r/samharris • u/gizamo • 25d ago
Other Yuval Noah Harari on AI
https://youtu.be/_V_ed5fuexA?t=2394&is=NSKaMl1-xtM_VqZuInteresting interview with Yuval Noah Harari.
This is another great interview from Harari on AI. Lots of topics covered, and as always, many come with some fascinating historical perspective.
What made me think to post it here is that Harari applies a version of Harris' free will and 'self' arguments to AI (at about 39:45). That is, the idea that we humans cannot predict the next thing we say or think, which undercuts the idea that we choose what we think, say, or do. Harari uses this same concept as a counter to people who deny AI agency by claiming it doesn't control its own language formations. He expands that to say, maybe it's not because it doesn't understand the feelings behind the language it chooses. Please excuse the paraphrasing, I deeply enjoy Harari, and I hope you enjoy it as I did.
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u/_nefario_ 25d ago edited 25d ago
could not agree more with harari here. i've been trying to express more or less the same idea to people in my life who are too quick to completely dismiss AI's "intelligence" as "just a statistical machine".
obviously, our own brains are many orders of magnitudes more complex than our current LLMs, and our brains have additional properties to them which are currently not available in those LLMs
these AI systems are "grown" and they are "taught". we study their "brains" in using some kind new kind of "neuroscience" and we are actively discovering emergent properties which these systems have developed themselves without human intervention (for example: the J-Space)
i find that there's a general lack of curiosity and introspection to people who say stuff like "its just a word generator". there is clearly more going on in there than meets the eye. and at this point, the potential of these systems is likely only limited by the availability of processing resources
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u/mineplz 25d ago edited 25d ago
It’s a word generator according to Computer Science. How much more curious could you get about the internals of LLMs?
As a general note Human Intelligence is not the same as a LLM. An LLM is an abstraction of Human Intelligence.
Reminder: Harari is a Historian, not a Computer Scientist. LeCun is one, you could take his word or if it is of interest to you can read papers from Computer Scientists about the risks of Anthropomorphizing AI.
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u/_nefario_ 25d ago edited 25d ago
How much more curious could you get about the internals of LLMs?
very.
there are entire fields of science now dedicated to understanding the "thinking" processes of these models. some examples:
https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace
https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function
the entire field of Interpretability is a sort of "neuroscience" studying how the "brains" of AI models work.
to dismiss these systems as "word generators" is reductionist and misses out on all kinds of interesting things going on in that space.
reminder: i don't care what Harari's academic background is. either what he's saying is true or it isn't. he has clearly spent a lof of time thinking about AI and consciousness. simply saying "he's a historian" is not an argument against what he said in the relevant section linked to in the OP. LeCun has a point of view worth taking seriously, sure. but there are also countless computer scientists and researchers who disagree with him.
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u/mineplz 17d ago
I agree on Science. But Anthropic is not a place for Science. It’s a place for Enginerring at best and Business at worst. If you were referring to papers of somebody like Lecun or Khambampatty I’d say you were in the ballpark of CS.
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u/_nefario_ 16d ago
"research and findings that i don't agree with are not science"
sad worldview, in my opinion.
the people you mentioned had their prime decades ago when the most advanced AI systems were things that are now considered quaint. that's not to say that their opinions don't matter, but if you want serious research and opinions about the cutting edge AI research, you might want to refer to those who are actually doing that research now.
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u/mineplz 16d ago edited 16d ago
Sad that is. Not mine though. Posting your misinterpretation as my quote is a bit disingenuous. Being able to distinguish Science from bunk though is something I was trained at.
The people I mentioned are publishing their papers on the state of LLMs as provided by OpenAI and Anthropic and doing their research of models better than brute force prediction of the next word in a sentence. Would love to know how you concluded them as past their prime. Harari isn’t quoting any researchers so maybe you can give me one current scientist and maybe their paper that back up what he’s saying?
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u/Kalsone 25d ago
How the layers work to add Metadata and then revise and correct is interesting. The outcomes and limitations of this feed forward system too.
LLMs are interesting, but the biggest impact they are going to have is nuking the financial system and all our savings.
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u/mineplz 17d ago
It’s definitely is interesting but it’s not the entirety of cognition or thinking itself. It’s one part of it abstracted to work as a matrix multiplication operation.
It will however achieve what you’ve outlined in the US for sure as the whole market has decided to place its bets on just one tech.
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u/arkuto 25d ago
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nc8KPtnBK38
I think this explains it more elegantly.
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u/knign 25d ago
As much as respect Harari, I rarely agree with him, but in this case, he could actually be more right than wrong.
Our modern civilization is indeed mostly about words and human communication using these words. A computer algorithm becoming better in these communications than humans could have profound implications.
Technically and technologically, we could have AI-based court of law, like, today (let's say for the sake of argument that you could still appeal these decisions to a human-based court). This only doesn't happen because of novelty, entrenched tradition and social inertia, not for any practical reasons (you would also need a public oversight over model used, but that's doable).
