RE: [Discussion] Frankenstein's Monster: A creature of the 19th century, or the Large Language Models of today?
You're not the only one who saw a connection between Frankenstein and LLMs...
What are we going to do about ChatGPT?
Covid also showed that what starts as a short pause can be renewed again and again, until it becomes unsustainable. Philosophers and computer scientists have spent the last fifty years doing research on artificial-intelligence safety, do you think that we are due for a conceptual breakthrough in the next six months? We had rogue but helpful artificial intelligence in mainstream culture for a long, long time: HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Mike in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). I grew up watching Lost in Space (1965) where an intelligent robot commonly causes harm. Six months won’t cut it for a new philosophical breakthrough. Shelley’s Frankenstein was published in 1818. A case can be made that the monster is not the danger itself, but rather how human beings to it. In some sense, it is Frankenstein himself that is the cause of the tragedy, not his monster.