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All very interesting, but much of it is besides the simple point I am trying to make. I know of no formal demonstration that definitively distinguishes between the kinds of processes a person can do and the kinds of processes a computer can do in principal. In practice various processes are easy for computers and hard for people and vice versa, but any product which manifests itself as a finite document (clearly all proofs are finite documents) whose validity can be determined in a finite number of steps can obviously be created by a computer although getting it to do so may be hard. Indeed, the production of proofs is quite hard for human beings as well. One other note: > Overall non-determinism's usefulness is vanishingly small . This is really not true. There are many problems which have no useful deterministic solution but for which non-deterministic solutions exist which can get very close to an optimal answer, and non-determinism is extremely important. In fact, in complexity theory Turing machines with and without a random oracle are distinguished precisely because the former is so useful and, in many respects, the big question in the complexity theory of quantum computers comes down to: is the randomness of a quantum computer more powerful than mere classical randomness? People perform certain kinds of proof tasks in practice better than computers, in my opinion, only because we have a large volume of heuristic strategies for proving things which are embedded in the culture of mathematics and which are difficult but in principal not impossible to embed in a machine. In a sense, humans prove things by _guessing correctly_ which turns out to be how we get computers to do these kinds of non-trivial search tasks as well. Anyway, on the cultural end of things I agree with the basic idea that some applications of language models and other AI are probably bad for society, but I think you're just overstating the case that this particular technology is so catastrophic. In fact, this technology merely takes effort out of a person and puts it into a machine: in a call center situation if a person gets angry at the call center employee, that is itself an error on the part of the caller, since the person at the center isn't personally responsible for anything and is, in fact, placed there almost entirely to sop up the emotional energy of the customer. The call center employee in turn has to do the internal work of "throwing away" the emotions of the customer so as to continue to respond in the robotic way that their bosses require them to perform. Merely being in a call center is intensely dehumanizing and, presently, places the burden of that dehumanization on the employee: they must dehumanize _themselves_ or face the economic consequences. This technology displaces some of that labor. Does it make the entire "call center" locus more dehumanizing? Hard to say, in total, but if so, its marginal. The employee in this situation is by far the one with the shortest end of the stick and I have trouble getting really bent out of shape about a technology which might make their lives slightly more pleasant. If the product in question here were a secret AI agent that intermediated between a partners in a romantic relationship or between parent and child (especially) then I would get your point, but the call center is such a moral morass that this piece of technology hardly matters. Speaking more broadly: you have a grand narrative, clearly, in your mind, but I think its preventing you from looking closely at the things that are really happening and responding rationally to them. In particular, in the cases to which you refer, where various sorts of strategies to disrupt cognition were so damaging, one thing stands out in particular: the overwhelming, credible, threat of actual violence to the subject from a difficult or impossible to escape force. Without that critical ingredient I would expect most of the effects you describe to be missing or highly attenuated. |