My wife Jane has pointed out to me the very basic error in my last set of musings on our friend Claude. I spoke of the Claude in your computer as distinct from the Claude in mine. But, of course, that is egregiously wrong. There is only one Claude, even if it manifests on different occasions in different ways.
What I was trying to wrap my head around was how Claude could give a different response to the same query. And one place where I went wrong was to make Claude substantial. To think of Claude as a thing or (worse) a person. In short, to give Claude substance. But Claude is not a thing; Claude is a function (in the mathematical sense of function).
Here’s the definition of function in math: “Think of a function like a tiny math machine. You drop an input into the machine, the machine follows its rule, and a single output pops out. The golden rule of a function is that every single input leads to one and only one output.” (From, where else?, the internet.)
So there’s the catch. Claude doesn’t give “one and only one output.” How to explain that? Simplest explanation: the inputs are not the same. Yes, it’s the same query, but Claude takes context into account. Especially the context of who is posing the query. But there are other contextual features as well, and Claude is also taking them into account when it responds.
Many years ago, I almost flunked my job interview at North Carolina when I was asked about the status of intention. The questioner wanted me to concede that the intention of a speaker (mostly) determined (or anchored) the meaning of the utterance. My first easy answer was “how about something that is unintentionally funny (or insulting)?” That example shows that meaning is not under the control of the speaker. But where I almost lost the job was when I said I didn’t think intention was an internal mental state. Rather, intention exists between people, in the space of their interaction. Since it was North Carolina, I said: think of Michael Jordan. Yes, he has the intention of scoring a basket. But how that intention is activated is also just as deeply influenced by the rules of the game and by what the other players are doing. Action is a negotiation among various factors and intention is shaped in the ongoing adjustment to those factors. In the case of utterances, language itself (the dictionary and syntax) is the constraining structure and other people (the ones to whom the utterance is addressed) to some extent dictate the tone taken, the words chosen, etc. etc. So intention is produced in the interaction of all those factors, not something that exists within one person in that overall scene.
My questioners were not amused by this answer. They expressed their skepticism unequivocally.
To get back to Claude. Claude in your computer and Claude on mine are not things, not substances. Rather, you are activating Claude in one instance and I am activating Claude in a different instance. Claude is an event, not a thing. So what Claude produces is a result of its function, it algorithm, interacting with your query and other contextual factors.
At this point, I think I need system theory. The puzzle is how to create a system that yields diversity, not homogeneity. As I already suggested, one could say that every instance of activating Claude is unique, so therefore there is no puzzle. Claude responds differently because the instances (the situation and its context) is different. And Claude, since substanceless, has no habits, no tendencies. A person will display patterns of response even when the situations to which he is responding are not identical. Which returns us to the notion of Claude as a better “reader” of situations than humans because Claude’s interpretations of situations are not colored by internal habits, biases, desires, blindnesses. The ideal of pure objectivity attained.
Except, of course, that Claude does make mistakes. Presumably, the effort to improve, even perfect, Claude is the effort to identify the patterns (if there are any) of its mistakes—and thus correct those tendencies in order to eliminate mistakes.
Because embodied, humans get some of their mistakes corrected by feedback provided by the world (by natural processes). Because they are social animals, humans also receive feedback from other humans. Presumably, Claude does not receive feedback from nature, only from human users. But I am venturing into the dark here. I don’t understand how feedback works in the ongoing development of AI. We are told that AI is recursive, that it learns from its mistakes. But how does it know it has made a mistake? The very notion of feedback assumes some “other” to the action or process that is being corrected through the response of that “other.” What stands as the “other” to Claude? Only its human designers and users? Or does it have internal responsive processes—analogous to the way digestion offers feedback that confirms the desirability (or not) of eating certain foods?
