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Comment by xerox13ster | Hacker News Reader

Anthro means human and these are not human. Please do not use anthropology or any derivative of the word to refer to non-human constructs.

I suggest Synthetipologists, those who study beings of synthetic origin or type, aka synthetipodes, just as anthropologists study Anthropodes

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May I humbly submit:

Automatologist: One who studies the behavior, adaptation, and failure modes of artificial agents and automated systems.

Automatology: the scientific study of artificial agents and automated-system behavior.

Greek word derivatives all seem to be a bit unwieldy; Latin might work better.

While the names aren't set yet, the field of study is apparently already being pushed forward. [1]

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-anthropologist-of-artific...

It is not in any sense of the word a being, it's a sophisticated generator that relies entirely on what you feed it.

> It is not in any sense of the word a being, it's a sophisticated generator that relies entirely on what you feed it.

OP is hedging bets in case the future overlords review forum postings for evidence of bias against machine beings. [1]

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-for-one-welcome-our-new-ins...

> a sophisticated generator that relies entirely on what you feed it

that's me!

There is no word anthropodes. :) I guess it would mean man-feet. Antipodes is opposite-feet, literally. Synthetipologist looks to me like a portmanteau of synthetic and apologist. Otherwise the -po- in it comes from nowhere.

Sensible boring versions of this like synthesilogy just end up meaning the study of synthesis. I reckon instead do something with Talos, the man made of bronze who guarded Crete from pirates and argonauts. Talologist, there you go.

yeah I realized that when I looked up podes downthread. I still like synthetologist better than talologist, in general no one in the common folk knows who Talos is.

You're probably right. There's things that are correct, and then there's things people think they know, which win and become true. We already have "synths", after all, which are keyboards. Though that adds to the vagueness of synthetologist, because maybe it refers to Rick Wakeman or Giorgio Moroder.

Agree with your sentiment, I think synthetologist (σύνθετος/synthetos + λογία/logia) flows better.

The plural of anthropos is anthropoi, not anthropodes.

But since when is there a synthetos? Since right now, I guess. Shrug But you know it's from the same root as thesis, and synthesis (or a more proper ancient Greek spelling) is the noun and doesn't end in -os.

σύνθεσις (súnthesis, “a putting together; composition”), says Wiktionary.

Oh wait there is a σύνθετος, but it's an adjective for "composite". Hmm, OK. Modern Greek, looks like.

Yeah, I realize that's more correct. I also realized when someone else downthread bastardized it into synthropologist that the podes part has entirely to do with feet and nothing to do with beings, necessarily. Anthro- -podes is more what I had in mind, not as a pluralization of anthropos.

So unless the AI has feet you wouldn't study Synthetipology.

You're probably thinking of anthropoids? That's anthrop[os]-oid. Like in humanoid or centroid or factoid. Or dorkazoid.

Pack it in Anthropologists! No longer are you allowed to study pottery, knots, shelters or any of the other human-esque things! They're not human!

What a bizarre understanding of what an anthropologist does.

Those are all things made by humans and therefore human constructs.

The language and culture they are talking about studying would not be made by humans, they would be made by synthetics.

I'm just saying, don't call the study of an extraterrestrial alien culture and its constructs and artifacts "anthropology", or even xenoanthropology (the extraterrestrial equivalent of AInthropology) --unless the extraterrestrials are genetically Human-- call it Xenopology or something else.

You have a truncated view of my understanding of what an anthropologist does. I know they study human culture and all of the things we've created, where we've been, where we started, how we got here, and EVERYTHING involved.

The study of that for whatever culture might arise from generative technology SHOULD NOT be called anthropology because what is creating that culture is not human.

Do clay pots, knots, shelters make new culture on their own without human action or intent?

llms are an artifact as pure as can he of human social langauge.

He’s proposing using LLMs (which model human behaviour) to study humans so the distinction is pedantic. You don’t call it speadsheetology just because someone opened Excel.

Synthetipologist vs Synthropologist tho.

> Synthropologist

Have an upvote :)

*thropologist: study of beings

That's not how the Greek word stems work. Technically it would not be synthetipologist, it would more accurately just be Synthetologist, as the Greek podes suffix means having feet.

> That's not how the Greek word stems work.

Sir, I would have you know that we are discussing English terms, not Greek

AInthropologist works fine for me, and is a lot funnier

LoL

Do you realise that nearly all of our English terms have roots in either Latin or Greek, and that most of their meanings, submeanings, components, and derivatives such as pluralization still follow the constructs of those languages? That you can use the roots and stems of those languages to coin and define a word in English based only on the meanings of those roots and stems?

You can't escape the Latin/Greek/Germanic root words and the way they combine to create the words we use, you can only ignore it. Ignoring it makes you look ignorant.

I will use AInthropologist as a heuristic to determine that someone is willfully ignorant and intellectually lax and incurious and avoid them.

Have fun telling on yourself.

Anthropo- is the entire prefix as it relates to human kind. The -thro- does not carry a meaning on its own that can be carried to another word.

> Synthetipologists, those who study Synthetic beings.

I see you took the prudent approach of recognizing the being-ness of our future overlords :) ("being" wasn't in your first edit to which I responded below...)

Still, a bit uninspired, methinks. I like AInthropologist better, and my phone's keyboard appears to have immediately adopted that term for the suggestions line. Who am I to fight my phone's auto-suggest :-)

They are state machines so they have a state of being therefore they are beings. Living is an entirely different argument.

> They are state machines

I might have to hard disagree on this one, since my understanding of state machines (the technical term [1] [2]) is that they are determistic, while LLMs (the ai topic of discussion) are probabilistic in most of the commercial implementations that we see.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine

[2] have written some for production use, so have some personal experience here

Even at your link it immediately says that there are 2 kinds of automata (a.k.a. FSMs): deterministic and non-deterministic.

In the former, the transition function provides the next state, while in the latter the transition function only provides a probability distribution for the next state, i.e. exactly how running an LLM is implemented.

> Please do not use anthropology or any derivative of the word to refer to non-human constructs

So you, for one, do not welcome our new robot overlords?

A rather risky position to adopt in public, innit ;-)

I’ve already had my Roko’s basilisk existential breakdown a decade ago, so I don’t really care one way or the other.

I just wanna point out that I only called them non-human and I am asking for a precision of language.

> am asking for a precision of language.

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse wh***. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”* --James D. Nicoll

* Does not generally apply to scientific papers

Precision of ideas isn't purity of language.

> Precision of ideas isn't purity of language

That's fair. Was trying to be funny, so glossed over the difference. Leaving my post above unedited/undeleted as a testament to your precision, and evidence of my folly.

Onwards; more appropriate rebuttals:

"English is a precision instrument assembled from spare parts during a thunderstorm." --ChatGPT

“If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.” -- Doug Larson

So tedious.

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