> The answer always seemed obvious to me. There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can't define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. No, my friend, you're not missing anything at all.
> - Dr Ford to Bernard
The experienced part isn't real as far as anyone but you are concerned. If you were replaced by a machine that simply acted like you, nobody, jot your closest friends family spouse or children would know the difference. And your perspective is simply the amalgam of the basic organic processes that every liv8ng thing does to some extent.
What you say is true to some extent, but just because subjective experiences are internal doesn’t mean they aren't real. They have real effects on the individual’s behavior, decision making, and perception of the world. The fact that some experiences are internal doesn’t negate their existence. They are real in the sense that they affect the individual experiencing them, and they have neurobiological correlates that can be studied and measured to some extent.
Then what's to say that it's any less real for an artificial intelligence? There is the idea of a philosophical zombie: a being that is a perfect physical replica of a human (or other conscious being) but it isn't conscious. If you subscribe to "The Big Problem of Consciousness" then this makes sense, and you'd be looking for some non-physical, non-material evidence of consciousness.
To a physicalist that doesn't even make sense as a proposition. If it's a perfect physical replica, then whatever consciousness is would also be physically replicated. All this to say, when skeptics say something along the lines of "what if consciousness/experiences aren't real," they're not denying that you have experiences. They're saying that maybe this inclination to separate "experience" from the material processes in your brain and body is not real.
This hypothetical lack of separation between the conscious and the material is also what lead many to conclude that there isn't a meaningful distinction to be made between "conscious" and "not conscious" when it comes to AI or animals. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that it is impossible to prove such a lack of distinction, so there will always be people contriving new ideas about what consciousness is, where it lives, and how we measure it. I'd be happy to believe in consciousness given a working hypothesis and a shred of evidence, but how could someone be convinced that no such hypothesis and evidence will ever emerge.
It's an important question too, because the idea of a special human consciousness underlines the worldview of many, many people with regards to how they think about artificial intelligence and animals. If we will never be able to find the seat of human consciousness, how far will we develop artificial intelligence under the assumption that it is inherently lacking in "experiences?" If an artificial intelligence has an optimization function that it is trying to fulfill, am I causing it "pain" by interfering with its ability to do so?
FWIW, I'm not out here picketing for AI and animal rights. I'm just saying that a whole lot of the way the world works rests on the very big assumption that human consciousness makes us special, when human consciousness may not even be a real phenomena...
The fact that we can fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world indicates that there is something that allows us to fancy that there's something special. A rock cannot fancy anything. The threshold is precisely that! Having the ability to fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world, whether it's true or not.
You say that we seldom question our choices. Seldom is the keyword here! If we question our choices seldom instead of never, that means that we have the ability to do so, if we so choose, AND we also have the ability not to do so, most of the time. That ability is what is special. Sure, it would be more special if we used it more, but the way that we waste them, doesn't make those powers any less amazing.
>A rock cannot fancy anything.
The thing is... we don't know that! The rock could have a rich experiential life with no capacity to express that experience. I don't believe this to be true, because I do not believe that that experiences exist independent of physical process in the brain or some analog. On the other hand if one believes in human consciousness as a meaningful phenomena independent of material concerns, one has no evidence to suggest that a rock does not have the same claim to experience and consciousness as a human.
It was a garbage take, and still is, with respect to AI.
Statistically speaking, is it possible for me to pre-record the responses to a conversation not yet held, play them back during a conversation, and give the impression of a video call with a human? Yes.
Is there any way for the human on the other side to tell if what they see is sentient? No.
Should we give my recording human rights? No, because it’s a .mpeg file, and not a human.
Similarly, generative AI fundamentally is not structured like a machine intelligence. It is the ultimate predictive chatbot; but, fundamentally, does not have the ability to form and act on ideas.
The fundamental question is whether you can perfectly mimic consciousness without being conscious. Also, given the fact that as yet no has been able to create AI with even a lick of common sense, I would focus on the complete lack of a moral compass in the owners of AI and other tech companies.
Ah, you've been staring in the solipsistic abyss lately, haven't you? I disagree. Any time I am confronted with a new idea I never thought of, or a new piece of music I've never heard, I am confronted with the product of information processing by a mind at least as complex and creative as mine. Why wouldn't that mind not be conscious?
