Klaatu barada nikto: Robert Wright’s “The God Test” (William Benzon, 8/10.26, 3Quarks)
The standard line about computers, that they only do what they’re programmed to do, doesn’t apply to large language models (LLMs), the particular technology that dominates the current scene. The engineers program a transformer to “examine” (or, if you prefer, ”consume”) a large corpus of texts, and the transformer constructs (“emits”?) a “model” of the language in those texts – Wright discusses this process in “Chapter Two: The Great Inversion.” The inner mechanisms of that model, however, are opaque. The engineers who programmed and ran the transformer can’t see into it to see how it works – something Wright discusses in “Chapter Four: The Evolution of a Large Language Model.”
Subsuming these factors, deeper than any of them, and more elusive is the simple fact that contemporary chatbots and their siblings are deeply STRANGE. They’re not animal, vegetable, or mineral; they’re a new kind of thing that doesn’t fit into pre-existing cultural categories. They’re inanimate things with which we can converse like we would with another human.
In the 19th century the term “iron horse” arose to characterize steam locomotives. Why? Because it moved autonomously over the surface of the earth like a horse, but it was made of iron and therefore inanimate. Consider this passage from Henry David Thoreau’s “Sound” chapter in Walden (1854):
When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion . . . with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in gold and silver wreaths . . . as if this traveling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils, (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I don’t know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it.
There you have it, the iron horse and the fire-breathing dragon. Now we have the electronic brain, as it was known in my youth, the thinking machine.
These factors make any attempt to explain the technology and its implications a bit like trying to describe a Rorschach blot. There’s something real there but characterizing it is difficult. Consequently any account you give has a large element of projection in it. AI thus functions as a cultural Rorschach blot onto which we project our hopes and fears, who we are and what we are, where we want to go.
