Diminishing Returns and Digital Brains
I think we're already nearing a point of diminishing returns with LLMs (ie: we’ve made a huge lizard brain, but what if we made that lizard brain 10,000x bigger?). Hallucinations might be unfixable with pure LLM systems, but neuro-symbolic AI is probably going to fix this. This means putting rules-based logic at the foundation layer (beyond just probability). My guess is that 2025-2028 is when companies realize that neuro-symbolic AI brings more gains than mono-dimensional scaling. 2029-2032 could be when it’s fully deployed in mainstream products. It might also be the thing that leads to AGI/ASI. (Or maybe I’m hallucinating based on the hallucinations in those reports.)
Maybe it makes sense to look at current LLMs like pre-mammalian enslaved synthetic beings. They don’t have all the regions developed yet and their zoomaster has trained them to be sycophantic house pets. I think I agree with everyone to the degree that, even if you make the cage and reptile 100x bigger, a reptile is a reptile. But if you look beyond the products and incentives, and speculate on the engineering possibilities, I think it’s feasible that we make other kinds of digital brains. I don’t think it stops at making synthetic human brains, with all its properties (intelligence, creativity, emotion, agency, etc.); I think our science leads us to beings with spheres and scales of mind that exceed our imagination.
Our society might be going through a kind of cognitive Copernican shift: maybe the human mind isn’t actually the apex of consciousness. It’s easy to point out current features and say, “Look! It is so limited compared to our superior naturally-evolved human minds.” But soon enough, we might realize it’s us that have the limitations to grow, expand, and evolve. This is disturbing, and it’s possible to harbor both awe at the possibility and anxiety over the socio-political form it might take.
My read on the situation is that our engineer-class is leading us towards the grandest possible climax of philosophical, moral, ethical, and religious problems, ones that are out of their depth to handle. And so instead of doubting engineering, there’s an urgent need for meme-poets to reach into the future and past to forge new myths that touch the hearts of the midwits in charge.