Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Nex Ninek's avatar

I am not particularly surprised at ChatGPT’s cognitive empathy and theory of mind. It was designed to be a prediction machine, and humans do behave predictably. Cognitive empathy and theory of mind behaviours are described in the data ChatGPT was trained on.

I think the main difference between a living being and ChatGPT is that living beings are spurred to action based on their brain’s reward/punish feature. We do things because we “feel” like it in anticipation of the satisfaction (reward) at the end. Just like we can predict when and how salmon are likely to migrate up the river to spawn, but have no particular desire to join them in the river on their journey, ChatGPT should be able to predict what we “feel” and how we react in a situation without any interest in doing it itself. The danger in such an AI is when humans start letting ChatGPT do things based on its predictions.

What would be an interesting exercise is to feed to ChatGPT whatever you have done so far of your cognitive empathy book and tell it to finish it off for you. Or have you already tried that?

Expand full comment
Daniel B. Miller's avatar

Hi Bob (isn't that a drinking game?)

The emergent behavior evidenced by these large language models is simply astounding. Equally astounding is the obtuseness of those who refuse to contemplate the possibility that these machines are sentient, or at least could become sentient in the near future. I can only assume they have failed to grok the relevance of computational universality, and they have not appreciated the incredible way complex behavior can emerge from simple systems such as cellular automata. I would refer them to the thoughts and work of my friend colleague and mentor Ed Fredkin, (who I suspect you know well, having literally written the book on him.)

https://www.scribd.com/document/235105454/On-the-soul-Ed-Fredkin

I took the liberty of replying to the newsletter in a personal email that I hope you have time to read. In any case, keep up the good work. I don't always agree with you about peace and war, but that's a matter for another day.

Expand full comment
27 more comments...

No posts