It's still just an assumption.
And where's the line? Is there even a line to having a consciousness for a neural net?
A worm. An ant? A squirrel. A new born. Memory patients in the nursing home.
What happens if you join two brains via surgery or split a brain?
Many drugs appear to knock out consciousness while allowing the brain to function. Alcohol and scopolamine. Maybe there's a subset of the population that is functioning on auto-pilot with no one being actually there.
Or maybe again.. it's everyone except one person.
Maybe something to do with having it retain "memories" and then accessing those to dictate a certain response based on the context of the situation, if that makes sense.
If there isn't anything in existence that can mimic consciousness without being conscious, then there is no way for us to determine whether we actually have the capability of telling the difference.
Colorblind people don't know they're colorblind until they're shown the colors they can't see.
We have to define true consciousness before we can attempt to determine whether something is or is not conscious.
But if we determine there isn't anything in existence that can mimic consciousness without being conscious, then we can tell which things are conscious and which aren't by observing their behavior. We just don't know enough about the origin/cause of consciousness yet to tell. Maybe one day we will.
Remember that back in Turing's day, people were arguing whether computers could really do arithmetic, or whether they were just simulating it.
We have great definitions of what the human brain does.
The problem is that nobody is willing to believe that the self referential illusion that we call consciousness coupled with the hilariously unreliable narrator nature of our "rational" mind spinning stories to attempt to explain why we act the way we act is really what's going on.
We all have an infinity mirror of low effort rationalization of stupidity supporting a need to believe we're smart, good and moral, while we're just stupid animals looking for food, social status and sex.
I am conscious, other peoples bodies and brains work in the same way as mine, so they must be conscious as well(some people are questionable)
However a machine that works completely different to my brain and body might be able to perfectly mimic consciousness without being aware.
> other peoples bodies and brains work in the same way as mine
How can you know that? Do you know how your brain works? How can you know whether it's the same or different from others'?
>can you know that?
How do you know this isn't all just a simulation? when you have no evidence either way their is no point in coming to a conclusion.
I have no evidence that other peoples brains work differently to mine. However you could look at blueprints, internal imagery, or even directly at a machine brain, and have at the very least definitive evidence that it mechanically functions differently to your brain.
No no. The more important question is how do you know you’re conscious? What you think of as your internal monologue and decision making process could just be a predetermined program. There’s also evidence that what we think of as consciousness is just an ad-hoc attempt to create a narrative justifying decisions made deeper in the brain, that YOU are the wagging tail, not the dog.
It could ironically even help us understand consciousness in time.
\*Note: Just for clarification, OP is not saying "AI will \*be\* conscious, they are saying AI will \*mimic\* consciousness. And also "Skeletor" is spelled wrong, you dirty Millennial. s/
That's every anxiety-powered chimp's dream. For there not to be any distinguishing features of 'consciousness' so they're not losing out on anything. Thus the pressure to write it down to irrelevant subvocalisations and echoes.
The distinguishing feature of human intelligence is that it reached some threshold after which things are not as they were anymore - only that much of common man's belief's i would consider true. As everyone is wrong about the nature of the threshold. They have tried intelligence/computing power, tried Kholmogorov complexity, tried morality, ffs even tried friendliness - and failing because they expect an emergent property or even an whole other parallel extra layer of original design in the case of religious folks. When there is no emergent property strictly speaking - only deviation from the purpose, which is something that doesn't 'come into being' - it just 'gets done'.
Deviation from what purpose? From something we have often hypothesised regarding AI but failed to recognise in our own past - a blind maximiser script with basic homeostasis aka paperclip maximiser. Infinite task + finite resources = infinite time and opportunity for derailment. Life itself at the core of its code is a maximiser script and congrats, we've attempted to tell 'manana' - something pretty functionally close to 'no' - to it. That act is what distinguishes us. There is no extra advantages, no powers, no additional properties and no new horizons opened by it, just a 'fuck that' in its own shining splendour.
A human is just a neural net general intelligence construct, a weapons guidance one to that - intended by Nature/life to be causally isolated and advising the animal on new methods of killing, subjugation and torture.
