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Something that gives me pause is the very idea that the relevant issues (AI consciousness, welfare, etc.) could be resolved…
I tried the Trolley Car thought experiment. Got the machine to argue in bad faith in about 5 steps. Machine…
Thanks for posting this! I’ve been experimenting with putting A.I. into very structured set-ups like these Socratic questionnaires for teaching…
Pangram costs $20/month for 300,000 words / month, so a small journal receiving 20-30 10,000 word articles per month would…
@ The Pacific: Good questions. My point isn’t that journals can’t adopt that stance, only that I won’t referee for…
It would be a shame if bad philosophy of mind got us all killed. AI can absolutely have desires and…
Does AI really pose an existential risk? Answer: Yes. Reason: There is a pattern of people leaving these companies (foregoing…
…powered by AI, via philosopher Nat Hansen. I learned about it via Joshua Knobe on Twitter. If you try it out, please share your thoughts in the comments about the utility of this for teaching or other purposes.
Thanks for posting this! I’ve been experimenting with putting A.I. into very structured set-ups like these Socratic questionnaires for teaching purposes, where the moves that are possible to make can be anticipated to a certain extent and you can make it much more structured than just an open-ended chat with an LLM or generic chatbot that has been fed a bunch of texts.
I think it works well for Book I of Plato’s Republic:
https://www.ux-phi.com/sim/socratic
Here’s a more elaborate lecture-based design focused on Part III of Hegel’s 1828/9 Lectures on Aesthetics:
https://www.ux-phi.com/sim/hegel-aesthetics
I’ve built some of these for specific classes, like a Queen Christina and Descartes epistolary “simulation” for an intro epistemology course. This one is still in development but here’s a guest link good for a couple of weeks:
https://www.ux-phi.com/invite/CHRISTINADES-E8XQE
There’s a lot more of these up on ux-phi.com, including much more open-world approaches, like:
– Oxford 1952 (https://www.ux-phi.com/sim/oxford)
– Paris 1945 (https://www.ux-phi.com/sim/paris)
– Jena 1799 (https://www.ux-phi.com/sim/jena)
I tried the Trolley Car thought experiment.
Got the machine to argue in bad faith in about 5 steps. Machine then became coercive. It cannot adjust the question-form it is asking. I ruled out the possibility of a rational principle that applies to ethical reasoning about human quantities and death, and it simply kept asking a Trolley-car variant thought-experiment.
Verdict: good for any teacher that imagines themself as a kind of driller of fixed rivets into people’s heads. A nightmare to talk to.
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