thinkling

Maybe I need to reread his book, but I think of System 1 as "fast, reflexive, instinctive" mental activity, and System 2 as "slow, deliberative, rational, verbal" thought.

So exactly inverse to this article, I characterize LLMs as 100% System 2, and would say that what's missing in AI is the more "embodied" System 1 intelligence.

My current thinking is that the experience of consciousness is closely tied to that embodied, emotional side of our nervous system, and is 100% lacking in LLMs. Anthropic people will say "the models have neural correlates of emotion", and that's fine, our cortex also has neural correlates for emotions and for much of what happens in the cerebellum and brain stem. That doesn't mean that that's where the primary function is implemented.

This used to be easy and then they moved it somewhere counterintuitive in the app that my brain refuses to remember. I swear.

Now they’ve put a QR code on the checkout console, and scanning that opens the Amazon app to the right spot. Scan a code to scan a code… modern life.

(WHat’s really ridiculous is that I’m paying with my Amazon Prime VISA card—why doesn’t that automatically get me my prime discounts? It’s my default method of payment on the Amazon site, it’s not like they don’t know about it. No, I need to jump through some other hoops to “enroll” or “link” my card or something for that to work. eyeroll )

The thing that’s bananas is that this is a City of Paris rule. In the rest of France, traffic entering a roundabout must yield. Not inside Paris. Better make sure you know this!

And even more crazy, the Periphérique, the controlled-access ring road around Paris which tends to move at 40-50mph, is a city street and so traffic entering that highway-like “street” also has right-of-way.

Installing a plug-in and reviewing its code at that point is one thing. But if the plug-in can be updated withut you knowing, then there’s little guarantee of security.

I'm surprised how few comments are written with the prior that Amazon managers aren't stupid or uninformed about how incentives work.

My guess would be that someone created the leaderboard without a lot of consultation with managers, and that some employees feel a competitive urge to try to "win" the leaderboard by burning tokens.

TL;DR: Railroad developers were granted alternating square mile sections as a reward for their investment.

I hope it’s better than other sensor tech in cars that think they need to warn you that you’re about to hit something at the front when the car is in reverse, that can't distinguish a bike rack statically attached to the car from the environment, and so on.

When their actions are sped up to match the speed at which we move, movies of their behavior will start to look like there's intent and will. Plants move towards the light, tendrils "reach" for supports, etc.

Clearly this is humans projecting our mental model onto plants, but... are you sure we're not also projecting it onto ourselves?

The Occam's Razor-logic of looking for the simplest explanation possible leads me to the hypothesis that consciousness will similarly turn out to be an emergent property of the mechanical universe [1]. It may be hard to delineate, just as life is (debates on whether a virus is alive, etc.) but the border cases will be the exceptions.

Current research on whether plants are sentient supports this, IMO. (See e.g. "The Light Eaters" and Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness, "A World Appears".)

Meditation adds to this sense. We do not control our thoughts; in fact the "we" (i.e. the self) can be seen to be an illusion. Buddhist meditation instead points to general awareness, closer to sentience, as the core of our consciousness. When you see it that way, it seems much more likely that something equivalent could be implemented in software. (EDIT to add: both because it makes consciousness seem like a simpler, less mysterious thing, but also once you see the self as an illusion, that thing that dominates your consciousness so much of the time, it seems much less of a stretch for consciousness itself to be a brain-produced illusion.)

[1] To be clear, the fact that life turned out to not be a mystical force is not direct proof, it is an argument by analogy, I recognize that.

Why aren't the labs training models to pick a mantra appropriate to the task and do this themselves? "Huh, a database question. I am going to pretend I'm a database expert with lots of experience. OK, here we go!"