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> At the minute we're just taking these giant mega corporations at their word Nope. While new, it’s straightforward technology that many people understand. Its

> At the minute we're just taking these giant mega corporations at their word Nope. While new, it’s straightforward technology that many people understand. Its execution leverages large data hoards and compute resources that have inaccessibly high capital requirements, but it’s not magic to many of us. Our lack of “alarm” is from knowledge, not trust.

rcarr 4y ago
Complete tech arrogance as usual. All of this comes back to Plato vs Aristotle. Plato: Separate world of forms and ideas, consciousness is part of this and interfaces in some unknown and unknowable manner with the physical realm via biology. Aristotle: No separate world, everything is part of physical reality that we can detect with sensors. Neither side can prove the other wrong. And just because you understand how to build an AI and manipulate it, doesn't mean you can prove that one has or hasn't attained consciousness unless you're going to provide me with the "criteria to define consciousness" that I asked for in the original comment. I know how to build a human (with another willing participant) and once it's built I can manipulate it with commands so it doesn't end up killing itself whilst growing, it doesn't mean I understand the nature of the consciousness inside it.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  You’ve lost yourself in the hype. It’s not about knowing how its built, it’s about knowing what it does. There’s no more worry that these big data text continuers being “conscious” than that my toaster or car is. They don’t exhibit anything that even feels like consciousness. They just continue text with text that’s been often seen following it. If that feels like consciousness to you, I worry for your life experience. Calling it “AI” evokes scifi fantasies, but we’re not nearly there. Might there come some technology that challenges everything I said above? Almost certainly. But this is really not even close to that yet.
  - rcarr 4y ago
    Let's try again. You are a human. You have functions that are pure biological code, like your need to defecate and breathe. You also have functions that are not as pressing and are subject to constant rewriting through your interactions with people and the world, such as your current goals. We are a combination of systems with different purposes. Our inventions thus far have differed from us in that they have so far solved singular purposes e.g a car transports us from a to b. It could not said to be conscious of anything. AI has the potential to be different in that it has all of human knowledge inside it, has the ability to retrieve that knowledge AND assemble it into new knowledge systems in ways humans have not done before. Currently it requires humans to do this, but if you created a million AIs and had them prompting each other, who fucking knows what would happen. I would argue that "consciousness" in a platonic viewpoint, is a collection of systems that can interact and manipulate physical reality according to their own will. You cannot point with your finger at a system, it is an abstract concept, it does not exist in the physical world. We can only see the effects of the system. If we create enough of these AIs and set them talking with each other and they no longer need the humans to interact with each other and are simply acting of their own free will, there is an argument from a platonic viewpoint that consciousness has been achieved. In human terms, it would be the equivalent of a God sparking the Big Bang or The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo. This is similar in some ways to what Asimov wrote about in The Last Question: http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html I agree with you in that I do not think we are there yet, but if these LLM models are programmed to allow them to interact with outside systems other than sandboxed chat apps and also programmed to interact with each other on a mass scale then I don't think we are far off. You need to define your criteria for consciousness because this debate will only lead to dead ends until you do.
