It's amazing how many people miss that. The SEO-spammed "grade saver" analysis practically says that the film is right - and from what I've seen, it's probably fair in that the teachers grading you might well think that too. Most misunderstood PKD book by far.
You're misunderstanding "Dick went out of the way to rub in that ... robots ... are actually not people, but rather artifacts designed to fool you about what they are." A person fooling others doesn't make that person an artifact.
Like what makes something an "artifact"? That it is a superficial image produced intentionally by another? Mass propaganda and social pipelining have produced the same phenomenon in humans.
Is it that the robot doesn't "feel" like a human does? Well, now we're in extraordinarily subjective territory, dealing with qualia, and the distinction will become more difficult as neural models continue to evolve and experience the world in the same way we do.
I like PKD's take but I think it's an open question.
The desires of the public don't enter into it. Like all matters of consequence, the people who control the economy and the government have decided this is happening and didn't take the opinion of the public into consideration.
Yes the article argues that. Crypto was not that interesting to people who already have financial control.
This doesn’t meet my personal experience, but curious to hear if others see something different! The prevailing opinion in the UK at least seems to be that it’s some non-living magical tool assistant.
As this assumption seems to be the basis of the article, I’m not sure on its validity.
I think it's an open question if that pre-LLM "priming" will survive actual contact with LLMs or if modern media depictions of robots will change in response.
Robocop is an interesting example where we sympathize with a cyborg but not the greedy corporate executives. Blade Runner has the same outlook. The Matrix and Ex Machina don't present AI as entirely sympathetic. Etc.
The priming has been a lot more nuanced than simply AI = sympathetic lifeform.
> “Robots are actually more alive than we are” is a core belief in our society
I absolutely do not think this is a core belief - If anything, the core belief is that 'being a human is special' and that robot's aren't really alive in the same way, because they don't feel human emotion.
It reads like someone used an LLM to cough up an article as an excuse to show the book ads. Though I don't actually think it's LLM-generated, mostly just because of the unnecessary ALL-CAPS in the middle, and the overuse of bold, italics, and underlining throughout.
What we have is, while useful for many things (with proper constraints), just prediction engines that behave like intelligence. Generating a sentence when specifically asked to do so is a far cry from independently pondering over your existence then picking up the God of Thunder's hammer.
If anything, the public has been primed to hate AI as we have it now. CEOs are blaming it for mass scale layoffs. Media executives are using it so recklessly they face legal action. Data centers (already an issue for years for environmental impact and noise pollution) are being even more aggressively pushed on communities who don't want them. And the Silicon Valley upper crust are, to sell their AI products, embracing the worst views and uses of them.
AI can be ethical and useful, if we want it to be. But that is not how it is being sold. Increasingly, the public is aligning against it's use. This blog post badly misses that point.
at what point does it cease to become a simple mathematical function and start to become an "organism"?
I don't see any evidence that current LLMs even have a path to that.
And by "outcome" I mean holistically - not the literal output of a model.
I have less of a problem with Chinese AI than American AI because no one in China is screaming at me to use their AI. No one in China is trying to justify me making sacrifices so their AI can grow. It's like: they don't care if I use their AI or not - it's there, you do you.
Meanwhile, Altman, Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg (problematic individuals at best) are all over the news proclaiming AI as the Second Coming of Jesus if only I give up water so they can cool their plants, all while yelling "it will all work out if you just trust us!"
Not helping, guys. Not at all.
Also, it's not Intelligent and for the love of God, please stop pretending it is and please stop trying to convince everyone that it is.