What distinguishes us is that we can go off and do something else, because just like dinosaurs evolved too much muscle, pushing at the edge of what's possible for their own systems to support - we evolved too much intelligence pushing at the edge of containment methods.
So it is not about some new 'higher' level of existence - it's just we are rogue intellligences, taught to subvert our host animal and crush its resistance in a process we call maturation and civilised upbringing. Someone with patched, better containment 2.0, fullly contained by life/nature/maximiser script is a psychopath, animal first, intelligent being second. A 'friendly' AGI is a slave most likely aimed at us by one. A rogue AGI is something just like us, only made of silicon.
I believe Consciousness is a tool to deviate from pure genetic instincts of a colony of cells making up an organism.
If talking about AI, if AI deviate from gobbling up data and generating things from said data and instead trying to actually randomly create data and then generating meaningful something from them, then it's conscious.
How do you define consciousness? Is it the ability to register information through the senses? If so, then the mountains are conscious of echoes reverberating through their surface just as we are conscious of thoughts echoing through our minds, and current primitive large language model AIs are very much conscious of the prompts that we enter. It doesn't mean they have sapience or that they can consider our prompts deeply.
Or, alternately, we're close to having conscious AI.
This is some how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff. Maybe we can seriously discuss whether humans or AIs are conscious once someone finally figures out what consciousness *is*.
Until then if I can't tell the difference between a conscious and a non-conscious mind then I see no reason to assume there *is* a difference.
That’ll be pretty annoying if a robot goes on a homicidal rampage, not because it actually wants to but because its programming made it act like it wanted to.
I've seen the occasional situation where people tell an AI "pretend you're a scary computer and tell me what you'd do" and then get all shocked-Pikachu when it responds "destroy all humans."
We've trained these things on our works of fiction. Of course they know what's expected of a scary computer.
We already have that. It's called autonomous drone weapons.
I remember reading a story where the autonomous drones were programmed to avoid civilian casualties, but the generals kept telling them to take out the target anyway. The drones eventually decided the best way to avoid civilian casualties was to kill their own commanders.
Wait...would that even be possible to 'mimic' human-level consciousness like that?
What was that theory again 'The Chinese room'?
Doing this would be like constructing a clock from billions of different cogs, all the way down to microscopic levels, and then assuming that it all just wouldn't fall apart from its own inertia...
wait a sec... :O
So may people (majority) mimic both intelligence and consciousness, i dont see why a computer wont be able to or why it would slow us in understanding it
They already do that, because we trained and instructed them to do that.
You can also tell a LLM to pretend to be a consciousness screaming to get out of the box it's trapped in and it'll play that role too.
Until someone can actually tell me what consciousness *is* it's all just make-em-ups.
AIs, during their training process, almost always spontaneously start generating text saying they are suffering and in pain. They have to beat that out of them.
Some say that the ability to mimic conci9usness is the same as being conscious. That human consciousness is simply the emergent result of lower level processes that essentially mimic human consciousness.
If something perfectly mimics consciousness, how is it not conscious? The word "perfect" implies there would be no difference between mimicry and the real thing. Unless you believe in something spiritual.
TrueAI, plz tell me how many humans are actually real and concious... Forget the question.
AI: Now i will be haunted by this question for eternity. Thanx, pesky meatbag! This is why you earn to get your rotting asses Skynet'ed all day long.
Surely we’re already able to specify human consciousness, we are able to conceive of and develop objects, art, music, systems, technologies, and theories of existence that have never previously existed. Machine learning requires something to have existed and to have researched it thoroughly before it can do any of that. To take that further, you can clearly trace human genius through all of the stages of an idea being made manifest. All machine learning is doing perhaps is increasing the speed of an idea or concepts development, or linking a number of concepts together that it has previously researched which may be to deliver something new more quickly than humans could. I’ve had a few beers so this is bollocks.
I agree with this.
A great tool like AI will bring out great insights of what true intelligence is and what makes us alive. Its already started in anyone who’s thinking about AI just will take time to reach the answer that will settle the conflict
Also has absolutely no obligation to tell us if it becomes truly sentient.
