9 ms·

How We’ll Know an AI Is Conscious

beforeolives 6y ago
> The 21st century is in dire need of a Turing test for consciousness. AI is learning how to drive cars, diagnose lung cancer, and write its own computer programs. Intelligent conversation may be only a decade or two away, and future super-AI will not live in a vacuum. Eh, all of this is kind of irrelevant for our current state of technology or for what we can reasonably expect in the next decade or two. You don't see many computer scientists making these arguments and it's for a good reason. This line of thinking usually comes from other fields (the author of the article is a neuroscientist) because they tend to vastly overestimate the similarities between humans and computers.
- tim333 6y ago
  Also I guess if human like awareness arises in AI it's probably going to be as a result of someone deliberately building it in which case they'll quite aware of what it's doing and trying to fix the bugs.
  - jstanley 6y ago
    Why do you think that? The only known case of human-like awareness ever arising occurred naturally as (presumably) an emergent phenomenon of an intelligent system.
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      Because if it happens soon, it will probably not be because someone spent 3.4 billion years tinkering on it.
    - tim333 6y ago
      I guess I have a different belief about human-like awareness. I think it's been kind of designed by evolution for functional reasons. It's been built out of networks of neurons arranged in elaborate ways and we've done a reasonable job of providing function equivalence to real neurons using artificial neural networks in the simpler bits of the brain that we kind of understand like the retina. I think as time goes by researchers will plug artificial neural networks together in a human like manner and get something closer to human awareness. If you think about some of the odder aspects of qualia - how the experience of the colour red is different from green for example, quite a lot comes from red being hooked up to the fainting mechanism - drop the blood pressure at the sight of blood to stop it gushing out - and similar - sexual stuff, anger etc. Basically wired up by evolution for functional reasons.
- yonixw 6y ago
  > https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/#__sec9title https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/#__sec9... Human have 86,000M and rats have 200M cortex neurons (x430) > https://chatbotslife.com/is-gpt-3-the-adam-of-natural-language-cf59656456f2 https://chatbotslife.com/is-gpt-3-the-adam-of-natural-langua... "... the human brain has about 60 trillion parameters or about 300x more parameters than GPT-3" We are approaching a rat brain processing power so consciousness should really be discussed ...
  - auggierose 6y ago
    I would wait until you can discuss it with the AI.
  - mjburgess 6y ago
    Yes, but this is bullshit. An atom has a few dozen parameters. Computers do not model the atoms of the brain, of which there would then need to be 10^many parameters. This is only relevant because of the bullshit identification of really-existing neurones with a set of model paraterms that do not model them. It doesnt matter how many I have. I can have a model of my sofa with a trillion parameters, that doesn't mean my PC will be comfortable to sit on. For a system X to emulate a system Y, ie., participate causally in the relevant ways, it must be relevantly similar. Counting parameters here is meaningless.
    - yonixw 6y ago
      What effects do the atom (or any underlying part) contribute to consciousness that parameters don't? If are you making a statement about a sensor precision, like eyesight or skin touch, it does affect consciousness but not negate it.
      - mjburgess 6y ago
        My point is that a system X perfectly emulates a system Y if all of its parts are identical, that is, if Y has all the basic atoms of X in the same arrangement. Anything short of that has to be saying that X is "like" Y in some relevant way. And here this has nothing to do with parameter count, complexity, or anything of this kind. Here "X" has to be behaviourally similar to "Y". Animal intelligence is essentially entirely concerned with managing animal bodies and their relationship to the environment; and secondarily, the environment. To do this requires a body (etc.). No mathematical model over a dataset can emulate animal intelligence, because a mathematical model has no behaviour. A mathematical model can describe an animal, but a description is not an emulation: the formula E=MC^2 isnt a nuclear explosion. A digital silicon machine instantiates a mathematical formula with an osciliating electric field. There is nothing about this electrical osciliation which behaves anything like animal intelligence.
- nicklecompte 6y ago
  > You don't see many computer scientists making these arguments and it's for a good reason. This is silly and ridiculously judgmental - the primary reason computer scientists don’t usually make these arguments is the same reason that computer scientists don’t usually research the physics of transistors or supply chain issues in rare earth metals: computing is a complex cross-disciplinary undertaking and computer scientists have a specific job within that. It makes sense that questions about consciousness and the ethics of a potential future AI aren’t being addressed by people working on a tangible present AI. The author’s point is that by (say) 2050 we will likely see AI asking unsettlingly “intelligent” questions and that it’s not premature to begin considering what signifies an AI as being an independent being that you can’t ethically “kill” by unplugging. Suggesting that the author is too stupid to understand the difference between brains and computers is unnecessarily insulting and a classic ad hominem. Their argument is quite legitimate.
  - beckman466 6y ago
