Words need to mean something to be useful. In this discussion words like "awareness" and "consciousness" are being used in such an imprecise way as to not have

Words need to mean something to be useful. In this discussion words like "awareness" and "consciousness" are being used in such an imprecise way as to not have useful meaning. They are sort of stand-ins for "alive" in a very rough way. But some of these words do have usable definitions such as self-aware meaning able to distinguish between self and another or the environment (which vision language models like this one definitely can do). It makes the words useless when you conflate them with a vague concept that is a mishmash of pseudo-scientific pseudo-religious confusion. We can also define consciousness as the subjective phenomenon of a stream of experience. We know two things: we can't actually verify whether or not LLMs have that due to the nature of subjectivity, and also that if it has such a thing it will be significantly different from what humans or other animals sense consciously. Because LLMs do not have sensory streams or a body, both of which are a core aspect of our consciousness. They are also conflating autonomy with this vague concept. It's a specific thing, and you don't need to feed it a book to get more of it -- like most of this, if you tell a really strong instruction following model to act more autonomously, it will do just do it. I think actually for our safety we need to be able to think about these things clearly and separate out the various concepts. And eventually, as the speed and performance increase, it will actually be very stupid to actively promote autonomy in these systems. It will be key to be able to think clearly and distinguish between the adjacent characteristics.