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The whole discussion is pure fluff and a Twitter box match. You'll do yourself a favor by keeping all this noise out and concentrate on actually valuable books

The whole discussion is pure fluff and a Twitter box match. You'll do yourself a favor by keeping all this noise out and concentrate on actually valuable books and writings. Any doofus and their cat can have an opinion on whether machines are conscious. We've been having this debate since Turing and even earlier. Also any time a Twitter storm comes up around AI, you will predictably have certain blocks building and flinging excrement at each other for various latent political disagreements. For Sutskever, it's a way to get into the news cycle, to get lots of engagement. Do you want to reward these? It's like Musk tweets. You can probably have more "impact" with a well optimized two-line off-hand tweet than with an actual book where you explain some novel idea.

visarga 5y ago
> Any doofus and their cat can have an opinion on whether machines are conscious. Please try a little bit to read the source before commenting. The originator of this opinion is Ilya Sutskever, co-founder at OpenAI and cited 269k times. He's one of the top people in the field. https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1491554478243258368 https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1491554478243258368 I take Ilya's tweet more like a musing, an invitation to think what if, rattling the box to get interesting reactions. In my opinion he's not necessarily right or wrong. Today's large neural networks might be conscious if they didn't lack some special equipment - a body, senses and action organs, and a goal. They need to be able to do causal interventions in the environment, not just reply to simple text inputs. I think embodiment is not out of reach. Look at Yann LeCun's strong reply: > Nope. Not even for true for small values of "slightly conscious" and large values of "large neural nets". I think you would need a particular kind of macro-architecture that none of the current networks possess. https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1492604977260412928 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1492604977260412928 The neural nets need the 4Es of cognition: embodied, embedded, enacted and extended. > The four E’s of 4E cognition initialize its central claim: cognition does not occur exclusively inside the head, but is variously embodied , embedded, enacted, or extended by way of extra cranial processes and structures... they constitute a form of dynamic coupling, where the brain body world interaction links the three parts into an autonomous, self regulating system. (MJ Rowlands, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology)
- bonoboTP 5y ago
  Again, this is kind of a mind virus, a "scissor statement" in Scott Alexander's words [0]. People have strong opinions on this, even if they have no idea on actual important open questions in AI/deep learning/ML etc. (or even just how the state of the art works). I'm not claiming that Sutskever has no deep knowledge, I know who he is! My point is that these conversations are just like the "what color is this dress?" and "is a hotdog a sandwich?" viral topics, where everyone feels addressed and think the "other side" is obviously wrong. Now this consciousness "debate" is all over my Twitter feed and most of it is low-effort memes, half-baked thoughts, etc. Well, that's Twitter for ya, anyway... Maybe I should have said "don't read Twitter". But actually sometimes people link to interesting new papers and projects, or open positions, informative stuff. But there is a lot of circular, self-referential circlejerking. Nobody knows what's consciousness, and most people who talk about it are either pushing buttons of the AI Twitter hivemind or have nothing more important to discuss. [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
- namero999 5y ago
  Cognition and consciousness are very different things. Do you think that a sufficiently large contraption of pipes, vales and water will become conscious?
  - bonoboTP 5y ago
    Come back when you can tell if another human being is conscious (and let me know how you were able to tell, so we can apply that test to the pipe contraption).
    - namero999 5y ago
      I am a human being and I am conscious. You look like me and behave like me, so I have no reasons to doubt you are conscious too: it's either that or solipsism. The real question is, how can you doubt that another human being is conscious, yet be open to the possibility that a bunch of silicon might be?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

visarga 5y ago

> Any doofus and their cat can have an opinion on whether machines are conscious. Please try a little bit to read the source before commenting. The originator of this opinion is Ilya Sutskever, co-founder at OpenAI and cited 269k times. He's one of the top people in the field. https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1491554478243258368 https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1491554478243258368 I take Ilya's tweet more like a musing, an invitation to think what if, rattling the box to get interesting reactions. In my opinion he's not necessarily right or wrong. Today's large neural networks might be conscious if they didn't lack some special equipment - a body, senses and action organs, and a goal. They need to be able to do causal interventions in the environment, not just reply to simple text inputs. I think embodiment is not out of reach. Look at Yann LeCun's strong reply: > Nope. Not even for true for small values of "slightly conscious" and large values of "large neural nets". I think you would need a particular kind of macro-architecture that none of the current networks possess. https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1492604977260412928 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1492604977260412928 The neural nets need the 4Es of cognition: embodied, embedded, enacted and extended. > The four E’s of 4E cognition initialize its central claim: cognition does not occur exclusively inside the head, but is variously embodied , embedded, enacted, or extended by way of extra cranial processes and structures... they constitute a form of dynamic coupling, where the brain body world interaction links the three parts into an autonomous, self regulating system. (MJ Rowlands, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology)

bonoboTP 5y ago
Again, this is kind of a mind virus, a "scissor statement" in Scott Alexander's words [0]. People have strong opinions on this, even if they have no idea on actual important open questions in AI/deep learning/ML etc. (or even just how the state of the art works). I'm not claiming that Sutskever has no deep knowledge, I know who he is! My point is that these conversations are just like the "what color is this dress?" and "is a hotdog a sandwich?" viral topics, where everyone feels addressed and think the "other side" is obviously wrong. Now this consciousness "debate" is all over my Twitter feed and most of it is low-effort memes, half-baked thoughts, etc. Well, that's Twitter for ya, anyway... Maybe I should have said "don't read Twitter". But actually sometimes people link to interesting new papers and projects, or open positions, informative stuff. But there is a lot of circular, self-referential circlejerking. Nobody knows what's consciousness, and most people who talk about it are either pushing buttons of the AI Twitter hivemind or have nothing more important to discuss. [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
namero999 5y ago
Cognition and consciousness are very different things. Do you think that a sufficiently large contraption of pipes, vales and water will become conscious?
- bonoboTP 5y ago
  Come back when you can tell if another human being is conscious (and let me know how you were able to tell, so we can apply that test to the pipe contraption).
  - namero999 5y ago
    I am a human being and I am conscious. You look like me and behave like me, so I have no reasons to doubt you are conscious too: it's either that or solipsism. The real question is, how can you doubt that another human being is conscious, yet be open to the possibility that a bunch of silicon might be?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]