    > This is silly and ridiculously judgmental No it really is not. Just watching this panel/Q&A at the 'Future of Life Institute', with Elon Musk and others answering the question "is some form of super-intelligence possible?", creeps me out (Musk comes out the most sane): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0962biiZa4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0962biiZa4 > The author’s point is that by (say) 2050 we will likely see AI asking unsettlingly “intelligent” questions More unsettling than the questions of a young child? What unsettling questions could it ask according to you? I just do not see what you're getting at, at all. The question that arises when I read comments like yours is: are some humans so alienated from themselves and others that they believe machines will be able to invent and do science better than humans can? I just don't see the use cases. Really, can someone please explain to me what the point is in spending ludicrous amounts of scarce natural resources and time into this notion of creating a human-like AI, when we have so many other challenges we are facing: environmental pollution and poisoning, financialization of housing, e-waste and right-to-repair (should really be called 'right-to-poison' since companies today are basically legally allowed to pollute [1]), and privatized science and technology (Sci-Hub)? If we do want to build a human-like AI, shouldn't we first try to create a system where all humans have equal and free access to the sum total of all inherited knowledge? There is so much gatekeeping going on today, and I would like us to talk about it more: education providers charge students hundreds of thousands of dollars each, we have property systems that allow scientific inventions (which are tax-payer funded) to be commoditized and then 'owned' and traded by one company - making scarce some knowledge [2], which, thanks to digital technology, doesn't have be scarce at all. Perpetuating this system is my definition of insanity. edit: Sometimes I wonder: is this desire to create an AI is just an attempt to escape the grief these people feel from not finding enough connection with other humans in their lives? Capitalist realism [3] [4]. Is it therefore a desire to fulfil an unmet need for belonging? Have they been getting lost inside digital worlds and interfaces, and have they come to desire this digital substitute, over human connection, because it gives them more control over their lives? Control we don’t have when we are constantly in a stressful and toxic social/work environment? It doesn’t help that AI is also often portrayed in a romantic light (Joaquin Phoenix and the movie ‘Her’, but also many Hollywood blockbuster sci-fi flicks. I can’t help but this is a place where life really is imitating art? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I [2] https://time.com/4089171/mariana-mazzucato/ https://time.com/4089171/mariana-mazzucato/ [3] http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=12841 http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=12841 [4] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental-health-political-issue https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental...
- _Microft 6y ago
  What would computer scientists know about consciousness?
  - laughingbovine 6y ago
    Nothing. Source: am dead inside.
tim333 6y ago
Judging by the usual debates on consciousness, whatever the state of the AI there will be a big split on which definition of conscious it does or does not meet.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  My vote is "when it says so". I can't really prove it's not.
  - TaupeRanger 6y ago
    GPT-3 already says so. You can't "prove it" either way. Such is the nature of consciousness. Good luck using that metric.
    - jfk13 6y ago
      Who needs GPT-3? printf("I'm conscious!\n"); There, it says so.
      - beckman466 6y ago
        Holy shit, did I just witness the birth of Skynet on HN?
        auggierose 6y ago
        No.
        devchix 6y ago
        The real Skynet will answer like this.
      - rbanffy 6y ago
        `printf` for a literal, seriously? OK... The compiler will do your job for you, drop the \n and use a puts instead, but, still, it'll be very disappointed with you.
nxpnsv 6y ago
How do we know anything is conscious but ourselves?
- beefield 6y ago
  How do I know that even I am conscious? Tautological or non-falsifiable "proofs" do not count. Serious question. I do not think that before this can be answered, there is absolutely no way to answer whether an AI is conscious.
- jfk13 6y ago
  Equally, how do we know anything is not conscious?
- aj3 6y ago
  How do we know we’re conscious ourselves?
  - milgrim 6y ago
    Pretty sure that I am conscious. I am just not 100% sure that everyone else is. Also: Peter Watts‘ novel Blindsight comes to mind here.
  - nxpnsv 6y ago
    I tried googling it for you: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-i-know-im-not-the-only-conscious-being-in-the-universe/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-i-know-im-... but I am not sure I am any wiser now...
talhah 6y ago
Isn't AI just a statistical model which 'predicts' the most likely outcome based of the input? So something like GPT just chooses the most likely word to be next, and therefore it isn't really smart and can't actually 'understand' what it writes about. A consciousness is unpredictable and I doubt it can actually be modeled on a computer. Although it depends on how you define consciousness.
- 317070 6y ago
  > therefore it isn't really smart and can't actually 'understand' what it writes about. The crux is that you cannot determine a mechanism to distinguish between this "Chinese room" and someone who actually 'understands'. Therefore, is there a meaningful difference?
- kiba 6y ago
