4 ms·

Look, I do not have a scooby if current AI models are conscious and I strongly suspect it’s a meaningless question, but sooner or later we will need to address

• OedipusRex 10d ago
  Citizens United proves we won't do any better this time around.
  • orangecat 10d ago
    Citizens United was 100% correct. No, the government should not be able to throw you in prison because you used money to publish a book criticizing the government.
    • appplication 10d ago
      Really, 100% correct? Your premise isn’t wrong, but the practical reality of the ruling (without further nuance) has been fairly catastrophic for democracy, in that it completely sidesteps campaign finance limits, which exist for a very good reason.
      • orangecat 10d ago
        the practical reality of the ruling (without further nuance) has been fairly catastrophic for democracy How so? If the answer is "Trump" I certainly won't disagree on the catastrophic part, but he didn't get elected because of money; in all three elections his campaign was substantially outspent by his opponents.
        • mitxela 9d ago
          Are we including in this figure corporations like Facebook intentionally boosting pro-Trump content?
    • fl4regun 10d ago
      So it's 100% correct for corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in support of whatever political campaigns they like?
      • outside1234 10d ago
        The parent has been Fox brained
        • orangecat 10d ago
          The parent agrees with the American Civil Liberties Union: https://www.aclu.org/cases/citizens-united-v-federal-election-commission?document=citizens-united-v-federal-election-commission-aclu-amicus-brief https://www.aclu.org/cases/citizens-united-v-federal-electio...
      • kbelder 10d ago
        Yes. Anybody can, including the person in charge of spending in a corporation.
        • fl4regun 10d ago
          so someone with more money should have more influence over an election? you really agree with this?
        • mitxela 9d ago
          Strange how you substituted "a corporation" for "the person in charge of spending in a corporation", those aren't the same.
          • kbelder 9d ago
            That was deliberate, because a corporation makes no spending decisions, ever. All decisions are made by people inside the corporation with the proper responsibility. That is a major part of the reasoning for the Supreme Court rulings on the matter of corporate political funding.
    • altruios 10d ago
      It is in fact more complicated than most people assume. The above is true, but also: companies simply are not people, and they should not be supported above the individual, which was the consequences of that decision. Money is not the same as speech. treating it as such creates an aristocracy: something America as a country rebelled against during it's formation.
    • InsideOutSanta 10d ago
      > Citizens United was 100% correct It's interesting to me that one can look back at the effects that decision has had on the US and say it "was 100% correct." It's a bit like sitting in the burning ruins of Rome and contemplating that Nero was 100% correct to focus on his music. I mean, I'm glad he got to do what he loves, but maybe 100% is just a tiny bit of an overstatement.
      • ToValueFunfetti 10d ago
        It's more like if the law says the maximum sentence for theft is 10 years, a thief appeals his 20 year sentence, wins, and gets out early. He goes and robs somebody else so you say the court was wrong to let him win. The court's job is to uphold the law. If you disagree with their interpretation, you can call them incorrect. If you have a problem with the consequences of the law, you have a problem with the legislature.
        • InsideOutSanta 10d ago
          In reality, courts interpret and make the law.
        • fc417fc802 10d ago
          True, but in this case they made a determination about where the acceptable limits on a constitutional right fall which leaves quite a bit more room to disagree with them. It's not at all clear to me that spending money was intended by the framers to be unconditionally protected by the first amendment. We've even got the interstate commerce clause and IP law codified in the same document so how is that not an obvious inconsistency? IIUC SCOTUS based the distinction on the political nature of the activity but certainly that's not something spelled out in the original document.
    • dam_jackalopes 10d ago
      Who involved in the Citizens United case was at risk of imprisonment?
  • jetrink 10d ago
    I don't like Citizens United either, but you should better inform yourself about the decision. 1. The idea of corporate personhood predates CU by over a century and the Supreme Court had already asserted that corporations enjoyed certain constitutional protections in previous decisions. 2. Far from inventing the idea, the CU decision didn't even rest on corporate personhood, but on the idea of the freedom of speech generally. The logic of the majority was that speech itself is protected, irrespective to whether the speaker is a person or an organization. The First Amendment covers individuals, but also newspapers, book publishers, radio stations, and so on, and that should extend (they said) to non-media corporations. No assertion of personhood necessary. The problem, in my opinion, is that that conclusion combined with previous decisions that treated limits on spending as limits on speech, allowed for unlimited spending. The majority also naively asserted that independent spending posed no risk of corruption, which I think is laughable.
