On Humphreys opacity, Reverse Engineering, and Social Externalities of LLMs.

🫧 Open on Bubbles I start with characterizing a term, ‘ Humphreys opacity ’ ( or, if you prefer, ‘ epistemic opacity ’) :1 this involves the inability to surveil the steps of a process from a known input to a known desirable (or truthful, useful, beautiful, etc.) output in a timely manner to the decision-maker or responsible agent. (For more on the origin and nature of this characterization, recall this post. ) In what follows, I set aside to what extent such Humphreys opacity is the effect of features of p