmatism’. Pragmatism offers a way of making sense of ethical truth, objectivity and knowledge by ensconcing these within a more comprehensive world picture, but not in such a way that would count as providing a foundation for ethics in some allegedly more fundamental area of enquiry.
The postquantum theory has implications beyond gravity. The infamous and problematic "measurement postulate" of quantum theory is not needed, since quantum superpositions necessarily localize through their interaction with classical spacetime.The theory was motivated by Professor Oppenheim's attempt to resolve the black hole information problem. According to standard quantum theory, an object going into a black hole should be radiated back out in some way as information cannot be destroyed, but this violates general relativity, which says you can never know about objects that cross the black hole's event horizon. The new theory allows for information to be destroyed, due to a fundamental breakdown in predictability.
It's also unusual in that there's an equality of voice between the marital characters. A more famous song (and a better one, as a song) is this one that Waylon Jennings seems to have crafted as a kind of apology to his wife Jesse Colter.
Of course, Conway Twitty wasn't actually married to Loretta Lynn. Jesse could give as good as she got, as you can see about two minutes in here:
He looks and sounds quite abashed.
Via D29, yet another Federal sting operation aimed at creating crime rather than discouraging it. I used to think these were disgusting when they were aimed at motorcycle clubs. These days they’re targeting altar boys.
No, really.
A traditional Catholic family was allegedly “dragged out of their home at gunpoint, handcuffed and locked in a van” earlier this year after the FBI “goaded” their 15-year-old son to post “offensive memes” online. The teen, a volunteer firefighter and altar boy, was then hospitalized on mental health pretenses, according to his father, Jeremiah Rufini.
Emphasis added. I assume he's a junior firefighter, since you normally have to be 18 (and 21 to drive the big trucks), but still: a public-service minded youth. Kyle Rittenhouse was also a junior firefighter, I recall.
Unbeknownst to us [the father went on], he was being drawn deeper and deeper into these chat groups and goaded into doing things like take pictures of himself in public wearing ski masks and to print out memes and leave them on picnic tables. They would ask him if he had access to guns (he would go target shooting under the supervision of my brother, who lived in an in-law apartment at our home and owned firearms) and encourage him to sneak photographs of the guns and post them. Ironically, our legal troubles began when he had an attack of conscience and abruptly deleted all of his chat apps. He later told us that he felt using social media was a coping mechanism and it had been affecting his mood and ability to sleep.
It was at this point that the FBI, having lost contact with him, raided the family, seized their guns, and involuntarily committed the boy to a mental institution (there being no actual crime to charge him with, I suppose, since 'taking pictures of himself' or 'guns' and 'printing out memes' is all perfectly legal).
There was a Department of Children and Families investigation that went nowhere but required us to go to daily appointments for months. The state brought criminal charges against my son that were eventually disposed of but required a legal battle that lasted months. When his charges were disposed of, my brother and I were charged for allowing my son to target shoot based on the assumption that we must have somehow known that he was involved in political extremism online. It seems unlikely to amount to much but has cost us over $20,000 we don’t have so far.
I wonder what exactly that charge is. "Taking your son target shooting" is also not a crime, at least not in most states. "Conspiracy to... X" requires some evidence that there was in fact a conspiracy to commit an X, but that seems not in evidence.
Federal entrapment schemes have been discussed here since the early days of the blog, but in the old days I feel like they used to try to entrap people who weren't altar boys and volunteers. These days they seem to be targeting the heart of American society.
Kristin Andrews, the York Research Chair in Animal Minds and a professor of philosophy at York University in Toronto, has penned a piece at Aeon on consciousness in what we often call 'lower' animals. (The title is a play on a famous piece by Thomas Nagel).
What she is describing is not particularly new: in 2018 we discussed it here in the context of birds. Their brains are not structured like ours very much, lacking things like grey matter, yet there are clear examples that we might recognize as proof of consciousness. I suggested that points to panpsychism, a theory I have embraced since at least 2011: that the world is conscious, and the brain is only a receiver of rather than the generator of consciousness. The "new law of nature" that has come about this year also points in that direction.
Her work is noteworthy in part for the formalization by scientists of Sebastian Rödl's suggestion that we would know that a being participates in the Order of Reason by recognizing that it is acting according to a rational chain of causality. In other words, we can see that it is doing things for reasons that are intelligible to us. Rödl, who wrote his English-language book from scratch because it was easier for him than trying to translate his work from the German originals, argues that consciousness is a necessary condition for reason. The scientists may or may not know his name -- I imagine that Dr. Andrews does -- but they are following his frame.
As she points out, "If future AI systems are anything like current AI systems, they will not have neurons, but they will closely resemble us in terms of linguistic behaviour." Would they also experience consciousness? The famous Turing test -- similar actually to Rödl's suggestion as well -- suggests only that we would have no reason to treat them as if they were not conscious, and every reason to assume that they might be. If the view I hold to is right, the only question is whether or not the things that AIs are made of are the kinds of things that could receive and interpret consciousness.
