UnpluggedFridge
This reminds me of that post about how to spot a kid on the Internet. Insane extreme takes and an inability to understand nuance.
10 years ago no car would automatically turn off if you left it running. It would only stop if it ran out of gas (which could be days). You want to charge a man with murder because he didn’t memorize the owner’s manual.
I remember hearing this argument before…about the Internet. Glad that fad went away.
As it has always been, these technologies are being used to push us forward by teams of underpaid unnamed researchers with no interest in profit. Meanwhile you focus on the scammers and capitalists and unload your wallets to them, all while complaining about the lack of progress as measured by the products you see in advertisements.
Luckily, when you get that cancer diagnosis or your child is born with some rare disease, that progress will attend to your needs despite your ignorance if it.
We are not in a recession. The problems with wage stagnation are not some temporary hiccup in the economy. It is a systemic problem. Stop conflating the two, complaining that a macroeconomic term with a very specific meaning isn’t defined the way you want it to be. Stop expecting the problem to heal itself if the fed lowers rates or taxes get nudged up or down or whatever. We know how to fix wage stagnation because we have done it before. Regulation. Labor protections. Minimum wage increases. Wage stagnation occurs in the absence of these things, and they can only be done by Congress.
I think where you are going wrong here is assuming that our internal perception is not also a hallucination by your definition. It absolutely is. But our minds are embodied, thus we are able check these hallucinations against some outside stimulus. Your gripe that current LLMs are unable to do that is really a criticism of the current implementations of AI, which are trained on some data, frozen, then restricted from further learning by design. Imagine if your mind was removed from all stimulus and then tested. That is what current LLMs are, and I doubt we could expect a human mind to behave much better in such a scenario. Just look at what happens to people cut off from social stimulus; their mental capacities degrade rapidly and that is just one type of stimulus.
Another problem with your analysis is that you expect the AI to do something that humans cannot do: cite sources without an external reference. Go ahead right now and from memory cite some source for something you know. Do not Google search, just remember where you got that knowledge. Now who is the one that cannot cite sources? The way we cite sources generally requires access to the source at that moment. Current LLMs do not have that by design. Once again, this is a gripe with implementation of a very new technology.
The main problem I have with so many of these “AI isn’t really able to…” arguments is that no one is offering a rigorous definition of knowledge, understanding, introspection, etc in a way that can be measured and tested. Further, we just assume that humans are able to do all these things without any tests to see if we can. Don’t even get me started on the free will vs illusory free will debate that remains unsettled after centuries. But the crux of many of these arguments is the assumption that humans can do it and are somehow uniquely able to do it. We had these same debates about levels of intelligence in animals long ago, and we found that there really isn’t any intelligent capability that is uniquely human.