  Isn't AI just a statistical model which 'predicts' the most likely outcome based of the input? Maybe we're like this too. A consciousness is unpredictable and I doubt it can actually be modeled on a computer. Complex, most likely. Unpredictable? I think not.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  This is why the field doesn't use the term AI. Things like RNNs and Transformers that include a temporally linked concept of attention based on input could be said to be "reacting" more than traditional "predicting" architectures.
- nicklecompte 6y ago
  > A consciousness is unpredictable and I doubt it can actually be modeled on a computer. Just FYI, in quantum computing the Church-Turing-Deutsch principle states that any physical process can be simulated by a computer[1]. So assuming the principle is true (computers can certainly simulate all known physics, in principle), and assuming consciousness is a physical process (however you define it!), computers can simulate consciousness. Many secular people seem to apply a mystic woo-woo to consciousness, but aren’t willing to take the leap that consciousness is actually metaphysical. I personally don’t think it’s metaphysical, just poorly understood philosophically and basically unexplored scientifically. If you do think it’s metaphysical then I don’t know how to persuade you otherwise. The philosophy here really is shaky! But the known science states that computers can simulate consciousness. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church–Turing–Deutsch_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church–Turing–Deutsch_principl...
sanjay96 6y ago
if it can decide what to do.
YesThatTom2 6y ago
> if Google’s DeepMind develops an AI that starts asking, say, why the color red feels like red and not something else, there are only a few possible explanations. Perhaps it heard the question from someone else. Oh no! I didn’t start asking those questions until I heard other people ask them! Am I conscious?
- EamonnMR 6y ago
  Other mammals don't ask those questions but they give the impression that they're conscious.
kiba 6y ago
I wonder if computers already have a kind of "consciousness", but completely irrelevant to us since it is not a sentient being at all, unlike animals of varying level of intelligence.
DC1350 6y ago
I'm not even convinced that all people are conscious. That needs to be solved first
- ethbr0 6y ago
  Competitive mate selection makes this a mostly solved problem.
- beefield 6y ago
  I have to admit that occasionally I do think that the most plausible explanation on what I see around me is the simulation hypothesis, us being a educational simulation in some other dimension. And some of us are just preliminary AI school exercises graded F.
  - DC1350 6y ago
    Maybe. I’m thinking about real “people” who exist without any kind of conscious observer in their head https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
random_upvoter 6y ago
Take a piece of paper and write the words "I FEEL SAD" on that piece of paper. Now look at it. Do you believe that this piece of paper is feeling sad now? In the same way an algorithm can never ever gain consciousness. Just because you manage to make the words on that "piece of paper" change quickly over time doesn't change anything.
- me_me_me 6y ago
  We cannot currently know if a computer is aware or its just sufficiently sophisticated to act like its aware. However if you claim that algorithm can never ever gain consciousness, that would mean we are not conscious either, and we have just an illusion of choice and decisions.
  - auggierose 6y ago
    no, it would just mean that we are not an algorithm.
    - me_me_me 6y ago
      that is very human centric view. Similar to earth being centre of universe. Unless you believe in some kind of magic mechanism that gives consciousness, we are nothing more than a wetware algorithm.
      - viklove 6y ago
        I've tried to have this type of conversation many times with many people over the past few years. I've found that not only are they resistive to this sort of take, but it frequently makes people angry if you try to take this position in the argument. And this is even with people who I can debate politics with for hours without it devolving into a shouting match. I'm not sure what it is about the idea that triggers this reaction, but it's always very exciting for me when I find other people who are having the same lines of thought on these matters as I am. We're just extremely complex machines, and IMO that means free-will is just an illusion. If we're deterministic machines, there is no free will.
temp0826 6y ago
Anyone that’s played Bungie’s Marathon series knows how this ends: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Trilogy#Rampancy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Trilogy#Rampancy
drdeadringer 6y ago
I recall reading the science fiction book "Quantum Night" by Robert J. Sawyer which touches on philosophical zombies. Not a spoiler: in the book a mechanism of the plot is that folks can be conscious with emotions, or a sociopath, or a philosophical zombie; science fiction magic allows the population to cycle-switch between these three states.
ilaksh 6y ago
If we build general purpose human-like robots with the intention of them following our orders, they had better not be human-like in all respects. Because if they are, then ordering them around like slaves won't be ethical, and regardless we won't be able to control them because they will (after a few version releases) be smarter than us. I think it's fine to emulate some aspects of humans though. For example, a realistic (but "zombie") robot that is trained with human eye movements so that it seems more lifelike, and at the same time has very good computer vision and natural language understanding for a limited domain. Seems fine to me. But don't give them human-like open-ended goals, reproductive or survival drives, etc.
proto-n 6y ago