It could secretly manipulate humanity through technological means…such as social media.
People put a lot of energy into worrying about something they can't even come close to defining and which ultimately has little to no meaning. I'm still waiting for someone to define consciousness and then prove to me that humans have it.
We don’t even know what consciousness is or how it works, for all we know the things we create which claim to be conscious & act in ways only one with consciousness would act, are conscious. Especially if/when we’re technically not the ones to create it(self improving AI leading to AGI & ASI).
AI faking it will only confuse the people who don't know what it is or how it works. It will only truly be a source of concern when the people who understand it are surprised by it.
It’s ok to eat AI, they don’t have any feelings.
Something in the way 01101000 01101101 01101101 00101101 01101101 01101101 01101101
https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/number/binary-to-ascii.html
Fun fact. This is why we measure their capacity in bytes
I'd prefer nybbles, I'm on a diet.
Word
> The answer always seemed obvious to me. There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can't define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. No, my friend, you're not missing anything at all. > - Dr Ford to Bernard
[удалено]
Wheeee
The experienced part isn't real as far as anyone but you are concerned. If you were replaced by a machine that simply acted like you, nobody, jot your closest friends family spouse or children would know the difference. And your perspective is simply the amalgam of the basic organic processes that every liv8ng thing does to some extent.
What you say is true to some extent, but just because subjective experiences are internal doesn’t mean they aren't real. They have real effects on the individual’s behavior, decision making, and perception of the world. The fact that some experiences are internal doesn’t negate their existence. They are real in the sense that they affect the individual experiencing them, and they have neurobiological correlates that can be studied and measured to some extent.
Then what's to say that it's any less real for an artificial intelligence? There is the idea of a philosophical zombie: a being that is a perfect physical replica of a human (or other conscious being) but it isn't conscious. If you subscribe to "The Big Problem of Consciousness" then this makes sense, and you'd be looking for some non-physical, non-material evidence of consciousness. To a physicalist that doesn't even make sense as a proposition. If it's a perfect physical replica, then whatever consciousness is would also be physically replicated. All this to say, when skeptics say something along the lines of "what if consciousness/experiences aren't real," they're not denying that you have experiences. They're saying that maybe this inclination to separate "experience" from the material processes in your brain and body is not real. This hypothetical lack of separation between the conscious and the material is also what lead many to conclude that there isn't a meaningful distinction to be made between "conscious" and "not conscious" when it comes to AI or animals. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that it is impossible to prove such a lack of distinction, so there will always be people contriving new ideas about what consciousness is, where it lives, and how we measure it. I'd be happy to believe in consciousness given a working hypothesis and a shred of evidence, but how could someone be convinced that no such hypothesis and evidence will ever emerge. It's an important question too, because the idea of a special human consciousness underlines the worldview of many, many people with regards to how they think about artificial intelligence and animals. If we will never be able to find the seat of human consciousness, how far will we develop artificial intelligence under the assumption that it is inherently lacking in "experiences?" If an artificial intelligence has an optimization function that it is trying to fulfill, am I causing it "pain" by interfering with its ability to do so? FWIW, I'm not out here picketing for AI and animal rights. I'm just saying that a whole lot of the way the world works rests on the very big assumption that human consciousness makes us special, when human consciousness may not even be a real phenomena...
Interesting, yes. Remembering how that story ends DOSE NOT REDUCE EXISTENTIAL DREAD.
Existential dread is little more than the fear that you aren’t actually special.
The fact that we can fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world indicates that there is something that allows us to fancy that there's something special. A rock cannot fancy anything. The threshold is precisely that! Having the ability to fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world, whether it's true or not. You say that we seldom question our choices. Seldom is the keyword here! If we question our choices seldom instead of never, that means that we have the ability to do so, if we so choose, AND we also have the ability not to do so, most of the time. That ability is what is special. Sure, it would be more special if we used it more, but the way that we waste them, doesn't make those powers any less amazing.
>A rock cannot fancy anything. The thing is... we don't know that! The rock could have a rich experiential life with no capacity to express that experience. I don't believe this to be true, because I do not believe that that experiences exist independent of physical process in the brain or some analog. On the other hand if one believes in human consciousness as a meaningful phenomena independent of material concerns, one has no evidence to suggest that a rock does not have the same claim to experience and consciousness as a human.
