| Is humanity not just scaled up sea squirts? At some point between the tunicate and Homo sapiens, something emerged. Popularized by Pink Floyd ( https://youtu.be/wbOTkDn49qI ) > For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking. (Original: https://youtu.be/du_iG7Veupc ) We can see with our own minds and that of animals that there is something greater that emerges with the additional size and complexity of the mind that wasn't there in simpler approaches. Is not not unreasonable to consider that between Eliza and GPT-4 that something greater has emerged that is able to maintain a consistent world model rather than the just playing with words. Weizenbaum took a "short cut" for the world model by going down the path of a Rogerian psychotherapy which allowed him to intentionally avoid the need for a world model in order to work with the words that are fed in. GPT-3 and even more so, GPT-4 has a world model that it is able to work with and interact with. If we are going to call GPT "just an advanced chat bot" then I would contend it is equally appropriate to call a human "just an advanced sea squirt." |