https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/02/the-unperson-of-2023/
"2023 is over. Taylor Swift was
Time’s Person of the Year, beating out
candidates like Jerome Powell, who may have stuck the economic soft-landing,
but can’t hit the high notes. Only a fool would challenge the decision, but I
would like to nominate 2023’s Unperson of the year – ChatGPT; the
neural-network based, Large Language Model which launched only 13 months ago
and took the world by storm. My claim is not that we need to pay more attention
to it; from jeremiads about risks ranging from plagiarism and mass unemployment
to the annihilation of the human species, we haven’t been able to shut up.
Instead, we need to pay a different kind of attention. Something important just
happened and I am not sure we noticed.
For the first time in history, humans had a world-altering fact forced on them;
sentences do not imply sentience. The crown-jewel of our species, the quality
that supposedly entitled us to our special moral status: the ability fluently
to manipulate highly complex, abstract language about a near-infinite number of
subjects is, undeniably, no longer confined to humans. ChatGPT did what parrots
with large vocabularies and chimps that have learned ASL could not. It produced
language that might pass as human-created. It did so not in a philosophy
hypothetical or computer lab, but in real-time, to hundreds of millions of
people.
Most of us believe that being human confers a special moral status, even if we
disagree how much that allows us to prefer our interests over other living
things. But why? Some believe it is because of a divine command that gave us
the world and its inhabitants in sole and complete dominion. But those seeking
a secular justification had to root it in our capabilities – something we have
or do that makes us unique. There have been many candidates, from tool-use, to
a conception of past and future, to notions of morality and beauty; all
challenged by studies of non-human animals suggesting they are far more capable
than we once imagined. But the ability we principally focus on is language, or
at least on the kind of consciousness that language seems to show. More than
2300 years ago Aristotle laid out the basic argument. Language, he claimed,
allows reasoning about expediency: how best to achieve our goals? But it also
enables reasoning about justice: which goals are right and just? This is why he
believed only the human species has morality. From that capacity comes the
particular type of morally-freighted associations so important to Greek
philosophers, the family and the polis, but also the state’s version of
morality – the law. The human being is a moral, social being. And language is
the root of it all."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
