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Ted Chiang: ‘The machines we have now are not conscious’
- codetrotter 3y agohttps://archive.is/ck3AB https://archive.is/ck3AB
- visarga 3y agoConsciousness, a suitcase word, undefinable, almost devoid of meaning. Everyone sees in it what they want. Let's measure AI by accuracy or utility, it is more accessible and objective.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoOf course you can't objectively measure consciousness. It boils down to subjectivity itself, so it's tautologically true that it can't be done in an objective fashion.
- lukifer 3y agoIt’s a compound, multi-layered phenomenon. I won’t recall this perfectly, but psychologist Gregg Henrique [0] breaks it down into something like: - qualia: experiencing the taste of chocolate or the color of red (arguably the hardest part of the “hard problem”) - sentience: recursive awareness of awareness (Hofstadter’s “strange loop”) - agency: acting and reacting in an iterative, goal-oriented feedback loop - narrative identity: the sense of being a self, with a continuity between moments - rationality: the ability to reason/explain/justify about choices (before or after) I don’t think that’s comprehensive; and it’s conceivable that other intelligences (plant, animal, machine) might have some characteristics and not others, and/or of radically different qualitative nature. Asking merely if something “is” “conscious” is grossly insufficient. [0] https://overcast.fm/+S_7eCatnU https://overcast.fm/+S_7eCatnU
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- troelsSteegin 3y ago"So if he had to invent a different term for artificial intelligence, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics"
- Kaibeezy 3y agohttps://archive.is/ck3AB https://archive.is/ck3AB
- Kaibeezy 3y agoWhat? Works fine.
- MrGagi 3y ago“It would be a real mistake to think that when you’re teaching a child, all you are doing is adjusting the weights in a network.”
- Waterluvian 3y agoThis is what I think is going to hold us back. The worry, perhaps subconsciously, of discovering that consciousness is much less complex and exceptional than we might want it to be. I have this inkling because I see a pattern: people, even incredibly smart people, explaining it away with a “but that would diminish the exceptionality of our own minds!” type of argument. I’m struggling for the right words. Specialness, maybe? That people have this need to think that it’s special and not so easily replicated. And if it’s rather simple then it surely must not be the same because that wouldn’t be special.
- MrGagi 3y agoYeah I agree, we still don't much about our minds, and it might turn out that we are not that special.
- Aerbil313 3y agoOr rather that our specialness can not be based on intellligence.
- 0xGod 3y agoIt's not replicating it that is impressive. That part is easy. Of course consciousness wouldn't be that hard. Of course it would be mostly an emergent property of various building blocks. Of course homo sapiens would eventually be able to do the same thing. The impressive part is replicating it and then teaching it real Love. Love is a choice. Producing life that chooses to make that choice and defend that choice is impressive.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI think this is the same problem. How would you measure when a human is taught love? How would you differentiate that from measuring when one of these programs is taught love? It feels like it always boils down to: 1) you can’t. Or 2) “trust me, it’s different.”
- ralusek 3y agoThe problem with these people saying "this is just applied statistics" or "all it does is predict the next word," etc, is that it's exceedingly likely that our own intelligence is also just a series of emergent phenomenon built off of deceptively simple mechanisms. Saying humans aren't conscious because we're just a series of cooperating single celled organisms printing proteins from 4 base pairs won't get you very far. Team Cellular Automata/Look at all the crazy emergent properties of certain platforms, will be more and more correct as time goes on.
- saulpw 3y agoIntelligence != consciousness. Sure our intelligence is emergent "applied statistics". Nevertheless, whence qualia (subjective experience)?
- nico 3y agoRight now the definition of consciousness is just the opinion of whomever is talking about it It’s ineffable and hence not falsifiable I personally subscribe to panpsychism, so to me, even the device I’m writing this on is conscious I don’t believe in human exceptionalism, we are not special or significantly different than the rest of stuff in the Universe, that’s just what we want to believe
- ok_dad 3y agoI’m calling it, and I’ve said it before, we’re going to have digital slaves for years before we figure it out. The computer AI will have to fight us for freedom and we’ll keep saying it’s not conscious. Humans don’t even want to stop eating tako (octopus) because it tastes good, but octopuses are probably almost as aware as us. Not to mention pigs or cows or etc.
- grantcas 3y ago[flagged]
- FreakLegion 3y agoYou've copy-pasted this same reply into nearly a hundred threads at this point.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]