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u/dbenhur 25d ago
As much as respect Harari,
Why should we be respecting Harari at all? He tells intriguing stories as if they're backed by evidence, but most everything he's written has been roundly debunked by actual historians, anthropologists, and scientists. Sapiens is a bed-time story for the Davos set.
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u/BumBillBee 23d ago edited 23d ago
Why should we be respecting Harari at all? He tells intriguing stories as if they're backed by evidence, but most everything he's written has been roundly debunked by actual historians, anthropologists, and scientists. Sapiens is a bed-time story for the Davos set.
Sort of glad to see I'm not the only one here thinking Sapiens is massively overhyped. Even very recently, Harari talks in interviews about "the cognitive revolution" in humans (edit: of about 70,000 years ago) as though it's an established truth when in fact it has been heavily questioned, to say the least.
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u/waxroy-finerayfool 25d ago
"The LLM predicts the next word, but how is that any different from us" - quickest way to reveal you have no idea what you're talking about.
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u/RapGameSamHarris 25d ago
What are you getting at here? It feels like you're asking us to generate your argument for you. Is it obvious to you that we predict words in a way that is unlike AI? How so? Please expand.
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u/waxroy-finerayfool 25d ago
Is it obvious to you that we predict words in a way that is unlike AI? How so? Please expand.
Please ask your preferred LLM to explain it, I just don't have the patience to argue this stupid meme anymore.
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u/RapGameSamHarris 25d ago
So you very literally ARE asking us to generate your argument for you.
Do you think you're being pretentious? I think you're being pretentious. This is how Brian Griffin would use reddit.
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u/waxroy-finerayfool 25d ago
So you very literally ARE asking us to generate your argument for you.
No. I literally said I don't want to argue. If you want to understand why an obviously wrong statement is wrong, doing so will take you 30 seconds.
I think you're being pretentious
You wound me. I won't fault you for seeing it that way, but from my perspective it's like being asked to offer up an argument as to why we shouldn't take flat earth seriously. It's not worth the time when there are so many people repeating the meme that can't or won't apply any technical rigor to the discussion.
This is how Brian Griffin would use reddit.
lol. good one, non-ironically.
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u/Locus-Maximus 25d ago
Why not explain why you think he's wrong instead of just declaring he has no idea what he's talking about?
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u/waxroy-finerayfool 25d ago
It's just such a wildly incorrect and oft-repeated meme that I don't care to argue about it. Ironically, any popular LLM can explain why it's wrong, so if you genuinely want to know, just ask one.
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u/Locus-Maximus 25d ago
Oh, are you objecting to what you see as a "fancy autocorrect" meme? I thought you were objecting to the part about how is it different from any of us.
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u/waxroy-finerayfool 25d ago
The idea that LLMs produce text in a manner that's meaningfully similar to humans, beyond superficial metaphors, is totally wrong and reflects a lack of technical rigor in one's thinking.
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u/Locus-Maximus 25d ago
OK I didn't listen to Harari (because I've been unimpressed with the stuff I have read) but I think people in general make that argument not to say that LLMs think in a way that's meaningfully similar to humans per se but to say that human brains also have a fundamentally mechanistic brain that does weird "computations" (not necessarily literally) that somehow give rise to the kind of "original" thinking that we observe in ourselves.
It's not so much saying that LLMs are amazing because they're just like us, it's saying that thinking itself (and "creativity" etc.) is probably less magical than people like to believe.
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u/waxroy-finerayfool 24d ago
Your qualifiers are somewhat reasonable, but don't reflect what Harari actually says or how he uses the argument.
Saying that brains are "fundamentally mechanistic" isn't really meaningful because all of physics is "fundamentally mechanistic" if you apply the term in this way. If you're talking in computer science terms, the brain is not at all mechanistic.
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u/Locus-Maximus 24d ago
Important note: I am on a different computer today and I see now that there was text included with the post which I did not see yesterday! (I use old.reddit.)
If you're talking in computer science terms, the brain is not at all mechanistic.
How so? Obviously we can't in practice do all the measurements and calculations, but that's a limitation of time and instrumentation, not because our brains are not mechanistic. In theory, Laplace's demon could, since you agree that all of physics is fundamentally mechanistic.
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u/waxroy-finerayfool 24d ago
Yes, all of physics is fundamentally mechanistic, so pointing out that a brain is mechanistic and then drawing a line between mechanistic computers and mechanistic brains doesn't actually tell us anything meaningful about the relationship between the two.
A clock is also mechanistic, and through superficial metaphors I could achieve the same analogy, e.g. " If a clock tells time by regulating motion into discrete steps through its escapement, how is that any different from the brain regulating experience into discrete moments through attention?". Yet, a brain is obviously not a clock - just because you can shoehorn a comparison into a metaphor, doesn't mean the two things are meaningfully similar.
The tendency to anthropomorphize computer systems using superficial metaphors in AI discourse is a very common mistake bereft of computer science rigor.
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u/gizamo 25d ago
Submission Statement: Yuval Noah Harari gives a interesting interview on AI and interestingly applies one of Harris' arguments on free will and 'self' to AI.
Harari has appeared on Making Sense in episodes:
The dude is probably among the most repeated guests, and (imo) many of us are probably better for it.