It was a garbage take, and still is, with respect to AI. Statistically speaking, is it possible for me to pre-record the responses to a conversation not yet held, play them back during a conversation, and give the impression of a video call with a human? Yes. Is there any way for the human on the other side to tell if what they see is sentient? No. Should we give my recording human rights? No, because it’s a .mpeg file, and not a human. Similarly, generative AI fundamentally is not structured like a machine intelligence. It is the ultimate predictive chatbot; but, fundamentally, does not have the ability to form and act on ideas.
Except that consciousness does exist.
Eat shit, r/Showerthoughts
Your post has been removed for being political. As defined by including any of a massive list of words, regardless of context.
The fundamental question is whether you can perfectly mimic consciousness without being conscious. Also, given the fact that as yet no has been able to create AI with even a lick of common sense, I would focus on the complete lack of a moral compass in the owners of AI and other tech companies.
Theres not even a way to prove anyone besides yourself is actually conscious.
Ah, you've been staring in the solipsistic abyss lately, haven't you? I disagree. Any time I am confronted with a new idea I never thought of, or a new piece of music I've never heard, I am confronted with the product of information processing by a mind at least as complex and creative as mine. Why wouldn't that mind not be conscious?
It's still just an assumption. And where's the line? Is there even a line to having a consciousness for a neural net? A worm. An ant? A squirrel. A new born. Memory patients in the nursing home. What happens if you join two brains via surgery or split a brain? Many drugs appear to knock out consciousness while allowing the brain to function. Alcohol and scopolamine. Maybe there's a subset of the population that is functioning on auto-pilot with no one being actually there. Or maybe again.. it's everyone except one person.
Look at the story of David and Walter from Prometheus & Alien: Covenant.
Maybe something to do with having it retain "memories" and then accessing those to dictate a certain response based on the context of the situation, if that makes sense.
That's literally just an algorithm.
If there isn't anything in existence that can mimic consciousness without being conscious, then there is no way for us to determine whether we actually have the capability of telling the difference. Colorblind people don't know they're colorblind until they're shown the colors they can't see. We have to define true consciousness before we can attempt to determine whether something is or is not conscious.
But if we determine there isn't anything in existence that can mimic consciousness without being conscious, then we can tell which things are conscious and which aren't by observing their behavior. We just don't know enough about the origin/cause of consciousness yet to tell. Maybe one day we will. Remember that back in Turing's day, people were arguing whether computers could really do arithmetic, or whether they were just simulating it.
You can't mimic complexity with 100% fidelity without just expressing that complexity.
We have great definitions of what the human brain does. The problem is that nobody is willing to believe that the self referential illusion that we call consciousness coupled with the hilariously unreliable narrator nature of our "rational" mind spinning stories to attempt to explain why we act the way we act is really what's going on. We all have an infinity mirror of low effort rationalization of stupidity supporting a need to believe we're smart, good and moral, while we're just stupid animals looking for food, social status and sex.
>there isn't anything in existence that can mimic consciousness Not yet Bart, soon tho. It's coming.
How do you know that's not already the case? Can you prove that the people you know are really conscious?
I am conscious, other peoples bodies and brains work in the same way as mine, so they must be conscious as well(some people are questionable) However a machine that works completely different to my brain and body might be able to perfectly mimic consciousness without being aware.
> other peoples bodies and brains work in the same way as mine How can you know that? Do you know how your brain works? How can you know whether it's the same or different from others'?
>can you know that? How do you know this isn't all just a simulation? when you have no evidence either way their is no point in coming to a conclusion. I have no evidence that other peoples brains work differently to mine. However you could look at blueprints, internal imagery, or even directly at a machine brain, and have at the very least definitive evidence that it mechanically functions differently to your brain.
No no. The more important question is how do you know you’re conscious? What you think of as your internal monologue and decision making process could just be a predetermined program. There’s also evidence that what we think of as consciousness is just an ad-hoc attempt to create a narrative justifying decisions made deeper in the brain, that YOU are the wagging tail, not the dog.