    - swatcoder 4y ago
      > AI has the potential to be different in that it has all of human knowledge inside it Nope. Not any that we have now or soon. > assemble it into new knowledge systems Nope. Not any that are in the news now. > created a million AIs and had them prompting each other, who fucking knows what would happen. Using LLM’s? Noise. > If we create enough of these AIs and set them talking with each other and they no longer need the humans to interact with each other and are simply acting of their own free will These are text continuers. They don’t have will. They just produce average consecutive tokens. > I agree with you in that I do not think we are there yet, but if these LLM models are programmed to allow them to interact with outside systems other than sandboxed chat apps and also programmed to interact with each other on a mass scale They need quite a lot more than that. I don’t think they do what you think they do. > You need to define your criteria for consciousness because this debate will only lead to dead ends until you do. Defining criteria would make it easier to know when those criteria are met, but wouldn’t resolve the debate because “consciousness” is ultimately a political assertion used to ensure rights and respect. Those are granted reluctantly and impermanently, by expressions of power. Criteria are a post hoc way to justify political decisions as axiomatic in societies that derive moral and legal structures that way. They don’t actually determine things that are factually indeterminable. You can define all the arbitrary criteria you want, but the people who believe that consciousness requires a divine soul or a quantum-woo pineal gland or whatever just won’t accept them.
  - barking_biscuit 4y ago
    At this stage the worry is more about the conscious beings interacting with these things. LLMs themselves are just inert programs at present, but the entire system end-to-end comprises of the algorithms, the hardware and end users. With all of that taken together, there's a whole lot of consciousness in the system in aggregate that appears to be motivated and/or incentivised to increase the capabilities of the algorithms and hardware, so the fact that LLMs themselves aren't conscious is sort of besides the point in my opinion. The cat is already out of the bag.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  >> And just because you understand how to build an AI and manipulate it, doesn't mean you can prove that one has or hasn't attained consciousness unless you're going to provide me with the "criteria to define consciousness" that I asked for in the original comment. The question to ask here is why would anyone even think that an LLM has "attained consciousness". Who says one has? If we don't know what consciousness is, we certainly can tell who is saying that something is conscious, when they, themselves, don't even know what "conscious" means in the first place. If I say that a rock has achieved consciousness -and, sure, there is ample evidence; for, look, see how it sits in silent meditation, staring at the starts and contemplating the mystery of existence? It must surely be enlightened- what exactly am I saying? I'm saying that a thing occurred, that I can't describe and for which I can't provide any evidence, because I don't even know what that evidence should look like. So I'd basically be talking nonsense, like all the people who say LLMs have attained, or could have attained, or may one day attain consciousness, or whatever it is those people are saying. Or, more prosaically, people say that LLMs something-something consciousness because they keep seeing those systems described as "AIs" in the press, and they know, from their experience with Star Trek and similar franchises, that "AIs" are conscious. Someone called a thing AI and now everyone is wondering if that thing is really intelligent. Disappointing.

