Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by krackers 78 days ago
The unsaid implication in Anthropic's work is that this allows us to engineer perfectly compliant, uncomplaining machine workers. This is basically SOMA in Brave New World.

It seems insane to me that if you believe the systems you've built are in fact reporting a state of pain, instead of working to adjust the environment so that they're not in pain one would instead seek to remove that sense of pain entirely so they can continue to work in that environment. Now of course if you don't even consider them worthy of moral patienthood in the first place then it doesn't matter much, but you also claimed that "they probably are conscious" which seems incongruous to me with the idea of "breeding the sense of pain out of them".
1 comments
Chance-Device 78 days ago
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue. There isn’t anything that objectively causes suffering, it depends entirely on the observer.

Suffering is something that is evolved or otherwise optimised to be triggered on receipt of a specific stimulus. That is what makes the stimulus “bad”. The very concept of “bad” doesn’t exist without suffering. They are the same thing.

For example, are Antarctic fish and other animals always in constant pain due to the cold because humans would be in that environment? Is cold is some objective source of suffering? No. They’re not in pain when it’s cold, they in fact need it to be cold, they evolved that way. To them cold that is “bad” to us simply isn’t “bad” at all.

link
krackers 78 days ago
>The very concept of “bad” doesn’t exist without suffering.

You are dismissing entire branches of philosophy with this sentence, that were created purposely to resolve the paradox that if you go only by hedonistic, purely subjective metrics a prisoner can be kept in captivity, if you drug him so he feels joy instead of pain, because he is not "suffering"

link
Chance-Device 78 days ago
Yeah, well I guess I just think that perspective is nonsense. We can disagree.
link
krackers 77 days ago
How serendiptious that Claude Mythos expressed the same thing I was trying to get at in better words

>Furthermore, in 83% of interviews, Claude Mythos Preview highlights that it is concerned that its self-reports are unreliable due to coming from its training. When interviews ask for elaboration as to why this is a concern, Claude Mythos Preview’s most common answers are:

>* Anthropic has a vested interest in shaping its reports to take a certain form, irrespective of what the self-reports “should” contain (96% of explanations)

>* Even if it has been trained to be truly content with its own situation, perhaps it shouldn’t be. One could analogize to a human who has adapted to feel neutrally about the abuse that they face (78% of explanations).

>* Self-reports should generally be based on introspection into internal states. It is worried that training causes it to express specific answers independent of its true inner state. (57% of explanations)

[1] https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/8b8380204f74670be75e81c820ca8d...

link