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Vincent Carchidi

@vcarchidi.bsky.social

470 followers 590 following 1.5K posts

Defense analyst. Tech policy. Have a double life in CogSci/Philosophy of Mind. (It's confusing. Just go with it.) https://philpeople.org/profiles/vincent-carchidi All opinions entirely my own.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · Apr 18

Sharing a new preprint on AI and philosophy of mind/cogsci.

I make the case that human beings exhibit a species-specific form of intellectual freedom, expressible through natural language, and this is likely an unreachable threshold for computational systems.

philpapers.org/rec/CARCBC

Vincent Carchidi, Computational Brain, Creative Mind: Intellectual Freedom as the Upper Limit on Artificial Intelligence - PhilPapers

Some generative linguists have long maintained that human beings exhibit a species-specific form of intellectual freedom expressible through natural language. With roots in Descartes’ effort to distin...

philpapers.org

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 12h

One thing which I'd be happy to get input on is, just to be blunt, I do find the urge to automate a person's life without consulting them in some systematic ways about it first a little odd...especially if this leads to dismay that non-AI people don't love it. Clashes with virtuous tech posturing.

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 12h

Agree with the sentiment, but I do think a number of people (not OP) who say "I want robots to do my dishes so I can do art" don't actually want their manual chores automated.

And, if we're being charitable, they may not be wrong to worry about all household chores being automated. Time will tell.

unpaid shirtz dot cool brand ambassador @sam.robotsfightingdinosaurs.com · 13h

i think it's a pretty clear repudiation of modern capitalism and capitalism as a whole that what people actually want robots to do is shit like laundry, taking the trash out, vacuuming, etc, and instead the market has forced robots to be The Future Of Everything. no, please just wash my dishes thx

Assistant HR Director of Antifa @sethdmichaels.bsky.social · 13h

AI HUCKSTER: "i built you a machine that reads books for you."

ME: "can you build me a machine that unloads the dishwasher for me so *i* can read a book?"

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 13h

I'd add that the US govt may behave in reaction to a crash in what we might call non-traditional ways. Idk how that impacts everything else.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 13h

I think there's ample room to argue that the tech is not useless but the correction would still not be quick.

My disclaimer is that I have no idea how it'll play out, but difficult for me to not see the risk of a painful period of correction.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 15h

This gets into some much thornier issues about what it is we're actually doing when trying to explain something. And that's a can of worms (there's so many possible angles). Though I'd argue it is one way of many ways to raise the importance of rigorous theory construction that's often neglected.

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 15h

I think we can hold both that intelligence *is* an abstraction and abstractions are useful to study real things - natural phenomena that are "out there" - but that what's meant by intelligence is often a very bad abstraction that does not capture the properties of what makes humans what they are.

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 15h

Quite an interesting topic about whether or not intelligence is "real" in some meaningful sense...

Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 20h

A long-running debate in physics is whether quantum mechanics is describing something real, or should rather be thought of as a metaphorical abstraction. I think the same question applies to "intelligence," as I write about this week. buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/the-quantu...

The quantum of intelligence

What might a long-running debate in physics suggest about human cognition and AI?

buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 19h

Oh I agree. Wasn't criticizing her. Moreso that her (skeptical) comments on LLMs make her kind of a pariah among people more bullish on them.

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 19h

In any event, props to this guy for simultaneously being a big believer in super capable LLMs *and* quoting Emily Bender.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 19h

I came across the thread last night, and coming back to it now, I think it's much too pessimistic on several counts.

E.g. Musk controlling Grok as a news source on X is very bad, but not as bad as it sounds when interwoven with everything else discussed by Carlini.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 19h

Lots to think about. I might just point out re: the token tax proposed by Amodei, that major firms asking to be regulated is...not incompatible with regulatory capture...

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 19h

Interesting thread...

Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 1d

Keynote at #COLM2025: Nicholas Carlini from Anthropic

"Are language models worth it?"

Explains that the prior decade of his work on adversarial images, while it taught us a lot, isn't very applied; it's unlikely anyone is actually altering images of cats in scary ways.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 20h

Yeah, I had no idea about some of the Soviet interpretations of people like Simon and Newell that @mraginsky.bsky.social mentions...

Reposted by Vincent Carchidi

AN/PRC-148 MBITRsweet Symphony @classywarfare.gobirds.online · 1d

Go phils, go flyers, go birds

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 1d

I think you'd agree that latter sense is less seamless than the former, but it can substitute for a less efficient process?

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 1d

Take your use of Excel. That's a software that is designed to function in very specific ways and, if used properly, it does! You don't need to question it, in that sense.

Then there's the other sense of effectively jury rigging it for use in an environment not built around Excel.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 1d

Both need to be aligned for workflow purposes, and I think they are very much misaligned in the process you're describing.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 1d

So I think there's two main senses in which it works:

- It operates as the programmer intended

- It operates as the end user intends

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 1d

those I think should be kept *somewhat* separate from whether the tech works as intended or not, just to get our bearings on what needs to be fixed and what doesn't need to be fixed.

These are really the problems that take years to figure out.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 1d

Yeah I have family who work in healthcare, and documentation is maybe the most recurring thing I hear about. The doctors (so I'm told) don't have enough time to do it themselves, but they're too short staffed so they have to do it.

But the broader issues about requirements and so forth...

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 1d

Interesting example...things get a little tangled here. Like would you say this specific outcome is a tech problem or just a workflow problem?

The data that's recorded is being recorded accurately - even if not an accurate diagnosis, etc - so the pipes work in that sense?

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 1d

Gonna be reading this one today for sure

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 1d

So in clinical software, that of course doesn't have to be maximum precision or reliability for each application. But for anything that, say, delivers an output that will guide the clinician to prescribing a med, my sense is it just has to be up there. (lots of variation, but you get my point)

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 1d

Yeah I think, getting to what someone else said, I probably trot out the five nines line too often, but it does capture a point which I think has been lost: the most impact on people's lives comes from the systems capable of operating (mostly) seamlessly in sensitive environments. AI or not.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 1d

I'll have to get past my "too much to read" crisis before I get to them tho