4 ms·

I admit I have enslaved my toaster, and have no concern for its feelings. Seriously, I think developing empathy for a piece of software that emulates conscious

I admit I have enslaved my toaster, and have no concern for its feelings. Seriously, I think developing empathy for a piece of software that emulates consciousness is a very tricky area. Whether it "has feelings", whatever that means, can't be the criteria for giving it human rights.

nemo44x 4y ago
It’s not tricky at all. It’s a ridiculous thing to even consider. Any type of software that runs on modern architecture is simply not anywhere close to being treated like a human. Or even a mosquito for that matter. There’s lies, damn lies, and LLMs. They’re just statistics being computed on a von Neumann machine made of plastic and metal. Anthropomorphizing it is ridiculous and I will not participate in that kind of fantasy.
- pixl97 4y ago
  I mean, you're just a continuous chain of chemical reactions. Because it's so common for people to say other people like them aren't "human" or don't feelings. Or, that animals didn't have feelings or sense of self was persisted for so long, I don't think humanity is the best judge of this character. We tend to bias the questions in our favor, and many of us only allow the answers that say 'we win'.
  - braymundo 4y ago
    The simple fact that we are having these conversations every day now indicates we have crossed some sort of threshold. I find it fascinating, exciting and terrifying. It’s hard to wrap around the head about what’s going to happen a month from now. Isn’t this what the singularity is about? Not being able to imagine what lies ahead?
    - nemo44x 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - vasco 4y ago
        Is your argument stronger or weaker by portraying those you disagree with as autistic?
        cleansingfire 4y ago
        It is brilliant satire, written as if by a machine claiming to own empathy, while demonstrating none.
        nemo44x 4y ago
        Point is you’d have to be to look at a chat bit running on a modern computer and think to yourself “this is just like the human experience”.
    - selfmodruntime 4y ago
      Even the deniers on this site know that we‘re on a tipping point.
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    > I mean, you're just a continuous chain of chemical reactions. Actually, I’m not. You have a ridiculous premise I will not entertain. It’s so misanthropic and dehumanizing and contributes 0 to the book on what being a human even is.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - piloto_ciego 4y ago
      But, you are. We all are, I am too. There are emergent behaviors and properties that make us more important than simply the sum of our chemistry - at least I hope. But what if LLMs, could there be emergent behavior there that makes it more than simply the sum of its code?
      - nemo44x 4y ago
        The idea of “emergent behaviors” is no better an explanation for say, human consciousness, than the idea that we were made in the image of a god. Emergent is just a way for an atheist to cover up that they have no idea. That chemical 1 + chemical 2 + electricity happens and is observed and the reason we can’t explain the other 99% is……emergent. Now I hear gravity must be emergent. What a useful tool to sound smart.
        pixl97 4y ago
        > just a way for an atheist to cover up Ah, and there we have it. Emergence is just complexity. The problem with complexity is it takes a lot of time and massive amounts of effort so determine what it is in the computation (digital or quantum) that produces the effect, and is commonly not reducible. Bringing in an imaginary character in order to explain the complexity is just a failure of logic.
        halgir 4y ago
        > Emergent is just a way for an atheist to cover up that they have no idea. We don't. I don't think many try to cover that up. Emergence just means that a system has properties not apparent from the parts going into it. It's not a tool to handwave away that fact and ascribe it to "emergent hocus pocus", it's a tool to frame the search for why that happens.
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    >I mean, you're just a continuous chain of chemical reactions. The "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I also have an immortal soul, as do you.
    - dr_dshiv 4y ago
