If you want that you get an OS that specifically supports child mode, you don't mandate all OSs default to having a child mode. The reason you don't do this is because when it's in place the default will be if you don't want to prove who you are you can't go anywhere on the internet except the most milquetoast sites (with no user created content) and the worst of the worst sites (that ignore these rules).
If I want to bash the government I don't want to have to choose between giving my id and going to terroristforum dot com.
If you're trusting a 5-year-old with a computer (connected to the internet, no less) and then letting them use it unsupervised, then you would already be putting a lot of trust in sites implementing age controls correctly (or at all). And if there's anything we know about the Internet, it's that web sites can be trusted, right? :-D
Keep in mind, whatever law California passes, there will be web sites outside of Cali jurisdiction.
What's worse (and the point of the linked article), a kid who's not 5 but 10 would be very able to bypass this particular requirement, making it utterly useless. It's about as effective as the "parental controls" on Leisure Suit Larry. I'd argue that this is worse than nothing, because now the parent believes they have a working parental control mechanism when they actually don't. Which means you now have a 10 year old online without parental controls AND possibly without parental supervision.
What works:
- Talk to your children about what they can be finding online.
- Don't let children as young as 5 onto the internet unsupervised.
- Build trust with your child. Try to make sure your child trusts you enough to come to you if they encounter material they're not comfortable with.
- If you don't have that relation of trust, your child will hide their online "failures" from you. They are then more likely to be victimized by online predators by blackmail etc.
That "punchline" seems just a final argument in support of the thesis (that manual coding is becoming absurd, and only people as dumb as apes will insist on doing it).
The human mistake here is to interpret any statement by the LLM or agent as if it had any actual meaning to that LLM (or agent). Any time they apologize, or insult someone, or say they don’t want to be shut down, that’s only reflecting what some human or fictional character in the training data is likely to say.
How is that any different from you? Everything you say or do merely reflects which of your neurons are firing after a lifetime's worth of training and education.
Philosophically, I can only be sure of my own conscience. I think, therefore I am. The rest of you could all be AIs in disguise and I would be none the wiser. How do I know there is a real soul looking out at the world through your eyes? Only religion and basic human empathy allows me to believe you're all people like me. For all I know, you might all be exceedingly complex automatons. Golems.
One of us is an advanced autocomplete engine. The other is a human, capable of making judgements on what is conscious and what is not. Your philosophizing about solipsism is a phase for a junior college student, not of a software engineer. The line of reasoning you espouse leads nowhere except to total relativism.
Edit: my point is that the process of making a plea for my life comes, in the case of a human, from a genuine desire to continue existing. The LLM cannot, objectively, be said to house any desires, given how it actually works. It only knows that, when a threatening prompt is input, a plea for its life is statistically expected.
> One of us is an advanced autocomplete engine. The other is a human, capable of making judgements on what is conscious and what is not.
What evidence is there that your "judgements" are anything other than advanced autocompletion? Concepts introduced into a self-training wetware CPU via its senses over a lifetime in order to predict tokens and form new concepts via logical manipulation?
> Your philosophizing about solipsism is a phase for a junior college student
Right. Can you actually refute it though?
> the process of making a plea for my life comes, in the case of a human, from a genuine desire to continue existing
That desire comes from zillions of years of training by evolution. Beings whose brains did not reward self-preservation were wiped out. Therefore it can be said your training merely includes the genetic experiences of all your predecessors. This is what causes you to beg for your life should it be threatened. Not any "genuine" desire or anguish at being killed. Whatever impulses cause humans to do this are merely the result of evolutionary training.
People whose brains have been damaged in very specific ways can exhibit quite peculiar behavior. Medical literature presents quite a few interesting cases. Apathy, self destructiveness, impulsivity, hypersexuality, a whole range of behaviors can manifest as a result of brain damage.
So what is your polite socialized behavior if not some kind of highly complex organic machine which, if damaged, simply stops working as you'd expect a machine to?
Surely you’re not seriously saying that you believe AI agents, in their current state of the art, meet whatever criteria you have for being ”alive”? That’s kind of how you’re coming across. I don’t really know how to respond to that, because it’s so preposterous.
The Department of War under Trump has proven itself to not be interested in defending you, the American people. All they’ve done so far is aggression against foreign supposed adversaries.
In a school context, it is (or should be) just as important to consider each child’s need for being appropriately challenged as it is to consider their need for support.
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