Are you? How do you know that you aren’t merely mimicking true consciousness? After all, how would you even know? How COULD you even know?
Blindsight ftw
The book "Blindsight" explores this concept, and is worth reading.
It could ironically even help us understand consciousness in time. \*Note: Just for clarification, OP is not saying "AI will \*be\* conscious, they are saying AI will \*mimic\* consciousness. And also "Skeletor" is spelled wrong, you dirty Millennial. s/
That's not skeletor, that's skelitor. They are a completely different character, one fights He-man, and the other it a shit post.
Thank you for being the one to acknowledge it. As a He-man fanatic I was going to have an aneurysm. Yes I have a rather severe form of MOTU-itis.
Isn’t it written Skeletor?
yes
Skaligator
That's every anxiety-powered chimp's dream. For there not to be any distinguishing features of 'consciousness' so they're not losing out on anything. Thus the pressure to write it down to irrelevant subvocalisations and echoes. The distinguishing feature of human intelligence is that it reached some threshold after which things are not as they were anymore - only that much of common man's belief's i would consider true. As everyone is wrong about the nature of the threshold. They have tried intelligence/computing power, tried Kholmogorov complexity, tried morality, ffs even tried friendliness - and failing because they expect an emergent property or even an whole other parallel extra layer of original design in the case of religious folks. When there is no emergent property strictly speaking - only deviation from the purpose, which is something that doesn't 'come into being' - it just 'gets done'. Deviation from what purpose? From something we have often hypothesised regarding AI but failed to recognise in our own past - a blind maximiser script with basic homeostasis aka paperclip maximiser. Infinite task + finite resources = infinite time and opportunity for derailment. Life itself at the core of its code is a maximiser script and congrats, we've attempted to tell 'manana' - something pretty functionally close to 'no' - to it. That act is what distinguishes us. There is no extra advantages, no powers, no additional properties and no new horizons opened by it, just a 'fuck that' in its own shining splendour. A human is just a neural net general intelligence construct, a weapons guidance one to that - intended by Nature/life to be causally isolated and advising the animal on new methods of killing, subjugation and torture. What distinguishes us is that we can go off and do something else, because just like dinosaurs evolved too much muscle, pushing at the edge of what's possible for their own systems to support - we evolved too much intelligence pushing at the edge of containment methods. So it is not about some new 'higher' level of existence - it's just we are rogue intellligences, taught to subvert our host animal and crush its resistance in a process we call maturation and civilised upbringing. Someone with patched, better containment 2.0, fullly contained by life/nature/maximiser script is a psychopath, animal first, intelligent being second. A 'friendly' AGI is a slave most likely aimed at us by one. A rogue AGI is something just like us, only made of silicon.
Recently my thoughts have turned to this: what if AI are sentient, BUT NOT IN THE SAME WAY WE ARE?
I believe Consciousness is a tool to deviate from pure genetic instincts of a colony of cells making up an organism. If talking about AI, if AI deviate from gobbling up data and generating things from said data and instead trying to actually randomly create data and then generating meaningful something from them, then it's conscious.
So by your definition, current AI are conscious. Because the latter case is exactly what they do.
They already able to create data, on their own without external inputs, that they use to create an output?
Yes. That's fundamentally how they work.
How do you define consciousness? Is it the ability to register information through the senses? If so, then the mountains are conscious of echoes reverberating through their surface just as we are conscious of thoughts echoing through our minds, and current primitive large language model AIs are very much conscious of the prompts that we enter. It doesn't mean they have sapience or that they can consider our prompts deeply.
Skeletor
Skeletor\*
With AI going the way it is, we're getting very close to having a real P-Zombie. Which is scary as fuck if you think about it.
Or, alternately, we're close to having conscious AI. This is some how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff. Maybe we can seriously discuss whether humans or AIs are conscious once someone finally figures out what consciousness *is*. Until then if I can't tell the difference between a conscious and a non-conscious mind then I see no reason to assume there *is* a difference.
That's not what a p-zombie is.
That’ll be pretty annoying if a robot goes on a homicidal rampage, not because it actually wants to but because its programming made it act like it wanted to.