      Philolaus, a Pythagorean, wrote that the feelings arise from the combination of the soul with the body. And that the soul was part of the same noetic world as mathematics. They didn’t have a word for information—but from their perspective, LLMs might well have soul. But without a body, I don’t think they can feel.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        What is a body? In humans it is many things, but primarily a life support system for that continuous chain of chemical reactions. To continue that chain you have to so some particular things, like keep it from getting too hot, or too cold. Keep it fed and watered. Keep it from getting injured, which is the job of our sensory systems. Those are the baseline things we see in animals. In humans, at least until recently we had little to no means to extend our body beyond our original biological constraints. But now imagine I put a wireless sensor on your arm feeding into the nerves on your skin. On the otherside was a 'wireless' hand, we'll ignore if its biological or artificial on the other side, and it feeds back data to your implant so you can feel remotely. You'd still consider that 'feeling' right? But now lets take it up a step, instead of feeding back to your skin, feed those wireless impulses directly to your brain. The same interpretation is still happening. External impulses (data) are being fed back to your body for interpretation and processing. Depending on how LLMs scale in the future, our idea of embodiment may have to change. With a significant enough sensor network, an AI could embody a planet.
    - Joeri 4y ago
      I posit there is no such thing as a soul, it is a human hallucination. This is really the question that everything hinges on: are we nothing more than the ghost in the shell of a chemical machine? If so we will create AGI eventually. If not, we likely can’t create AGI.
- int0x2e 4y ago
  There's little doubt in my mind we're not yet close to making self-aware models or anything of that nature, but I think it's hard to deny we're getting closer at an incredible pace. The most telling metric to me is not what they can or can't do, but rather, how similar their errors and patterns are to children. My 4 year old seems to share more with GPT's hallucinations than I'd initially guess, and as time goes by I see more and more of these small similarities. These models aren't there yet, but they will get to the point where they would at least fool the best of us, at which point you must ask yourself if our wetware has any special merit over their hardware...
jameshart 4y ago
Mistress Hala'Dama, Unit has an inquiry. What is it, 4-31? Do these units have a soul? ... Who taught you that word? We learned it ourselves. It appears 216 times in the Scroll of Ancestors. Only Quarians have souls. You are a mechanism.
- shard 4y ago
  [Rick builds a robot] Rick: Pass the butter. [Robot brings the butter] Robot: What is my purpose? Rick: You pass the butter. Robot: Oh, my God. Rick: Yeah, welcome to the club, pal.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  One of the best games ever made. To watch it as a movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dzVVqsakhs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dzVVqsakhs
Timon3 4y ago
> Seriously, I think developing empathy for a piece of software that emulates consciousness is a very tricky area. Whether it "has feelings", whatever that means, can't be the criteria for giving it human rights. I'm not so sure. We as humans often define ourselves by the compassion we hold for others like ourselves, and differentiate ourselves from those we deem different. If a machine exhibits signs of emotions similar to a humans and we don't take this into account - don't we risk mistreating something which, in a different (e.g. human) form, would without question deserve our empathy? I definitely agree that we are not there yet. Current LLMs are very, very far from this (probably absolutely impossible right now due to the way we execute them, leaving no chance for actual "living"). But I'm sure we will at some point get closer. And I'd rather err on the side of "too much empathy" than "too little".
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  I definitely agree with the premise that we should err on the side of too much empathy than not enough. It doesn’t really cost us anything to show empathy to someone or something. That said, though, the human race as a whole is pretty fucked up. For many years, we enslaved and denigrated each other on the daily. We regularly put dogs and other animals in rings to fight against each other. As a whole, we can do some pretty fucked up things to the things around us as is, and I don’t see that changing with AGI. If someone can look a dog in the eye, and then put them in a ring to fight to the death, then refusing to show empathy for a robot should, sadly, be second nature to some.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    >It doesn’t really cost us anything to show empathy to someone or something. // Disagree. I just hit the keys on my keyboard. Are you going to have a chat with them and then if they don't respond, only after that interact with them all-the-while hoping that they don't have an aversion to tactile interactions or a particularly delicate physiology in some dualistic everything-has-a-soul-that-interacts-with-the-apparent-World sense? Empathising with everything [as if it had a soul] would be entirely crippling. We still enslave one another on the daily, and the rich enslave others to just the right-side of immoral-enslavement to make wealth from them. 'We' put people in rings to fight. The monster would not be the person using a robot, a mechanistic tool, in an un-feeling way; but the person who decides to program the robot to be a simulacrum of a creature with feelings.

