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NY Times, Oliver Whang, 27 Mar 2023<\/strong>: Can a Machine Know That We Know What It Knows?<\/a>, subtitled “Some researchers claim that chatbots have developed theory of mind. But is that just our own theory of mind gone wild?” Mind reading is common among us humans. Not in the ways that psychics claim to do it, by gaining access to the warm streams of consciousness that fill every individual\u2019s experience, or in the ways that mentalists claim to do it, by pulling a thought out of your head at will. Everyday mind reading is more subtle: We take in people\u2019s faces and movements, listen to their words and then decide or intuit what might be going on in their heads.<\/p>\n Among psychologists, such intuitive psychology \u2014 the ability to attribute to other people mental states different from our own \u2014 is called theory of mind, and its absence or impairment has been linked to autism<\/a>, schizophrenia<\/a> and other developmental disorders<\/a>. Theory of mind helps us communicate with and understand one another; it allows us to enjoy literature and movies, play games and make sense of our social surroundings. In many ways, the capacity is an essential part of being human.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I’ve been reading about “theory of mind” for over a decade, at least since Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct<\/b><\/a>. It’s the thing that babies initially don’t have, and then do have: an awareness that other people have minds of their own, intentions and beliefs distinct from their own.<\/p>\n What if a machine could read minds, too?<\/p>\n Recently, Michal Kosinski, a psychologist at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, made just that argument<\/a>: that large language models like OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT and GPT-4 \u2014 next-word prediction machines trained on vast amounts of text from the internet \u2014 have developed theory of mind.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n It’s just a thought, not widely accepted.<\/p>\n \u201cPsychologists wouldn\u2019t accept any claim about the capacities of young children just based on anecdotes about your interactions with them, which is what seems to be happening with ChatGPT,\u201d said Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the first researchers to look into theory of mind in the 1980s. \u201cYou have to do quite careful and rigorous tests.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The article goes on with examples of how ‘theory of mind’ develops in children (just as Bering provided in his book), and goes back and forth with observations about chatbots. Conclusion:<\/p>\n It\u2019s natural and often socially required to explain human behavior by talking about beliefs, desires, intentions and thoughts. This tendency is central to who we are \u2014 so central that we sometimes try to read the minds of things that don\u2019t have minds, at least not minds like our own.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \\\\\\<\/p>\n Big Think, Ethan Siegel, 24 Mar 2023<\/strong>: Ask Ethan: Can science explain UFO sightings?<\/a>, subtitled “Lots of people have seen lots of bizarre events and phenomena that defy our conventional experience. But is there a scientific explanation?”<\/p>\n The article’s own summary:<\/p>\n A familiar discussion, with a citation of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous three laws<\/a>.<\/p>\n
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\nI think the lesson with the recent chatbots is that they aren’t “intelligent” at all, but simply crude mirrors of everything humanity has put on their computers.<\/p>\n\n
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