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Instinctively I'd trust the people with the knowledge that goes farther back in time. On the other hand, I once whinged to my thesis advisor that a lot of peopl

Instinctively I'd trust the people with the knowledge that goes farther back in time. On the other hand, I once whinged to my thesis advisor that a lot of people in machine learning don't seem to know much about older machine learning and AI work and he, with 30+ years of research on me, pointed out that people complained about that already when he was a PhD student. There is so much work on AI that goes back about 80 years (counting from Pitts and McCulloch, because why not; or you could count from Turing) and it's very hard to both keep up with what everyone else is doing, and go deep in your own subject. e.g. you pick up a Reinforcement Learning book and it's basically attacking the same problems as in planning, and with very similar assumptions (states and action spaces) but it's like planning doesn't even exist. Btw: they're next token predictors :P

wayeq 3y ago
> Btw: they're next token predictors :P Why not (possibly) both? After all, we can't even define consciousness, other than "what's it like to be a bat" makes more sense to us intuitively than "what's it like to be a rock". Consciousness may just come along with the ride with a certain amount of information processing, we just have no clue.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  If we can't define consciousness then that's a very good reason not to assume that a computer program is conscious, especially when it wasn't created with the purpose of being conscious in the first place. Consciousness is something we say animals or humans have, but not computers, so to say that a computer program is conscious it takes a lot more work and, I guess, a formal definition that most of us can agree on.