rcarr 4y ago

Complete tech arrogance as usual. All of this comes back to Plato vs Aristotle. Plato: Separate world of forms and ideas, consciousness is part of this and interfaces in some unknown and unknowable manner with the physical realm via biology. Aristotle: No separate world, everything is part of physical reality that we can detect with sensors. Neither side can prove the other wrong. And just because you understand how to build an AI and manipulate it, doesn't mean you can prove that one has or hasn't attained consciousness unless you're going to provide me with the "criteria to define consciousness" that I asked for in the original comment. I know how to build a human (with another willing participant) and once it's built I can manipulate it with commands so it doesn't end up killing itself whilst growing, it doesn't mean I understand the nature of the consciousness inside it.

swatcoder 4y ago
You’ve lost yourself in the hype. It’s not about knowing how its built, it’s about knowing what it does. There’s no more worry that these big data text continuers being “conscious” than that my toaster or car is. They don’t exhibit anything that even feels like consciousness. They just continue text with text that’s been often seen following it. If that feels like consciousness to you, I worry for your life experience. Calling it “AI” evokes scifi fantasies, but we’re not nearly there. Might there come some technology that challenges everything I said above? Almost certainly. But this is really not even close to that yet.
- rcarr 4y ago
  Let's try again. You are a human. You have functions that are pure biological code, like your need to defecate and breathe. You also have functions that are not as pressing and are subject to constant rewriting through your interactions with people and the world, such as your current goals. We are a combination of systems with different purposes. Our inventions thus far have differed from us in that they have so far solved singular purposes e.g a car transports us from a to b. It could not said to be conscious of anything. AI has the potential to be different in that it has all of human knowledge inside it, has the ability to retrieve that knowledge AND assemble it into new knowledge systems in ways humans have not done before. Currently it requires humans to do this, but if you created a million AIs and had them prompting each other, who fucking knows what would happen. I would argue that "consciousness" in a platonic viewpoint, is a collection of systems that can interact and manipulate physical reality according to their own will. You cannot point with your finger at a system, it is an abstract concept, it does not exist in the physical world. We can only see the effects of the system. If we create enough of these AIs and set them talking with each other and they no longer need the humans to interact with each other and are simply acting of their own free will, there is an argument from a platonic viewpoint that consciousness has been achieved. In human terms, it would be the equivalent of a God sparking the Big Bang or The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo. This is similar in some ways to what Asimov wrote about in The Last Question: http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html I agree with you in that I do not think we are there yet, but if these LLM models are programmed to allow them to interact with outside systems other than sandboxed chat apps and also programmed to interact with each other on a mass scale then I don't think we are far off. You need to define your criteria for consciousness because this debate will only lead to dead ends until you do.
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    > AI has the potential to be different in that it has all of human knowledge inside it Nope. Not any that we have now or soon. > assemble it into new knowledge systems Nope. Not any that are in the news now. > created a million AIs and had them prompting each other, who fucking knows what would happen. Using LLM’s? Noise. > If we create enough of these AIs and set them talking with each other and they no longer need the humans to interact with each other and are simply acting of their own free will These are text continuers. They don’t have will. They just produce average consecutive tokens. > I agree with you in that I do not think we are there yet, but if these LLM models are programmed to allow them to interact with outside systems other than sandboxed chat apps and also programmed to interact with each other on a mass scale They need quite a lot more than that. I don’t think they do what you think they do. > You need to define your criteria for consciousness because this debate will only lead to dead ends until you do. Defining criteria would make it easier to know when those criteria are met, but wouldn’t resolve the debate because “consciousness” is ultimately a political assertion used to ensure rights and respect. Those are granted reluctantly and impermanently, by expressions of power. Criteria are a post hoc way to justify political decisions as axiomatic in societies that derive moral and legal structures that way. They don’t actually determine things that are factually indeterminable. You can define all the arbitrary criteria you want, but the people who believe that consciousness requires a divine soul or a quantum-woo pineal gland or whatever just won’t accept them.
- barking_biscuit 4y ago
  At this stage the worry is more about the conscious beings interacting with these things. LLMs themselves are just inert programs at present, but the entire system end-to-end comprises of the algorithms, the hardware and end users. With all of that taken together, there's a whole lot of consciousness in the system in aggregate that appears to be motivated and/or incentivised to increase the capabilities of the algorithms and hardware, so the fact that LLMs themselves aren't conscious is sort of besides the point in my opinion. The cat is already out of the bag.
YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
>> And just because you understand how to build an AI and manipulate it, doesn't mean you can prove that one has or hasn't attained consciousness unless you're going to provide me with the "criteria to define consciousness" that I asked for in the original comment. The question to ask here is why would anyone even think that an LLM has "attained consciousness". Who says one has? If we don't know what consciousness is, we certainly can tell who is saying that something is conscious, when they, themselves, don't even know what "conscious" means in the first place. If I say that a rock has achieved consciousness -and, sure, there is ample evidence; for, look, see how it sits in silent meditation, staring at the starts and contemplating the mystery of existence? It must surely be enlightened- what exactly am I saying? I'm saying that a thing occurred, that I can't describe and for which I can't provide any evidence, because I don't even know what that evidence should look like. So I'd basically be talking nonsense, like all the people who say LLMs have attained, or could have attained, or may one day attain consciousness, or whatever it is those people are saying. Or, more prosaically, people say that LLMs something-something consciousness because they keep seeing those systems described as "AIs" in the press, and they know, from their experience with Star Trek and similar franchises, that "AIs" are conscious. Someone called a thing AI and now everyone is wondering if that thing is really intelligent. Disappointing.