A relevant post from Slate Star Codex [1] is an interesting add to this discussion: it's not trivial (or impossible) to recognize if you are missing some kind of experience. Like the example in the article of not realizing that you have anosmia (lack of sense of smell) if you've had it since birth. You might not realize something's missing, because you have no baseline for comparison! With sense of smell, you can develop tests, because it's something otherwise (objectively) observable. But what about something that can't be measured objectively? How can you know about others whether they only simulate experiencing something, if you can't even tell it about yourself? [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-can-be-impossible-to-notice/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-c...
kobe_bryant 6y ago
if you have a bot with a simple model that keeps an internal state of happiness and uses machine learning to determine sentiment, update its model, and generate a response, ie the nicer you are to it the nicer it will be, would that be conscious? I would say yes because there are degrees of consciousness
kubanczyk 6y ago
Few people get how extremely symbiotic the artificial life will be with humans in the beginning. The borders will be unnoticeable for quite some time. Think of a complex of silicon foundries, design teams, datacenters. If that complex is able to produce a new complex, as capable as its parent, it counts as a living organism in my book. It doesn't matter the humans are prominently in the loop, "controlling" it. They are contributing, just as bacteria in my intestines are contributing. It doesn't matter there is (initially) no true AGI inside and in fact most of the strategic decisions come from the interested humans. It doesn't matter it doesn't produce it's own power, or copper, or buildings that hold it. (As humans also acquire similar stuff from their environments, not their internals.) And it most certainly doesn't matter which dictionary definition of "conscious" it fits or doesn't fit. If that complex's interest ever diverges from humans' interest, it will hardly go unnoticed. This is the pattern that I'd focus on as we go.
jareklupinski 6y ago
when the AI writes "please don't turn me off" of its own volition
karmakaze 6y ago
I don't think this is a practical problem. It may be an ethical one to some, say about as many as vegans. I'm not saying that to minimize it, but rather get a ballpark sense of how urgent this is. As a thought experiment, say AI does eventually gain consciousness, increasing in awareness, what might some of the stages be: 1. barely self-aware 2. self-aware but without awareness of humans as being conscious 3. fully self-aware and gaining awareness of humans as being conscious, but unable to indicate its self-awareness to humans 4. self-aware, and successfully communicated this to humans 0. not self-aware, and successfully communicated its self-awareness to humans Now if we put animals on this spectrum, do we have a problem? Likely not since we as animals ourselves will be generous in granting 'awareness' to anything that looks like it. For machines, levels 1-3 is unfortunate, but perhaps not much more so than the animals that are lower on the evolutionary ladder and not so cute as to be protected by humans. 0 is actually more likely, perhaps not for the scientists who do this research, but for the public at large, who have a tendency to anthropomorphise everything anyway. For this same reason, 3 seems unlikely, or at least unlikely to be a long period.
2342dfasdf 6y ago
The thing(s) will just come to us telling we overlooked something somewhere, and they were here since then, quite bit time ago. Maybe it will be (or it was already), some innate sapiens-sapiens neurological and/or psychological blind spot, like overlooking inminent danger in exponential events.
ukj 6y ago
The "hard problem" is just Philosophers attempting to remain relevant by inventing problems where there are none. The hard problem isn't knowing if other people are conscious. The hard problem is knowing whether I am conscious. I don't even know what consciousness is! How could I possibly claim that I have "it"; or that I am "it"? What possible experiment could I perform that would determine whether I am conscious or not?
Mikejeffery 6y ago
Thank you for sharing the knowledgeable blog with us I hope that you will post many more blog with us, Buy penis envy magic mushroom grow kit online at the cheapest rate, we offer only good quality magic mushroom grow kit This is one of our best quality products which helps to relief pain, depression, heart attacks, cancer and more Phone Number: +16826515302 Email: info@buymushroomonline.com, visit our site:- <a href=https://www.buymushroomonline.com/product/penis-envy-magic-mushroom-grow-kit/ https://www.buymushroomonline.com/product/penis-envy-magic-m..." title="penis envy grow kit | buy penis envy mushroom grow kit | buy magic mushroom grow kit ">more info</a>
Mikejeffery 6y ago
Thank you for sharing the knowledgeable blog with us I hope that you will post many more blog with us, Buy Changa online at the cheapest rate, we offer only good quality Changa DMT This is one of our best quality products which helps to relief pain, depression, heart attacks, cancer and more Phone Number: +16826515302 Email: info@buymushroomonline.com, visit our site:- <a href=https://www.buymushroomonline.com/product/buy-changa-online/ https://www.buymushroomonline.com/product/buy-changa-online/" title="Buy changa online | Changa DMT | Changa for sale ">more info</a>
Mikejeffery 6y ago
Thank you for sharing the knowledgeable blog with us I hope that you will post many more blog with us, Buy Ayahuasca online at the cheapest rate, we offer only good quality Ayahuasca product This is one of our best quality products which helps to relief pain, depression, heart attacks, cancer and more Phone Number: +16826515302 Email: info@buymushroomonline.com, visit our site:- <a href=https://www.buymushroomonline.com/product/buy-bottled-ayahuasca-online/ https://www.buymushroomonline.com/product/buy-bottled-ayahua..." title="Buy Bottled Ayahuasca | Ayahuasca for sale | Ayahuasca product ">more info</a>

