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 act

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/