AI and East-West cultural differences

[dmm]

"A second difficulty in communicating alignment ideas was based on differing ontologies. A surface-level explanation is that Japan is quite techno-optimistic compared to the west, and has strong intuitions that AI will operate harmoniously with humans. A more nuanced explanation is that Buddhist- and Shinto-inspired axioms in Japanese thinking lead to the conclusion that superintelligence will be conscious and aligned by default. One senior researcher from RIKEN noted during the conference that “it is obviously impossible to control a superintelligence, but living alongside one seems possible.” Some visible consequences of this are that machine consciousness research in Japan is taken quite seriously, whereas in the West there is little discussion of it."

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I think it's time for us to start asking if, for example, GPT-4-produced simulations have associated subjective experience.

We have a feed-forward transducer in an autoregressive mode; each time a new token is produced by the feed-forward Transformer, the whole dialog including the just produced token is fed again to the input of the model, so there is a recurrent dynamics here (cf. section 3.4 of "Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention", arxiv.org/abs/2006.16236).

So I would not be too surprised if that process actually "feels what it says".

Comments

[dmm]

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Yc6cpGmBieS7ADxcS/japan-ai-alignment-conference-postmortem

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yc6cpGmBieS7ADxcS/japan-ai-alignment-conference-postmortem

[dmm]

So there is interesting duality here:

* machine consciousness research in Japan is taken quite seriously, whereas in the West there is little discussion of it

* AI safety research in the West is taken quite seriously, whereas in Japan there is little discussion of it