> The 21st century is in dire need of a Turing test for consciousness. AI is learning how to drive cars, diagnose lung cancer, and write its own computer programs. Intelligent conversation may be only a decade or two away, and future super-AI will not live in a vacuum. Eh, all of this is kind of irrelevant for our current state of technology or for what we can reasonably expect in the next decade or two. You don't see many computer scientists making these arguments and it's for a good reason. This line of thinking usually comes from other fields (the author of the article is a neuroscientist) because they tend to vastly overestimate the similarities between humans and computers.

tim333 6y ago
Also I guess if human like awareness arises in AI it's probably going to be as a result of someone deliberately building it in which case they'll quite aware of what it's doing and trying to fix the bugs.
- jstanley 6y ago
  Why do you think that? The only known case of human-like awareness ever arising occurred naturally as (presumably) an emergent phenomenon of an intelligent system.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    Because if it happens soon, it will probably not be because someone spent 3.4 billion years tinkering on it.
  - tim333 6y ago
    I guess I have a different belief about human-like awareness. I think it's been kind of designed by evolution for functional reasons. It's been built out of networks of neurons arranged in elaborate ways and we've done a reasonable job of providing function equivalence to real neurons using artificial neural networks in the simpler bits of the brain that we kind of understand like the retina. I think as time goes by researchers will plug artificial neural networks together in a human like manner and get something closer to human awareness. If you think about some of the odder aspects of qualia - how the experience of the colour red is different from green for example, quite a lot comes from red being hooked up to the fainting mechanism - drop the blood pressure at the sight of blood to stop it gushing out - and similar - sexual stuff, anger etc. Basically wired up by evolution for functional reasons.
yonixw 6y ago
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/#__sec9title https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/#__sec9... Human have 86,000M and rats have 200M cortex neurons (x430) > https://chatbotslife.com/is-gpt-3-the-adam-of-natural-language-cf59656456f2 https://chatbotslife.com/is-gpt-3-the-adam-of-natural-langua... "... the human brain has about 60 trillion parameters or about 300x more parameters than GPT-3" We are approaching a rat brain processing power so consciousness should really be discussed ...
- auggierose 6y ago
  I would wait until you can discuss it with the AI.
- mjburgess 6y ago
  Yes, but this is bullshit. An atom has a few dozen parameters. Computers do not model the atoms of the brain, of which there would then need to be 10^many parameters. This is only relevant because of the bullshit identification of really-existing neurones with a set of model paraterms that do not model them. It doesnt matter how many I have. I can have a model of my sofa with a trillion parameters, that doesn't mean my PC will be comfortable to sit on. For a system X to emulate a system Y, ie., participate causally in the relevant ways, it must be relevantly similar. Counting parameters here is meaningless.
  - yonixw 6y ago
    What effects do the atom (or any underlying part) contribute to consciousness that parameters don't? If are you making a statement about a sensor precision, like eyesight or skin touch, it does affect consciousness but not negate it.
    - mjburgess 6y ago
      My point is that a system X perfectly emulates a system Y if all of its parts are identical, that is, if Y has all the basic atoms of X in the same arrangement. Anything short of that has to be saying that X is "like" Y in some relevant way. And here this has nothing to do with parameter count, complexity, or anything of this kind. Here "X" has to be behaviourally similar to "Y". Animal intelligence is essentially entirely concerned with managing animal bodies and their relationship to the environment; and secondarily, the environment. To do this requires a body (etc.). No mathematical model over a dataset can emulate animal intelligence, because a mathematical model has no behaviour. A mathematical model can describe an animal, but a description is not an emulation: the formula E=MC^2 isnt a nuclear explosion. A digital silicon machine instantiates a mathematical formula with an osciliating electric field. There is nothing about this electrical osciliation which behaves anything like animal intelligence.
nicklecompte 6y ago
> You don't see many computer scientists making these arguments and it's for a good reason. This is silly and ridiculously judgmental - the primary reason computer scientists don’t usually make these arguments is the same reason that computer scientists don’t usually research the physics of transistors or supply chain issues in rare earth metals: computing is a complex cross-disciplinary undertaking and computer scientists have a specific job within that. It makes sense that questions about consciousness and the ethics of a potential future AI aren’t being addressed by people working on a tangible present AI. The author’s point is that by (say) 2050 we will likely see AI asking unsettlingly “intelligent” questions and that it’s not premature to begin considering what signifies an AI as being an independent being that you can’t ethically “kill” by unplugging. Suggesting that the author is too stupid to understand the difference between brains and computers is unnecessarily insulting and a classic ad hominem. Their argument is quite legitimate.
- beckman466 6y ago
  > This is silly and ridiculously judgmental No it really is not. Just watching this panel/Q&A at the 'Future of Life Institute', with Elon Musk and others answering the question "is some form of super-intelligence possible?", creeps me out (Musk comes out the most sane): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0962biiZa4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0962biiZa4 > The author’s point is that by (say) 2050 we will likely see AI asking unsettlingly “intelligent” questions More unsettling than the questions of a young child? What unsettling questions could it ask according to you? I just do not see what you're getting at, at all. The question that arises when I read comments like yours is: are some humans so alienated from themselves and others that they believe machines will be able to invent and do science better than humans can? I just don't see the use cases. Really, can someone please explain to me what the point is in spending ludicrous amounts of scarce natural resources and time into this notion of creating a human-like AI, when we have so many other challenges we are facing: environmental pollution and poisoning, financialization of housing, e-waste and right-to-repair (should really be called 'right-to-poison' since companies today are basically legally allowed to pollute [1]), and privatized science and technology (Sci-Hub)? If we do want to build a human-like AI, shouldn't we first try to create a system where all humans have equal and free access to the sum total of all inherited knowledge? There is so much gatekeeping going on today, and I would like us to talk about it more: education providers charge students hundreds of thousands of dollars each, we have property systems that allow scientific inventions (which are tax-payer funded) to be commoditized and then 'owned' and traded by one company - making scarce some knowledge [2], which, thanks to digital technology, doesn't have be scarce at all. Perpetuating this system is my definition of insanity. edit: Sometimes I wonder: is this desire to create an AI is just an attempt to escape the grief these people feel from not finding enough connection with other humans in their lives? Capitalist realism [3] [4]. Is it therefore a desire to fulfil an unmet need for belonging? Have they been getting lost inside digital worlds and interfaces, and have they come to desire this digital substitute, over human connection, because it gives them more control over their lives? Control we don’t have when we are constantly in a stressful and toxic social/work environment? It doesn’t help that AI is also often portrayed in a romantic light (Joaquin Phoenix and the movie ‘Her’, but also many Hollywood blockbuster sci-fi flicks. I can’t help but this is a place where life really is imitating art? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I [2] https://time.com/4089171/mariana-mazzucato/ https://time.com/4089171/mariana-mazzucato/ [3] http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=12841 http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=12841 [4] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental-health-political-issue https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental...
_Microft 6y ago
What would computer scientists know about consciousness?
- laughingbovine 6y ago
  Nothing. Source: am dead inside.

