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Not sure why everyone is being so negative. Taken charitably the scientist is saying "We don't currently have a mathematical definition for what consciousness
by sgillen 5y ago
Not sure why everyone is being so negative. Taken charitably the scientist is saying
"We don't currently have a mathematical definition for what consciousness is, but if we do develop one in the future, I would not be totally surprised if we learned that todays large neural networks (I assume here he is talking mostly about the recent gigantic language models) turn out to be conscious in some sense."
Maybe that's overly charitable, but that statement doesn't seem too unreasonable.
- cosheaf 5y agoBecause by muddying the waters about what counts as intelligence and consciousness AI researchers are making it harder to actually discuss these topics in a coherent way. It's a self serving agenda that serves no purpose beyond aggrandizing some very basic mathematics. No one has any coherent explanation for why a bunch of matrix multiplications and very basic non-linearities like ReLU are sufficient for creating conscious agents. It's obvious that "1+1" is not an expression that denotes anything about consciousness and yet AI researchers would have us believe that if we just add more 1s and a few more mathematical operations then we will magically get conscious agents. It's a preposterous claim and as I said previously serves no purpose other than confusing and befuddling the public in order to sell them silly toys.