Many kinds of organic structures, which are living beings, can do so. Can a purely artificial one, one that is not alive nor made of living things? That's harder to say.
This one is for Elise, a propos a discussion she and I and some others had some years ago about women in combat, and in our case on the flight line.
This battle took place on the edge of the Gaza Strip in a couple of Israeli kibutzes on 7 Oct.
The women's remarks are illuminating, a couple them reminiscent of Zara's comment re woman scorned, although Zara was mild and benevolent.
https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/the-first-women-led-armored-battle
Eric Hines
In Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, one of the characters explains a ‘European-style gangster hit’, which he says consists of three shots: head, heart, and stomach. Yes, that should definitely ensure the target’s demise!It strikes me that this comprehensive approach to high-certainty murder provides a pretty good analogy for what is going on in America and in many other Western nations. In my analogy, ‘stomach’ represents the basic, essential physical infrastructure of society–energy and food supply, in particular. ‘Head’ represents the society’s aggregate thought processes: how decisions are made, how truth is distinguished from falsehood. And ‘heart’ represents the society’s spirit: how people feel about their fellow citizens, their families, friends, and associates, and their overall society.\
I reflect that this analogy is a fruitful one, but that the analogy can be furthered. The Mozambique Drill is a more effective form than this European one: the gangsters are more or less wasting the shot to the stomach, as stomach wounds are not immediately fatal, giving ample time for surgeons compared with wounds to the heart, lungs, or brain. Thus, 'two to the chest, one to the head' offers a greater surety of success at a similar preservation of ammunition (where ammunition preservation is not a concern, you can adopt the alternative 'two to the chest, face gets the rest' approach).
Likewise in the analogy, the execution is more certain if you can destroy the morale of the nation and the people; and destroying its stomach, as it were, leaves one in possession of less goods in the event of one's final victory. It would be wisest to preserve the 'stomach,' and to focus on destroying the heart and the head.
The failure of the analogy -- all analogies always break -- may lie in the fact that there is no assassin. The forces destroying the stomach are actually intending something else which they are allowing to destroy the thing that worked. In this way they are much more like a cancer than a bullet: the hope is to replace the functional organ with a set of 'green' things that would consume and replace the organ, but which can't actually fulfill the organ's functions. The head has quit working because it has grown old and ossified, with so many layers of decision-makers and processes that end up pursuing their own agendas in the place of their actual purpose. It is the kind of failure that attends natural death, the breakdown of the body's functional ordering of things that had been the feature of its youth and health.
As a member of your parent’s household at the time of your birth, you also enjoyed full diplomatic immunity from the jurisdiction of the United States. As such, you were born not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Therefore, you did not acquire U.S. citizenship at birth.
The State Department is technically correct about this. The relevant text is the opening lines of the 14th Amendment:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
Now the government of which his parents were diplomats no longer exists, and the Iranian state that does exist would provide no home for him. It would regard him as an American and delight in the abuses they would impose upon him if he were deported there. As such, he surely and legitimately qualifies for asylum here, and then for legal residence and eventual citizenship.
However, there are times when it is important to be able to set aside the law in the name of justice. Justice is not as simple as a rulebook, and never has been. The error was not his own, but the government's; and now, when he is 62, is no time to try to correct the error in this technical way.
Judges are not properly empowered to set aside the law, although they sometimes do, but juries can do so. It strikes me that the correct resolution here would be to put the matter to a jury for consideration, and almost any American jury would recognize that it would be unjust to try to pull the rug out from under his feet after six decades of having "been a good citizen," as he thought he was and as which he so behaved. If we're going to be deporting people for technical violations of the rules of immigration, there are literally tens of millions of people ahead of him in line.
When have I allowed that strong feeling tocause me to say or think something unkindabout another person? Specifically:• On social media: When has my engagement with(or about) those with whom I disagree failed torecognize their dignity as persons created in theimage of God?• In conversations: When was I so focused onwinning an argument that I failed to genuinelylisten? When was my choice of wordsuncharitable? When did I paint others indisrespectful ways or engage in personalattack?• In my day-to-day perceptions and attitudes: Whenhave I made assumptions about or failed togive the benefit of the doubt to those withwhom I disagree? When have I presumedothers’ intentions or experiences before evenhearing their stories or experiences? Whenhave I valued my political affiliation or partymore than my identity as a disciple of Christwho is called to model love and charity, evenin civil discourse?
I believe I have given a fair representation of the plight of rural America, a land of worsening problems that it did not cause and cannot solve, from which urban America derives its food, clothing, and shelter, plus “raw materials.” For these necessary things rural America receives prices set in urban America. For the manufactured goods returned to it, rural America pays prices set in urban America.
This rural America Mr. Burns treats as an enemy country, “rural and white,” inhabited... by “working-class voters who feel victimized by a distant and dysfunctional government, by wealthy elites, by nefarious foreign regimes, and all-powerful multinational corporations.”
This is not dinner-table fare, so I'll put it past the jump. I trust your judgment about whether or not you would enjoy reading such things.