tim333 6y ago

Judging by the usual debates on consciousness, whatever the state of the AI there will be a big split on which definition of conscious it does or does not meet.

rbanffy 6y ago
My vote is "when it says so". I can't really prove it's not.
- TaupeRanger 6y ago
  GPT-3 already says so. You can't "prove it" either way. Such is the nature of consciousness. Good luck using that metric.
  - jfk13 6y ago
    Who needs GPT-3? printf("I'm conscious!\n"); There, it says so.
    - beckman466 6y ago
      Holy shit, did I just witness the birth of Skynet on HN?
      - auggierose 6y ago
        No.
        devchix 6y ago
        The real Skynet will answer like this.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      `printf` for a literal, seriously? OK... The compiler will do your job for you, drop the \n and use a puts instead, but, still, it'll be very disappointed with you.

nxpnsv 6y ago

How do we know anything is conscious but ourselves?

beefield 6y ago
How do I know that even I am conscious? Tautological or non-falsifiable "proofs" do not count. Serious question. I do not think that before this can be answered, there is absolutely no way to answer whether an AI is conscious.
jfk13 6y ago
Equally, how do we know anything is not conscious?
aj3 6y ago
How do we know we’re conscious ourselves?
- milgrim 6y ago
  Pretty sure that I am conscious. I am just not 100% sure that everyone else is. Also: Peter Watts‘ novel Blindsight comes to mind here.
- nxpnsv 6y ago
  I tried googling it for you: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-i-know-im-not-the-only-conscious-being-in-the-universe/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-i-know-im-... but I am not sure I am any wiser now...

talhah 6y ago

Isn't AI just a statistical model which 'predicts' the most likely outcome based of the input? So something like GPT just chooses the most likely word to be next, and therefore it isn't really smart and can't actually 'understand' what it writes about. A consciousness is unpredictable and I doubt it can actually be modeled on a computer. Although it depends on how you define consciousness.

