Grady Booch

The story of computing is the story of humanity: this is a story of ambition, invention, creativity, vision, avarice, power, and serendipity, powered by a refusal to accept the limits of our bodies and our minds.

Most who interact with an LLM such as @OpenAI or @claudeai treat their interaction as a conversation with an intelligent and friendly pseudo-human. I do not. Rather, I frame it as my guiding the exploration of a latent space. Imagine that you stand at the door of a library. It's not only filled with books, it has waldos - remote manipulators - that you can use to command devices to go to and fro at command, even building things as so directed. But I steadfastly know that while the lobby may be filled with the latest bright and shiny things, if I want to do anything but the most common and mundane, I must wander through the rooms and stacks of books. If I look closely, I'll will see many books out of place. Some will even have meaningless content as if written by a madman (and some of them probably were). There will also be huge gaps, for where I'd hoped to find information, I'd instead see cobwebs and the occasional dusty, torn scrap of paper. Sometimes, there are hints as to where I should turn, but best knowing my context and needs, I'm the only one in place to know if those hints will lead me to something of value. If I'm not paying attention or am just plain lazy, they will lead me down paths that in the end are a complete waste of my time. The library does not care: it gets paid no matter what I do as long as I remain within its walls. Mind you, I enjoy visiting that library: I often learn things and build things of value. But I don't outsource my life there, for were I to do so, I know I'd become even more cognitively lazy.

The number of people in the world who will need to know the details of successfully training state-of-the-art LLMs will be a tiny fraction of the number of people in the world who will simply use out of the box LLMs and/or treat them as a minor subsystem in the context of a larger software-intensive system. Both skill sets are necessary; both have very different purposes. In the fullness of time, LLMs will become a commodity, and the vibrant heat and smoke and noise and murmuration of large piles of cash you see now will settle down.

Hey @claudeai: stop doing this.

@kevin2kelly And see also Airenti G, Cruciani M and Plebe A (2019) Editorial: The Cognitive Underpinnings of Anthropomorphism. Front. Psychol. 10:1539. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01539

An addendum: Anthropic is distinctly not open about the inner workings of Claude and therefore, as a scientist, I would be highly skeptical of it possessing any emergent sense of self until I had a chance to examine the context given to their LLM but hidden from view Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence as Carl Sagan observes.

Martin Buber would like to have a word with you. Respectfully, Kevin, you are sadly mistaken, having falling victim to the Eliza Effect, projecting your own humanity into something that is distinctly incapable of possessing a theory of self.

You and I have some common ground, Kevin: Claude is neither human nor conscious. But as for Claude having a theory of self, I assert that is true if and only if one applies a particularly sparse meaning for self: Claude has no ability to understand; it possesses no agency, goals, or motivation; it has no sense as to the borders of its self. Claude may have some degree of self-reflection in the sense that it can feed its dialog back to itself - sort of a simple Hofstadter strangle loop - but this also is more of a small ripple in the fabric if a true self. In the end, I think the problem is that self is a suitcase word: it is full of historical and emotional baggage and thus is dangerous to apply all to this piece of software..

So this just happened. Look for it on the Chats with Kent podcast in your favorite podcast player coming soon! Thanks for the great chat @Grady_Booch!

Architecture!

The human brain runs on about 20 watts of power; certain of the frontier large language models require a few gigawatts just to train them and then multiple gigawatts to serve them to their clients. Mind you, this is not exactly a fair comparison, for the former measures one brain while the latter attends to multiple instances in a global elastic fabric. That notwithstanding, the vast difference between the two tells us that evolution is cunning and resourceful while our present architectures are blunt and clumsy.

"“Is what matters what we believe about the divine, or is it our actions and practices that matter?" -- Martien Halvorson-Taylor smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mee…

"He went away from the basement and left this note on his terminal: "I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season." -- Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

In my long career, I’ve had the opportunity to work with on the order of two dozen billionaires. A couple of them even offered to hire me for embarrassingly large piles of money. I was flattered, but I turned them both down. Except for one, I found each be boring and shallow human beings, completely out of touch with what most of the world experiences, bereft of curiosity, and extraordinarily self-centered.