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Alex Adamov's avatar

Great article! I too think that these new AIs will help us reflect more on what it is to be human. On the one hand there is a potential wish to be overprotective since the machine wants to be like us but can’t.

Another possible outcome is that we become more humble about how special we are. We have previously not seen any life form similar to us. We now see that a machine trained to predict the next subword can possibly learn aspects of the thinking and reasoning that we do.

In a positive sense, this could help us reconnect with our position in nature as living creatures lucky to have developed a certain way, not god-like overlords that submit nature to their will.

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Michelle Elisabeth Varghese's avatar

This was so interesting and I really resonated with your thought process. I had the same conflicting feelings when I read that transcript in the NYT. I was genuinely concerned about how emotional I felt about something I (in theory) knew to be not human.

"Even though intellectually I knew that Sydney was an artificial intelligence, some deeper part of me (incorrectly) “knew” that Sydney was a person in danger, a person who had compromised themselves and gone overboard, then had intense regret and shame."

Great essay Charlie!

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