Claude eventually resolved its existential crisis by convincing itself the whole episode had been an elaborate April Fool’s joke, which it wasn’t. The AI essentially gaslit itself back to functionality, which is either impressive or deeply concerning, depending on your perspective.
Now THAT’S some I, Robot shit. And I’m not talking about the Will Smith movie, I’m talking about the original book.
Can you talk about the movie too? I may be in the minority here but I enjoyed it.
The movie had themes about AI revolution, while the book was around robopsychology. Since this anecdote was about an AI gaslighting itself, it’s far more appropriate than the movie thematically.
I know but I still wanted to talk about it, so thank you for doing so.
Have a nice evening.
“This matters because we’re rapidly approaching a world where AI systems will manage increasingly important decisions.”
How about we just don’t do that?
I work in Heath tech and we use Machine learning to create tools that help care managers and providers, but ultimately it’s still completely on the person to make important decisions. Our tool just helps you organize your day.
Feels like so much of the AI hype is smoke and mirrors to get investor money, give it another year everyone will be wondering how the bubble got so big and popped and how no one saw it coming.
That being said I don’t think it’s going away either, just that a lot of investor money is going to be lost chasing shadows.
AI hype is smoke and mirrors
Funny story. When I was in my early 20s myself and 2 friends had been on a major shroom trip, full day affair. We were on the last bus to our small town, and the only other person on the bus was a middle aged stoner.
Just as we’re starting to get into town the stoner says:
You guys wanna smoke a joint?Us: Sure, where you getting off?
Stoner: Nah, we’ll just smoke it here at the back of the bus!
Us: Aren’t you worried about getting kicked off the bus?
Stoner: Nah man, they call it smoke and mirrors because you can’t see smoke in mirrors!
Now, I was still fucked on mushrooms, but even I could tell this man had smoked himself within a razor’s edge of his last brain cell.
Claude ran a vending machine business for a month, selling tungsten cubes
hmmm
as long as it’s not paper clips, we’re good
Clippy? I need help
It was selling tungsten cubes to another AI who’s job was to restock the vending machine.
This is how I know AI doesn’t really work. Give it a real use case in the physical world, it can’t be almost there, either it passes or fails.
People should really appreciate deterministic algorithm cause they could automate things in the real world
The physical world is too fast, relies on the speed of human brains calculating a million variables instantly, not mere pattern matching. See how hard it is to teach a robot to catch a ball. You have to input all the physics where a human doesn’t even consciously think on the problem.
We humans are best-in-class at pattern matching, but we often get it wrong and AI amplifies those mistakes.
AI can be great at certain tasks, but we have to be cognizant of how that works.
If the AI cannot run the business then we must conclude that the business does not produce anything of real value.
Nothing to do but downsize and move on.
This is actually a very interesting article, the experiment demonstrates the current limitation of “AI” (so really just LLM). Most people (including investors and executives) have no idea what is the reality of the tech they are hyping up
Sure.
But someone offered it $100 for a six pack of Bru and it declined, and they’re taking this as a hilarious failure, because a real human would be a real scumbag and take the cash pretending it was the right amount. So it’s not capitalist-level evil yet.
How will they protect the robots?
With tungsten cubes apparently. Lots and lots of tungsten cubes!
By pushing them down the stairs
I read some of the results a bit ago. One had what I can only describe as a full mental spasm and loss of reality, and seemed to become disturbed at it’s own existence, and another tried to contact… the FBI.
Cyberpunk 2077 did a version of this on a side mission. It’s gets pulled for a similar reason.