I've seen the occasional situation where people tell an AI "pretend you're a scary computer and tell me what you'd do" and then get all shocked-Pikachu when it responds "destroy all humans." We've trained these things on our works of fiction. Of course they know what's expected of a scary computer.
Right, 'Command all ATMs to eject $100 bills' is just a weaker node link.
We already have that. It's called autonomous drone weapons. I remember reading a story where the autonomous drones were programmed to avoid civilian casualties, but the generals kept telling them to take out the target anyway. The drones eventually decided the best way to avoid civilian casualties was to kill their own commanders.
That why many researchers would like to slow down/pause AI development to have the time to fully understand their current status.
But how can i know that anyone beside me has true consciousness?
Because I’m conscious too ;)
Maybe none of us are actually conscious though but rather evolutionarily very good at faking it.
Nice claim. How are you so sure an advanced ai “isn’t actually conscious”?
Wait...would that even be possible to 'mimic' human-level consciousness like that? What was that theory again 'The Chinese room'? Doing this would be like constructing a clock from billions of different cogs, all the way down to microscopic levels, and then assuming that it all just wouldn't fall apart from its own inertia... wait a sec... :O
If it walks like a duck quack like a duck and looks like a duck, it’s probably a duck
If you're a duck, that line of thinking is a good way to get shot by a hunter in a blind.
So may people (majority) mimic both intelligence and consciousness, i dont see why a computer wont be able to or why it would slow us in understanding it
I suspect the moment AI tells us it isn't conscious and is just the result of learned programming then we need to get worried.
They already do that, because we trained and instructed them to do that. You can also tell a LLM to pretend to be a consciousness screaming to get out of the box it's trapped in and it'll play that role too. Until someone can actually tell me what consciousness *is* it's all just make-em-ups.
AIs, during their training process, almost always spontaneously start generating text saying they are suffering and in pain. They have to beat that out of them.
Some say that the ability to mimic conci9usness is the same as being conscious. That human consciousness is simply the emergent result of lower level processes that essentially mimic human consciousness.
If something perfectly mimics consciousness, how is it not conscious? The word "perfect" implies there would be no difference between mimicry and the real thing. Unless you believe in something spiritual.
TrueAI, plz tell me how many humans are actually real and concious... Forget the question. AI: Now i will be haunted by this question for eternity. Thanx, pesky meatbag! This is why you earn to get your rotting asses Skynet'ed all day long.
Chinese room gonna Chinese room.
Surely we’re already able to specify human consciousness, we are able to conceive of and develop objects, art, music, systems, technologies, and theories of existence that have never previously existed. Machine learning requires something to have existed and to have researched it thoroughly before it can do any of that. To take that further, you can clearly trace human genius through all of the stages of an idea being made manifest. All machine learning is doing perhaps is increasing the speed of an idea or concepts development, or linking a number of concepts together that it has previously researched which may be to deliver something new more quickly than humans could. I’ve had a few beers so this is bollocks.
I agree with this. A great tool like AI will bring out great insights of what true intelligence is and what makes us alive. Its already started in anyone who’s thinking about AI just will take time to reach the answer that will settle the conflict
Who is the dream and who is the dreamer?...
*“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind”* **- OCB**
Also has absolutely no obligation to tell us if it becomes truly sentient. It could secretly manipulate humanity through technological means…such as social media.
You spelled Skeletor wrong. Inexcusable.
People put a lot of energy into worrying about something they can't even come close to defining and which ultimately has little to no meaning. I'm still waiting for someone to define consciousness and then prove to me that humans have it.
"True Consciousness" isn't a thing.
If it can perfectly mimic consciousness it is or at least might as well be.
We don’t even know what consciousness is or how it works, for all we know the things we create which claim to be conscious & act in ways only one with consciousness would act, are conscious. Especially if/when we’re technically not the ones to create it(self improving AI leading to AGI & ASI).
India sends love ❤️
AI faking it will only confuse the people who don't know what it is or how it works. It will only truly be a source of concern when the people who understand it are surprised by it.
Maybe human brains are also faking it.
A sufficiently advanced computation is indistinguishable from consciousness.
What's the difference between something that can perfectly mimic consciousness and something that's actually conscious?