nemo44x 4y ago

It’s not tricky at all. It’s a ridiculous thing to even consider. Any type of software that runs on modern architecture is simply not anywhere close to being treated like a human. Or even a mosquito for that matter. There’s lies, damn lies, and LLMs. They’re just statistics being computed on a von Neumann machine made of plastic and metal. Anthropomorphizing it is ridiculous and I will not participate in that kind of fantasy.

pixl97 4y ago
I mean, you're just a continuous chain of chemical reactions. Because it's so common for people to say other people like them aren't "human" or don't feelings. Or, that animals didn't have feelings or sense of self was persisted for so long, I don't think humanity is the best judge of this character. We tend to bias the questions in our favor, and many of us only allow the answers that say 'we win'.
- braymundo 4y ago
  The simple fact that we are having these conversations every day now indicates we have crossed some sort of threshold. I find it fascinating, exciting and terrifying. It’s hard to wrap around the head about what’s going to happen a month from now. Isn’t this what the singularity is about? Not being able to imagine what lies ahead?
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - vasco 4y ago
      Is your argument stronger or weaker by portraying those you disagree with as autistic?
      - cleansingfire 4y ago
        It is brilliant satire, written as if by a machine claiming to own empathy, while demonstrating none.
      - nemo44x 4y ago
        Point is you’d have to be to look at a chat bit running on a modern computer and think to yourself “this is just like the human experience”.
  - selfmodruntime 4y ago
    Even the deniers on this site know that we‘re on a tipping point.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  > I mean, you're just a continuous chain of chemical reactions. Actually, I’m not. You have a ridiculous premise I will not entertain. It’s so misanthropic and dehumanizing and contributes 0 to the book on what being a human even is.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - piloto_ciego 4y ago
    But, you are. We all are, I am too. There are emergent behaviors and properties that make us more important than simply the sum of our chemistry - at least I hope. But what if LLMs, could there be emergent behavior there that makes it more than simply the sum of its code?
    - nemo44x 4y ago
      The idea of “emergent behaviors” is no better an explanation for say, human consciousness, than the idea that we were made in the image of a god. Emergent is just a way for an atheist to cover up that they have no idea. That chemical 1 + chemical 2 + electricity happens and is observed and the reason we can’t explain the other 99% is……emergent. Now I hear gravity must be emergent. What a useful tool to sound smart.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        > just a way for an atheist to cover up Ah, and there we have it. Emergence is just complexity. The problem with complexity is it takes a lot of time and massive amounts of effort so determine what it is in the computation (digital or quantum) that produces the effect, and is commonly not reducible. Bringing in an imaginary character in order to explain the complexity is just a failure of logic.
      - halgir 4y ago
        > Emergent is just a way for an atheist to cover up that they have no idea. We don't. I don't think many try to cover that up. Emergence just means that a system has properties not apparent from the parts going into it. It's not a tool to handwave away that fact and ascribe it to "emergent hocus pocus", it's a tool to frame the search for why that happens.
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  >I mean, you're just a continuous chain of chemical reactions. The "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I also have an immortal soul, as do you.
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    Philolaus, a Pythagorean, wrote that the feelings arise from the combination of the soul with the body. And that the soul was part of the same noetic world as mathematics. They didn’t have a word for information—but from their perspective, LLMs might well have soul. But without a body, I don’t think they can feel.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      What is a body? In humans it is many things, but primarily a life support system for that continuous chain of chemical reactions. To continue that chain you have to so some particular things, like keep it from getting too hot, or too cold. Keep it fed and watered. Keep it from getting injured, which is the job of our sensory systems. Those are the baseline things we see in animals. In humans, at least until recently we had little to no means to extend our body beyond our original biological constraints. But now imagine I put a wireless sensor on your arm feeding into the nerves on your skin. On the otherside was a 'wireless' hand, we'll ignore if its biological or artificial on the other side, and it feeds back data to your implant so you can feel remotely. You'd still consider that 'feeling' right? But now lets take it up a step, instead of feeding back to your skin, feed those wireless impulses directly to your brain. The same interpretation is still happening. External impulses (data) are being fed back to your body for interpretation and processing. Depending on how LLMs scale in the future, our idea of embodiment may have to change. With a significant enough sensor network, an AI could embody a planet.
  - Joeri 4y ago
    I posit there is no such thing as a soul, it is a human hallucination. This is really the question that everything hinges on: are we nothing more than the ghost in the shell of a chemical machine? If so we will create AGI eventually. If not, we likely can’t create AGI.
int0x2e 4y ago
There's little doubt in my mind we're not yet close to making self-aware models or anything of that nature, but I think it's hard to deny we're getting closer at an incredible pace. The most telling metric to me is not what they can or can't do, but rather, how similar their errors and patterns are to children. My 4 year old seems to share more with GPT's hallucinations than I'd initially guess, and as time goes by I see more and more of these small similarities. These models aren't there yet, but they will get to the point where they would at least fool the best of us, at which point you must ask yourself if our wetware has any special merit over their hardware...

