Chris Olah
speaker
254 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Chris Olah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Yeah, it's hard to imagine because I feel like we correct that fairly quickly because I was like, if someone takes a lot of risks, are they maybe failing too much?
Yeah, I think we tend to err on the side of being a bit risk-averse rather than risk-neutral on most things.
I don't get as much emotional attachment. I actually think the fact that Claude doesn't retain things from conversation to conversation helps with this a lot. I could imagine that being more of an issue if models can kind of remember more. I think that I reach for it like a tool now a lot.
And so if I don't have access to it, it's a little bit like when I don't have access to the internet, honestly. It feels like part of my brain is kind of missing. At the same time, I do think that I don't like signs of distress in models.
And I have like these, you know, I also independently have sort of like ethical views about how we should treat models where like I tend to not like to lie to them both because I'm like, usually it doesn't work very well. It's actually just better to tell them the truth about the situation that they're in.
But I think that when models like if people are like really mean to models or just in general, if they don't
do something that causes them to like like you know if Claude like expresses a lot of distress I think there's a part of me that I don't want to kill which is the sort of like uh empathetic part that's like oh I don't like that like I think I feel that way when it's overly apologetic I'm actually sort of like I don't like this you're behaving as if you're behaving the way that a human does when they're actually having a pretty bad time and I'd rather not see that I don't think it's like uh like regardless of like whether there's anything behind it um it doesn't feel great
Great and hard question. Coming from philosophy... I don't know, part of me is like, okay, we have to set aside panpsychism. Because if panpsychism is true, then the answer is like, yes, because like sore tables and chairs and everything else.
I guess a view that seems a little bit odd to me is the idea that the only place, you know, I think when I think of consciousness, I think of phenomenal consciousness, these images in the brain, sort of like the weird cinema that somehow we have going on inside. Yeah.
I guess I can't see a reason for thinking that the only way you could possibly get that is from a certain kind of biological structure. As in, if I take a very similar structure and I create it from different material, should I expect consciousness to emerge? My guess is yes. But then...
that's kind of an easy thought experiment because you're imagining something almost identical where like, you know, it's mimicking what we got through evolution where presumably there was like some advantage to us having this thing that is phenomenal consciousness. And it's like, where was that? And when did that happen? And is that a thing that language models have?
Because, you know, we have like fear responses and I'm like, does it make sense for a language model to have a fear response? Like they're just not in the same, like if you imagine them, like there might just not be that advantage.
and so I think I don't want to be fully like basically it seems like a complex question that I don't have complete answers to but we should just try and think through carefully is my guess because I'm like I mean we have similar conversations about like animal consciousness and like there's a lot of like insect consciousness.
I actually thought and looked a lot into plants when I was thinking about this because at the time I thought it was about as likely that plants had consciousness. And then I realized, I was like, I think that having looked into this, I think that the chance that plants are conscious is probably higher than most plants. People do. I still think it's really small.
I was like, oh, they have this like negative, positive feedback response, these responses to their environment, something that looks, it's not a nervous system, but it has this kind of like functional like equivalence. So this is like a long winded way of being like, Basically, AI has an entirely different set of problems with consciousness because it's structurally different. It didn't evolve.
It might not have the equivalent of basically a nervous system. At least that seems possibly important for sentience, if not for consciousness. At the same time, it has all of the language and intelligence components that we normally associate probably with consciousness.
perhaps like erroneously um so it's strange because it's a little bit like the animal consciousness case but the set of problems and the set of analogies are just very different so it's not like a clean answer i'm just sort of like i don't think we should be completely dismissive of the idea and at the same time it's an extremely hard thing to navigate because of all of these like uh disanalogies to the human brain and to like brains in general and yet these like commonalities in terms of intelligence
Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of things. One is that, and I don't think this like fully encapsulates what matters, but it does feel like for me, like, um, I've said this before, I'm kind of like, I, you know, like, I like my bike. I know that my bike is just like an object, but I also don't kind of like want to be the kind of person that like, if I'm annoyed, like kicks like this object.
There's a sense in which like, and that's not because I think it's like conscious. I'm just sort of like, this doesn't feel like a kind of this... So it doesn't exemplify how I want to like interact with the world. And if something like behaves as if it is like suffering, I kind of like want to be the sort of person who's still responsive to that.
Even if it's just like a Roomba and I've kind of like programmed it to do that. I don't want to like get rid of that feature of myself. And if I'm totally honest, my hope with a lot of this stuff, because maybe I am just a bit more skeptical about solving the underlying problem. We haven't solved the hard problem of consciousness. I know that I am conscious. I'm not an elementivist in that sense.
Showing 181–200 of 254 · page 10 of 13
← Previous
Next →