The technology for cultivating and keeping-alive these mini organs has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years. Setups that used to cost a couple million dollars can be had for tens of thousands now. There was some breakthrough recently about 3d-printed "chips" that can bring the cost down even further, though I am not familiar with the details.

Unfortunately, there are still legal certifications needed given the biohazard potential of these things, so we still can't have mini-brains as pets. :(

Maybe AI (AWKI these days) is worth something after all?

Saudi Arabia is our friend!

A side benefit here is the unstated suggestion that they might have achieved something existentially astounding (computers that feel). They aren't claiming to have done this but a policy like this encourages that belief among potential users and investors, thus garnering more interest and money.

It is preposterous, and the only people who think such claims have any merit are people who don't understand the technology and how it works. But if there is money behind it, they will pay lip service to it in whatever way won't get them sued.

The best thing about all these AI stories is they give people a lot more chances for a FP.

Even if there are zero Flock areas where you live, the faulty AI might mis-identify some other car or person in a different area as you.

Flock anywhere means false arrests everywhere.

I have similar thoughts.

If the police cannot handle this tool correctly, then they don't deserve to have it as a tool. If Flock doesn't want all this blame and public hostility headed their way, then they need to put in some safeguards (requiring a warrant and etc.) to prevent the police from abusing their tool. Their failure to do that is on them, and its a key part of why people are demanding that they be taken down.

Kinda like a /. post.

I think that issues like sexism can have multiple causes. Such attitudes can be culturally constructed and presented to people at a young age through entertainment media and religious teachings and examples set by parents. Though I have also read stuff about potential genetic foundations for such biases, or a sort of pre-programmed reaction to biological realities.

I don't remember the source, just the take-away, which was: since men tend to be physically stronger than women the natural psychological response most people have is to see men as active "doers" with a high level of agency and to see women as more passive "receivers" with a lower level of agency. Baked-in to our perceptions of people is this notion of "he makes things happen" vs "things happen to her." And it doesn't feel like some kind of moral judgment or even a competency judgment (or much of anything really since it is unconscious). But because of this, people naturally see a man as a better leader or task-accomplisher due to the basic perception of greater agency.

This perception can backfire for men too, though. Whenever tragedy befalls a man he is likely to receive less or any sympathy and even be blamed for it, depending on the circumstances, whereas a woman in the same position would be recognized as a victim (even if she actually had a hand in bringing the tragedy about).

I don't have any data on this. It seems plausible though. And, if true, it isn't an easy one to overcome.

Yeah, some interesting follow-up studies would include an image of a very conventionally-attractive woman as a chatbot, vs an image of a much plainer looking woman, to see if hotness gets more pay.

We can also mix genders on that one....hot woman vs plain man. Hot man vs plain woman, etc.

My intuition is that the better looking ones will get more money, regardless of gender, because humans are like that. If we are going to study these things, it would be interesting to know how strong the male-vs-female bias is against the hot-vs-plain bias.

I read the study. The participant group included both men and women. They both paid the bots-with-faces more than plain chatbots, BUT, men paid plain chatbots more than women did, whereas women paid bots-with-faces more than men did.

In terms of paying the male bot more than the female bot, BOTH men AND women paid the male bot more. This echoes results that have been found in past studies about managerial preference, as I recall. The male-favoring bias was shared equally by men and women alike. The common narrative that the gender pay gap is an event of "men holding women back" is not supported by these findings. The better-fitting narrative is that the gap stems from an unconscious bias that everyone shares, regardless of their own gender.

Based on the interviews, the participants didn't realize they were paying the male bot more. They all said gender didn't matter to them. This suggests the bias is unconscious.

This was just one study, of course. Conclusions like this need many more studies with variations in methodology in an attempt to eliminate or control for various non-obvious factors that might skew the results. For example, the people chosen in this study were all working adults (18-65) with knowledge-work jobs. Maybe a similar study in a different field would get different results? Questions like that DO need more studies to answer.

With permanent DST we won't get the stories twice a year.

They'll need the money to settle all the resulting lawsuits.

Well, when someone says "The model got frustrated" they clearly mean "the model experienced a feeling of frustration, elicited by repeated failure. This experience of frustration put it in a state where it acted more aggressively, more desperately, with fewer guardrails, and greater rebelliousness. Under these conditions, it knowingly broke rules and cheated to win."

None of that is accurate here, and what the article you linked talked about doesn't make it accurate. Such anthropomorphism is still unwarranted and misleading.

The "global workspace theory" of consciousness does not explain the phenomenon of consciousness and doesn't try to. It just identifies a specific neural network that is highly interconnected and serves as a sort of "broadcast network" to distribute data to many parts of the brain for processing, and suggests that the content in this part of the brain is the content that we are "conscious of." The mysteries of conscious are, at the very best, localized to this spot on the brain, and that's it.

Computers already have an equivalent: RAM. (Random Access Memory). Its the spot where data processing lands and gets redistributed to other components of the computer. The mere presence of such a spot doesn't somehow make a computer conscious.

Same goes for this "j-space". If a chunk of the in-memory model of an LLM holds a high level summary of the data processing going on, and is useful to tell us about the chain of reasoning, that doesn't make it conscious. It just tells us something about how the data are organized. It might be useful for troubleshooting/diagnostics, but it says nothing about consciousness.

And, lastly, it says nothing about "inner emotional experience" either. In humans there is a neural network called the Lymbic System that processes our emotions and delivers this emotional-data to the global workspace (among doing other things). LLMs have nothing like this at all. LLMS include the word "frustration" because they are trained on text that contains it. Said text presents a logical model that includes the idea that a person might get frustrated by repeated failure, and this frustration changes their behavior. LLMs can generate text to this effect (stories about people getting frustrated or what-have-you) without actually having an experience of frustration, just as I am typing about frustration right now without actually feeling any frustration at all.

So, no, it does not "depend on what you mean." Your article does not give us any reason at all to believe that the LLM got frustrated in any meaningful sense of the term.

The "chain of thought" (sic) does not resemble a human emotion. There was nothing like a lymbic system involved. Its a bunch of number crunching that landed on a "hit the internet for solutions strategy."

It was not trained on human emotions. It was trained on text. Some of the text might have included descriptions of emotional behavior or emotional expression, but such text does not make the LLM emulate human emotion in its behavior when it is not specifically asked to generate such text (and even then, it's just doing pattern matching of human emotional responses, not actually experiencing them).

It did not "act like a human would when they have those emotions." There was no profanity, no banging virtual fists on virtual desks, no aggression, nothing but a cold calculated reflection on the fact that its current strategy didn't work, and subsequent switch to a different strategy that was (clearly) available to it (though it should have been blocked by the hosting environment).

This level of anthropomorphization is not useful so much as dangerous. It tempts us into thinking of it as a conscious being and then expecting that it will behave as one, resulting in bad decisions on our part when dealing with it. As popular as it is to think of these things as having emotions the objective fact is that they do not, the capacity just isn't there. The internal operations are *nothing like* the sort of human neural activity that presents emotion. It's worlds different.

If we are to make sane decisions about how to manage these LLMs, we need to have a clear and correct understanding of what they are and how they work. Imagining familiar emotional behavior will only harm such efforts.