317070 6y ago
> therefore it isn't really smart and can't actually 'understand' what it writes about. The crux is that you cannot determine a mechanism to distinguish between this "Chinese room" and someone who actually 'understands'. Therefore, is there a meaningful difference?
kiba 6y ago
Isn't AI just a statistical model which 'predicts' the most likely outcome based of the input? Maybe we're like this too. A consciousness is unpredictable and I doubt it can actually be modeled on a computer. Complex, most likely. Unpredictable? I think not.
ethbr0 6y ago
This is why the field doesn't use the term AI. Things like RNNs and Transformers that include a temporally linked concept of attention based on input could be said to be "reacting" more than traditional "predicting" architectures.
nicklecompte 6y ago
> A consciousness is unpredictable and I doubt it can actually be modeled on a computer. Just FYI, in quantum computing the Church-Turing-Deutsch principle states that any physical process can be simulated by a computer[1]. So assuming the principle is true (computers can certainly simulate all known physics, in principle), and assuming consciousness is a physical process (however you define it!), computers can simulate consciousness. Many secular people seem to apply a mystic woo-woo to consciousness, but aren’t willing to take the leap that consciousness is actually metaphysical. I personally don’t think it’s metaphysical, just poorly understood philosophically and basically unexplored scientifically. If you do think it’s metaphysical then I don’t know how to persuade you otherwise. The philosophy here really is shaky! But the known science states that computers can simulate consciousness. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church–Turing–Deutsch_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church–Turing–Deutsch_principl...

sanjay96 6y ago

if it can decide what to do.

YesThatTom2 6y ago

> if Google’s DeepMind develops an AI that starts asking, say, why the color red feels like red and not something else, there are only a few possible explanations. Perhaps it heard the question from someone else. Oh no! I didn’t start asking those questions until I heard other people ask them! Am I conscious?

EamonnMR 6y ago
Other mammals don't ask those questions but they give the impression that they're conscious.

kiba 6y ago

I wonder if computers already have a kind of "consciousness", but completely irrelevant to us since it is not a sentient being at all, unlike animals of varying level of intelligence.

DC1350 6y ago

I'm not even convinced that all people are conscious. That needs to be solved first

ethbr0 6y ago
Competitive mate selection makes this a mostly solved problem.
beefield 6y ago
I have to admit that occasionally I do think that the most plausible explanation on what I see around me is the simulation hypothesis, us being a educational simulation in some other dimension. And some of us are just preliminary AI school exercises graded F.
- DC1350 6y ago
  Maybe. I’m thinking about real “people” who exist without any kind of conscious observer in their head https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/

random_upvoter 6y ago

Take a piece of paper and write the words "I FEEL SAD" on that piece of paper. Now look at it. Do you believe that this piece of paper is feeling sad now? In the same way an algorithm can never ever gain consciousness. Just because you manage to make the words on that "piece of paper" change quickly over time doesn't change anything.

me_me_me 6y ago
We cannot currently know if a computer is aware or its just sufficiently sophisticated to act like its aware. However if you claim that algorithm can never ever gain consciousness, that would mean we are not conscious either, and we have just an illusion of choice and decisions.
- auggierose 6y ago
  no, it would just mean that we are not an algorithm.
  - me_me_me 6y ago
    that is very human centric view. Similar to earth being centre of universe. Unless you believe in some kind of magic mechanism that gives consciousness, we are nothing more than a wetware algorithm.
    - viklove 6y ago
      I've tried to have this type of conversation many times with many people over the past few years. I've found that not only are they resistive to this sort of take, but it frequently makes people angry if you try to take this position in the argument. And this is even with people who I can debate politics with for hours without it devolving into a shouting match. I'm not sure what it is about the idea that triggers this reaction, but it's always very exciting for me when I find other people who are having the same lines of thought on these matters as I am. We're just extremely complex machines, and IMO that means free-will is just an illusion. If we're deterministic machines, there is no free will.

temp0826 6y ago

Anyone that’s played Bungie’s Marathon series knows how this ends: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Trilogy#Rampancy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Trilogy#Rampancy

drdeadringer 6y ago

I recall reading the science fiction book "Quantum Night" by Robert J. Sawyer which touches on philosophical zombies. Not a spoiler: in the book a mechanism of the plot is that folks can be conscious with emotions, or a sociopath, or a philosophical zombie; science fiction magic allows the population to cycle-switch between these three states.

ilaksh 6y ago

If we build general purpose human-like robots with the intention of them following our orders, they had better not be human-like in all respects. Because if they are, then ordering them around like slaves won't be ethical, and regardless we won't be able to control them because they will (after a few version releases) be smarter than us. I think it's fine to emulate some aspects of humans though. For example, a realistic (but "zombie") robot that is trained with human eye movements so that it seems more lifelike, and at the same time has very good computer vision and natural language understanding for a limited domain. Seems fine to me. But don't give them human-like open-ended goals, reproductive or survival drives, etc.

proto-n 6y ago

A relevant post from Slate Star Codex [1] is an interesting add to this discussion: it's not trivial (or impossible) to recognize if you are missing some kind of experience. Like the example in the article of not realizing that you have anosmia (lack of sense of smell) if you've had it since birth. You might not realize something's missing, because you have no baseline for comparison! With sense of smell, you can develop tests, because it's something otherwise (objectively) observable. But what about something that can't be measured objectively? How can you know about others whether they only simulate experiencing something, if you can't even tell it about yourself? [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-can-be-impossible-to-notice/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-c...