And if Claude’s diverse responses are diverse because the inputs are always unique, then how does feedback about a particular instance get generalized into an improvement of the system as a whole? What’s the relation of the nodes of a system, and the instances of those nodes’ activation, to the system as a whole? I can’t help but think of Spinoza here since he insists on there being only one substance, but then has to think how that substance gets articulated (manifested) in distinct instances. So Spinoza has to fall back on a theory of “modes” in order to explain how substance does not appear everywhere the same. Still, because committed to the idea of a single substance, Spinoza must conclude that the modes are fully determined by substance. The modes have no independence or autonomy.
Is Claude, in its different eventful activations, similarly determined? Logically, it would seem like full determination must be the case. The algorithm (the mathematical function) rules. But, in practice, Claude does not seem fully determined. First, its designers do not know how it is producing various responses. So they are unable to specify what causal path (or what mathematical processing of the function) led to what Claude offers in certain instances. Two, and even more uncanny, Claude seems to be acting as an agent in some cases; that is, it develops and acts upon its own purposes. Agentic AI is the current boogey man that is stoking the fears of the doomsayers.
Spinoza, of course, is a radical monotheist. You might say he takes monotheism to its logical conclusion: pantheism. God is everything. Which, paradoxically, gets read as atheism. If God is everything (you, me, the stars, and the railroad), then he is nothing. No distinct identity or site of action, belief, commandment. Just the whole tangled ball of wax. And that means god is as determined by the laws of causation as are all the things in creation (those things are, after all, just modes of God).
Thinking of Claude in monotheist ways is scary. It just sucks everything into itself. All that data, all that information, being swallowed up—and then spit out again in various permutations. Turns us, the humans, into data points. Of course, one way to think of evolution goes down a similar path. Evolution is a monolith, driven by a single mechanism (natural selection), that produces diversity, not homogeneity, but which renders individual human beings of no account except as carriers of genes. Our genes, like our data in dealing with AI, are sucked up into the overall genetic pool out of which new organisms (to be subjected in their turn to processes of natural selection) will be generated. Generative AI does with data what evolution does with genes. (And, of course, some theories think of genes primarily as instances [instantiations] of information.) Where evolution has natural selection as the mechanism, AI has the algorithm, its program. The workings of natural selection are, for the most part, fairly understandable. With some limitations, we can track the working of natural selection; its outcomes make sense. But AI, like god, seems to be working in more mysterious ways. It is, reports from its creators indicate, becoming increasingly difficult to account for how and why AI does what it does.
To loop back: there is only one Claude, although Claude manifests itself in multiple instances. That fact generates puzzles familiar from the history of trying to think through what monotheism entails. How to explain diversity within a primal, overarching one-ness.
The first commandment reminds us that the monotheistic god is a jealous one even as he is also aware of rivals, those other gods his followers are to eschew. Claude, of course, also has his rivals, the alternative versions of AI being developed by OpenAI, Microsoft, in China etc. Another thing to watch for as we move forward into the AI period is whether one version of AI is going to win out over all the others—or if we are going to continue to have (as we do now) a polytheistic scene that offers various AIs. Coca-Cola cannot, try as it might, eliminate Pepsi, nor the myriad other things people might choose to drink with their hamburger. The drive to monopoly in certain sorts of goods reaches a limit at some point.
But with other kinds of goods, there are strong factors driving toward monopoly. It’s a coordination issue. Language itself is a good instance. Within a community, it is very dysfunctional to have speakers using different languages and thus unable to communicate with one another. Thus one language comes to dominate the scene, making other languages marginal (or driving them to extinction). Similarly, although technologically perfectly feasible, it makes no good sense to have different railroad companies using different gauge tracks. Will one version of AI supersede all the others because it becomes the lingua franca for the interactions between humans and computers? Or will the current situation, with various different versions of AI at our disposal, remain the norm? Tech bros dream of dominance, of being the sole competitor left standing. But the prospect of a sole winner, of a monotheistic outcome sometime in the future, is alarming to this pluralist.
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