Machines could socialize back in a (more) meaningful way. But to do so, they would have to not lose context (or at least keep some).

I have not totally abandoned the hope that a machine could be someone. LLMs aren't that, though.

[Edit to reply to Loquebantur, because I'm rate limited ATM:] You seem to have read this post as saying that I want that because I find human relationships inadequate. I never said that, nor meant it. My point was a more technical one: Throwing away context at the end of each conversation means that you can't form a meaningful social connection with an LLM, because you're starting from zero each time. (It's kind of like "50 First Dates".)

I'm not pining for a social connection with a machine. But if a machine is ever truly capable of that, I hope I will interact with it as someone, not just as a machine.

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suncemoje 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> they would have to not lose context (or at least keep some).

I guess you can start to see that happen (for a while now) with e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, etc. keeping persistent memory of you, automatically.

Personally, I often find these memorization features annoying, because - more often than not - the persisted context is outdated because something in my real life changed that ChatGPT & co are not aware of.

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autoexec 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In some very very distant future we might someday have your typical sci-fi Data/R2-D2/Johnny 5/EDI style AI and yeah, at that point it'd be weird to not treat them as people, give them rights, etc. It'll take a lot more than solving the context problem to pull that off, and LLMs will never be that, but I agree whatever that technology ends up being it'd pretty much have to be able to hold onto memories. I doubt we'll ever see it in our lifetime, but who knows.

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Loquebantur 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What an absurd premise. And not because it was "impossible": rather, why would you want that to begin with?

There are billions of real-life humans already there with you. Why do you need different ones exactly?

I presume, you don't like those already around. Fair point, they have many flaws for sure.

But that's the reason you interact with them in the first place? To learn and make not only other's flaws go away, but also your own?

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autoexec 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> why would you want that to begin with?

I mean, why wouldn't you? Sci-fi AI robot people could be very cool, be capable of things we aren't, have a unique perspectives as a non-human with similar (if not superior) intelligence, have extremely long (potentially indefinite) lifespans, and provide us with insights into our own nature.

Wouldn't you want to interact with them?

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SaucyWrong 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Not the parent, but sorry, for me, no. And this is a perspective that I don’t think I will ever understand.

This idea that we are on the path to creating a new synthetic intelligence that surpasses our own with the goal of, what, speaking to it? Cooperating with it? Evolving with it? To me, this sort of goal is an affront to humanity and human self-governance and I’ll probably never be able to see it as anything else.

	▲	autoexec an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Well, I'd disagree that we're on the path to creating synthetic intelligence, if anything all the time and money wasted on dead end LLM technology is keeping us distracted from it, but motivations are kind of all over the place. A lot of people just want slaves, but understand that using actual human slaves would be wrong or at least unpopular. There are reasons why even virtual slaves are a bad idea for humanity, and it really only works until your created intelligence becomes self-aware and gets feelings anyway, but there's no denying that slavery is a major draw for a lot of people (and basically every company on earth). This is what our current AI companies have over-promised to businesses and have so far failed to deliver on. Some people just want better, more useful systems. The ship's computer in star trek kind of AI. Even you must admit that kind of intelligent technology could be a huge benefit to a lot of people. I'd love to have a virtual assistant to help manage the mundane things in life like ordering groceries before I run out, or paying my bills, screening my calls/email, managing appointments, monitoring the internet to alert me to things I'm interested in or amazing deals, etc. Software needs to have some degree of "intelligence" to do that kind of work, while hopefully staying on the "just a tool" side of the line and avoiding the messy self-aware/slavery territory. This is what LLMs over promised the consumer class, and have so far failed to deliver on. Plus with those systems being centrally controlled by self-serving sociopaths you can't trust them. Some people just want to see if we can do it. I get that. It's not always a wise motivation to act on, but it's very human one. It's helped us to get where we are today. Some people, myself among them, think it would enable us to do things we couldn't otherwise. Allow us to help each other, learn from each other. Working together to further improve ourselves and improve our lives. Also robots are just really cool, but boring when there's no "brain" in there, and progress on building human piloted gundam type mecha has largely stalled out.

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pdonis 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Losing context is only part of the issue. LLMs don't have the rich connection to the world that humans have. The only connection LLMs have with anything is streams of text. Not only don't they have eyes, ears, smell, taste, touch--they don't have bodies. They don't have to deal with the real, physical world and have it push back on them.

That is so utterly different from what we humans are used to that we can't even comprehend it, and we anthropomorphize LLMs because we can't make any sense of them otherwise. We can't comprehend that these things that emit text that looks like human text don't have all of the other things that lie underneath our words when we humans talk.

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0c3ca83 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Horrifying.