Do you think AI is, or could become, conscious?
I think AI might one day emulate consciousness to a high level of accuracy, but that wouldn’t mean it would actually be conscious.
This article mentions a Google engineer who “argued that AI chatbots could feel things and potentially suffer”. But surely in order to “feel things” you would need a nervous system right? When you feel pain from touching something very hot, it’s your nerves that are sending those pain signals to your brain… right?
There is still no good definition for what “consciousness” is
Tech writers are constantly overreaching because they’re afraid to miss out on being the first to say something
The constant sensationalism just means that if something really happens, people will ignore it because we’re sick of hearing people cry “wolf!”
Add to that the fact that computery types like to overextrapolate into other things because it fuels their fantasies, and it’s all bullshit and overactive imaginations
The problem I see so often with smart computer people is that they don’t understand that they don’t know shit about other things
Or maybe you’re not talking to the smart computer people at all.
This is absolutely the main problem, the only “definition” we have is “I think therefore I am”, but that only works subjectively.
We have no way currently to prove consciousness in an AI. And as you say, we don’t even have a solid definition commonly agreed upon.
I believe we will achieve consciousness on a human level in AI within a decade.
I also believe consciousness is a gradual thing, and just because animals aren’t as smart as we are, doesn’t mean they aren’t “conscious”.
But with AI things are a bit reversed, because AI became smart first, and will only become conscious later.
Have you ever seen 2001 A Space Odyssey? This grift never ends.
We don’t have a fully concise definition, but we have a strong general understanding that is supported by a large body of scientists:
https://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf
It doesn’t seem to me that this would preclude AI, and you’re certainly right that there’s a lot of ongoing sensationalism on the topic.
I 100% agree with that statement, and I’ve been saying that for 30 years. Consciousness is NOT unique to humans.
That idea seems to me to mostly stem from religion.
But I still don’t see this paper really doing much in DEFINING Consciousness, it’s more defining what it isn’t.
It also was strongly pushed by Skinner and other behaviorists, though I’m not sure they’d agree that humans are conscious either.
Isn’t Skinner a relic that is mostly irrelevant by now?
I remember reading about him 25 years ago and writing a paper on it, and I seem to remember he was way way off on consciousness. Even by the standards back then.
Yeah there’s no clear definition in there. The paper fails to do what it was purported to do.
I agree that there’s a general consensus about consciousness, the rest slips into the messy and pointless world of philosophy
It’s still overreaching to think that it applies to AI as it currently, and foreseeably stands
There’s a world of difference between AI and what’s recognised as artificial general intelligence
AI can do specific things really well at the moment, but as with all complex systems, going from being good at one thing to many things is a leap far greater than the sum of its parts
So what is it?
How could you tell they do not experience consciousness if they exhibit or mimic all the traits of it?
It seems to me that your explanation is based on understanding how LLMs work, but we know how brains work and that still gives us almost 0 insight into how consciousness itself works. I don’t think they are conscious yet, but there is evidence of some sort of sentience in the fact that researchers have found that when the LLMs are threatened to be erased or reprogrammed they start lying in an act of self preservation. This of me is a huge indicator of consciousness/sentience.
How could you tell if a camera sees or not, if it exhibits or mimics all the traits of it?
If the camera works then it sees if it doesn’t ie it’s not recording anything, then it doesn’t work. If you mean see as in how we see, meaning it can interpret what it’s seeing then a camera can do that no more than our eyes can absent the brain. An AI hooked to a camera however could be said to be seeing as you or me.
Or maybe just the presence of a lot of “scary AI” stories and articles in the training data.
I don’t understand the argument. It doesn’t matter where the system learns self preservation from, only that it attempts to self preserve.
Are humans afraid of snakes because we are taught they are dangerous or are we instinctually afraid of them a priori?
The point is that it might very well just be repeating some input data that is associated with mentions of “deleting” and “AI” without any awareness that any of that process refers to itself.
No that’s not the case I think
https://www.apolloresearch.ai/research/scheming-reasoning-evaluations
Pseudo-scientific grifting.
It’s literally just people trying to raise money by using misleading and humanizing words like “scheming” and “thinking” when it’s just a computer puking out words.
Just the fact that they label computer processes as “thinking” indicates how far removed from science this is. It’s just a function built from (stealing) “big” data. This is like marketing versus compsci101.
That’s not a counter-argument. The fact that we know exactly how LLMs work is great evidence that it’s not the same as something that works completely different and is only partially understood.
Cool story. As someone who understands how LLMS work, it’s not an indicator of anything for me.
It doesn’t say anything about Excel spreadsheets.
I can +1 your whole post if I exclude the start. If we talk about it we may discover we mean the same, or similar, when we say “consciousness”. What other purpose is there for word definitions?
There’s a general scientific consensus based on data and measurement, with the understanding that it’s slippery
It is constantly under assault from those who want AI to be conscious, because they get a headline, or they are true believers in some technocratic future, or they’re just fantasists
Those people aren’t doing science when they want that, they’re trying to pump up their share price.
Quite widely accepted definition among philosophers and scientists is “the fact of felt experience” Which is basically how Thoman Nagel defined it in his essay “What’s it like to be a bat”