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by throwaway49849 853 days ago
It's like the Monkey's Paw from the Simpsons: you can have a program that understands what you mean, but you can't understand how it really works.

It's just another tool in the toolbox. Personally, I think we've reached the limits of "computers do exactly what you ask them to do, to a fault." I'm interested to see how the opposite direction works out for us.
3 comments
danans 853 days ago
FWIW The Monkey's Paw is originally a 1902 story published in Harper's.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey%27s_Paw

The Simpsons borrowed from that.

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bemusedthrow75 853 days ago
> It's like the Monkey's Paw from the Simpsons

This is really, really funny in the context of age and perspective. But not in the way you meant.

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throwaway49849 853 days ago
No need to be condescending about it. I mentioned the Simpsons because the author referenced the Simpsons.
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bemusedthrow75 853 days ago
I didn’t mean to be condescending. Sorry. It’s just so perfectly expressive of the nature of culture and the way culture overwrites culture.
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stemlord 853 days ago
>Personally, I think we've reached the limits of "computers do exactly what you ask them to do, to a fault.

Good point, maybe this is the dawn of a new kind of computer engineering, a higher level, fundamentally social one.

We already see people "hacking" chatGPT to reveal its system prompts or get around its given boundaries using nothing but clever conversational logic tricks.

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