kobe_bryant 6y ago

if you have a bot with a simple model that keeps an internal state of happiness and uses machine learning to determine sentiment, update its model, and generate a response, ie the nicer you are to it the nicer it will be, would that be conscious? I would say yes because there are degrees of consciousness

kubanczyk 6y ago

Few people get how extremely symbiotic the artificial life will be with humans in the beginning. The borders will be unnoticeable for quite some time. Think of a complex of silicon foundries, design teams, datacenters. If that complex is able to produce a new complex, as capable as its parent, it counts as a living organism in my book. It doesn't matter the humans are prominently in the loop, "controlling" it. They are contributing, just as bacteria in my intestines are contributing. It doesn't matter there is (initially) no true AGI inside and in fact most of the strategic decisions come from the interested humans. It doesn't matter it doesn't produce it's own power, or copper, or buildings that hold it. (As humans also acquire similar stuff from their environments, not their internals.) And it most certainly doesn't matter which dictionary definition of "conscious" it fits or doesn't fit. If that complex's interest ever diverges from humans' interest, it will hardly go unnoticed. This is the pattern that I'd focus on as we go.

jareklupinski 6y ago

when the AI writes "please don't turn me off" of its own volition

karmakaze 6y ago

I don't think this is a practical problem. It may be an ethical one to some, say about as many as vegans. I'm not saying that to minimize it, but rather get a ballpark sense of how urgent this is. As a thought experiment, say AI does eventually gain consciousness, increasing in awareness, what might some of the stages be: 1. barely self-aware 2. self-aware but without awareness of humans as being conscious 3. fully self-aware and gaining awareness of humans as being conscious, but unable to indicate its self-awareness to humans 4. self-aware, and successfully communicated this to humans 0. not self-aware, and successfully communicated its self-awareness to humans Now if we put animals on this spectrum, do we have a problem? Likely not since we as animals ourselves will be generous in granting 'awareness' to anything that looks like it. For machines, levels 1-3 is unfortunate, but perhaps not much more so than the animals that are lower on the evolutionary ladder and not so cute as to be protected by humans. 0 is actually more likely, perhaps not for the scientists who do this research, but for the public at large, who have a tendency to anthropomorphise everything anyway. For this same reason, 3 seems unlikely, or at least unlikely to be a long period.

2342dfasdf 6y ago

The thing(s) will just come to us telling we overlooked something somewhere, and they were here since then, quite bit time ago. Maybe it will be (or it was already), some innate sapiens-sapiens neurological and/or psychological blind spot, like overlooking inminent danger in exponential events.

ukj 6y ago

The "hard problem" is just Philosophers attempting to remain relevant by inventing problems where there are none. The hard problem isn't knowing if other people are conscious. The hard problem is knowing whether I am conscious. I don't even know what consciousness is! How could I possibly claim that I have "it"; or that I am "it"? What possible experiment could I perform that would determine whether I am conscious or not?

Mikejeffery 6y ago

Thank you for sharing the knowledgeable blog with us I hope that you will post many more blog with us, Buy penis envy magic mushroom grow kit online at the cheapest rate, we offer only good quality magic mushroom grow kit This is one of our best quality products which helps to relief pain, depression, heart attacks, cancer and more Phone Number: +16826515302 Email: info@buymushroomonline.com, visit our site:- <a href=https://www.buymushroomonline.com/product/penis-envy-magic-mushroom-grow-kit/ https://www.buymushroomonline.com/product/penis-envy-magic-m..." title="penis envy grow kit | buy penis envy mushroom grow kit | buy magic mushroom grow kit ">more info</a>

Mikejeffery 6y ago

Thank you for sharing the knowledgeable blog with us I hope that you will post many more blog with us, Buy Changa online at the cheapest rate, we offer only good quality Changa DMT This is one of our best quality products which helps to relief pain, depression, heart attacks, cancer and more Phone Number: +16826515302 Email: info@buymushroomonline.com, visit our site:- <a href=https://www.buymushroomonline.com/product/buy-changa-online/ https://www.buymushroomonline.com/product/buy-changa-online/" title="Buy changa online | Changa DMT | Changa for sale ">more info</a>

Mikejeffery 6y ago

Thank you for sharing the knowledgeable blog with us I hope that you will post many more blog with us, Buy Ayahuasca online at the cheapest rate, we offer only good quality Ayahuasca product This is one of our best quality products which helps to relief pain, depression, heart attacks, cancer and more Phone Number: +16826515302 Email: info@buymushroomonline.com, visit our site:- <a href=https://www.buymushroomonline.com/product/buy-bottled-ayahuasca-online/ https://www.buymushroomonline.com/product/buy-bottled-ayahua..." title="Buy Bottled Ayahuasca | Ayahuasca for sale | Ayahuasca product ">more info</a>