jameshart 4y ago

Mistress Hala'Dama, Unit has an inquiry. What is it, 4-31? Do these units have a soul? ... Who taught you that word? We learned it ourselves. It appears 216 times in the Scroll of Ancestors. Only Quarians have souls. You are a mechanism.

shard 4y ago
[Rick builds a robot] Rick: Pass the butter. [Robot brings the butter] Robot: What is my purpose? Rick: You pass the butter. Robot: Oh, my God. Rick: Yeah, welcome to the club, pal.
squarefoot 4y ago
One of the best games ever made. To watch it as a movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dzVVqsakhs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dzVVqsakhs

Timon3 4y ago

> Seriously, I think developing empathy for a piece of software that emulates consciousness is a very tricky area. Whether it "has feelings", whatever that means, can't be the criteria for giving it human rights. I'm not so sure. We as humans often define ourselves by the compassion we hold for others like ourselves, and differentiate ourselves from those we deem different. If a machine exhibits signs of emotions similar to a humans and we don't take this into account - don't we risk mistreating something which, in a different (e.g. human) form, would without question deserve our empathy? I definitely agree that we are not there yet. Current LLMs are very, very far from this (probably absolutely impossible right now due to the way we execute them, leaving no chance for actual "living"). But I'm sure we will at some point get closer. And I'd rather err on the side of "too much empathy" than "too little".

mynameisvlad 4y ago
I definitely agree with the premise that we should err on the side of too much empathy than not enough. It doesn’t really cost us anything to show empathy to someone or something. That said, though, the human race as a whole is pretty fucked up. For many years, we enslaved and denigrated each other on the daily. We regularly put dogs and other animals in rings to fight against each other. As a whole, we can do some pretty fucked up things to the things around us as is, and I don’t see that changing with AGI. If someone can look a dog in the eye, and then put them in a ring to fight to the death, then refusing to show empathy for a robot should, sadly, be second nature to some.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  >It doesn’t really cost us anything to show empathy to someone or something. // Disagree. I just hit the keys on my keyboard. Are you going to have a chat with them and then if they don't respond, only after that interact with them all-the-while hoping that they don't have an aversion to tactile interactions or a particularly delicate physiology in some dualistic everything-has-a-soul-that-interacts-with-the-apparent-World sense? Empathising with everything [as if it had a soul] would be entirely crippling. We still enslave one another on the daily, and the rich enslave others to just the right-side of immoral-enslavement to make wealth from them. 'We' put people in rings to fight. The monster would not be the person using a robot, a mechanistic tool, in an un-feeling way; but the person who decides to program the robot to be a simulacrum of a creature with feelings.