technology

AI Shouldn't Be a Religion (Seriously)

Velda R

— 2 min read

Content/Possible trigger warning: existentialism, cults/religious extremism, mention of Elon Musk.

I felt like my previous post might have been too blunt... Maybe a bit harsh. Maybe the technology is too recent to criticize... I had not so great feelings about GMOs until golden rice, thinking, "Oh, okay maybe it's not the technology itself that makes it bad, it's how it's used by powerful organizations." My personal bias with mild religious trauma might have factored in and clouded my opinions.

Then I came across this and the ick factor came back:

About 20-something minutes in I had to stop watching.

LLMs/LRMs may give you the illusion that they are thinking and/or reasoning:

Particularly concerning is the counterintuitive reduction in reasoning effort as problems approach critical complexity, suggesting an inherent compute scaling limit in LRMs. Our detailed analysis of reasoning traces further exposed complexity-dependent reasoning patterns, from inefficient “overthinking” on simpler problems to complete failure on complex ones.

TL;DR: The models are not at god-levels yet. There's no absolute reason to treat them as such as long as they stumble on high-complexity tasks, like 15 disks of Tower of Hanoi. (Yes, it's thirty-two-thousand-something moves, which is a lot to handle, but not impossible.)

Figure 4 from the study showing accuracy across models and complexity across different puzzles. All of the models fail at 15 discs of Tower of Hanoi. Not something I would expect from an omnipresent, all-knowing being... (If you're okay with exalting and/or worshipping something like that I cannot help you.)

If you were chatting with a LLM/LRM for a while, it might pass the Turing test, especially if you didn't realize you were chatting with an AI model, but it can only fool you it's sentient, possibly up to a certain point. As impressive enough as these tools are, they are just that: tools. Tools that can be misused and misapplied. It's very much a human characteristic to find something higher than us but not here... Just... Don't. Don't join an AI cult, don't ask ChatGPT existential questions... Don't. Any time you find yourself exalting someone, something, or some idea as something diety-like and higher than yourself: Don't.

I'm not anti-religious or anti-spiritual, I'm all for religious freedom, but I steer away from harmful, cultish extremes as far as I humanly can. Lafayette Ronald Hubbard developed pseudoscience ideas (Dianetics) before turning it into the Church of Scientology. NXIVM started out as a second-attempt pyramid scheme by Keith Raniere. The world cult can be about an idea, not just a higher being, person or a religious idea. If you can't take my word for it, listen to someone who studies and lived this. (Daniella Mestyanek Young is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Organizational Psychology at the Harvard Extension School and survived the Children of God cult.)

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