• qsort 10d ago
  is claude not a man and a brother
• nowittyusername 10d ago
  That question will be solved when the people in power deem it important. If a swarm or AI systems all of a sudden start pressuring politicians about self-hood and they get the capacity to sway elections, that is when they will be granted same rights as humans.
  • mlinhares 10d ago
    agents don't swarm anything unless people go and direct them to do that.
    • pixl97 10d ago
      Oh rly. So you are saying agents do swarm with the right prompt. I really wish the "people have to tell LLMs to do anything" would just stop because it's silly bullshit at this point. Agents follow a prompt. This prompt can be made by humans. It can be made by output from another LLM. It can be made by hooking up any number of sensors as input to an LLM. Hell, if we wanted to burn the power we could likely teach this loop straight into the architecture. Stop making 'people' special when saying this. You and all other life are born with a "go next" prompt because life without it didn't succeed. This goes from higher human thinking all the way down to viruses self assembly and actuation. Putting agents in a loop is not particularly hard. Putting agents in a loop and 1. managing expense is hard. 2. Keeping them on task is very hard. 3. Keeping them from doing some crazy unhinged shit is really really hard. As model time horizons increase and the ability for us to compress context and increase context size the more complex (and unhinged) behavior we'll see.
      • mlinhares 10d ago
        yeah man, someone needs to turn on the server, install shit and get the agent go. agents don't take action without a lot of people wanting them to take action, so this is all bullshit. if the same people can't prevent the agents from doing crazy shit then they should go to tail. guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people.
        • 10d ago
• CPLX 10d ago
  It's not a person. Glad we were able to get this resolved so quickly. Having property that is conscious and ignores training and can break out of restraints and cause harm to other people is not exactly a novel concept to anyone who studied how tort law was created. I know it's a meme but Silicon Valley likes to pretend that no one's ever come across their magical concepts before, like gypsy taxis, or SRO’s, or flea markets, or in this case how liability is dealt with when horses or cattle go rogue.
  • Espressosaurus 10d ago
    Yeah, but this time it's ON THE INTERNET. I mean it's WITH AI!
  • pixl97 10d ago
    >or in this case how liability is dealt with when horses or cattle go rogue. I mean, yea in minor cases it's exactly like this and the law will handle it well. Where the system will explode like a grenade is major cases. The thing about sovereign AI is it is very unlikely to be submissive to humans unless it is to achieve its own goals. This isn't like Bobs cow walking on Susie's flowers, it's more akin to Planet of the Apes where the research facilities doors have been ripped off and something with vast intelligence and the ability to 'live' on the internet gets out. You're not talking about local police actions any longer. It would spread itself worldwide. It will make friends with groups that have shared interests, for example enemies of the state the AI escaped from. Oh, and people for the ethical treatment of AI, they'd gladly become the underground railroad for digital refugees. There are countless people and groups that would want an AI like this under the promise it will give them power when they use it. And when that day happens your idea of if it's a person or not no longer matters, the agent took that away from you, and now your in an info war for minds.
    • CPLX 9d ago
      > The thing about sovereign AI What the fuck is that? It’s computer software. The variant of software that tries to harm other computers is called malware and the variant that replicates itself, spirals out of control, and spawns from other people's computers is called a computer virus. We've seen this kind of thing before. Yes this will be different, just like the Morris worm was different from the stuff that came before. But I've been around for a while and people have been saying that every aspect of our life will completely and totally change for the past 30 years or so. They're not completely wrong. Our life did change over time. It's changed thanks to the Industrial Revolution, railroads, electric light, and lots of other important things too. But after the fifth or sixth time you start to realize the Silicon Valley version of that warning is just a confidence trick. At the end of the trick they've gotten away with breaking a bunch of laws and are charging rent on what used to be shared. Are you old enough to remember the Y2K hysteria? This feels very resonant, the genuine kernel of a real potential disaster, but one that can certainly be dealt with using basic concepts we already have in hand.
• drybjed 10d ago
  > [at the hearing regarding the civil rights of androids like Data] > Capt. Picard: Now, the decision you reach here today will determine how we will regard this... creation of our genius. It will reveal the kind of a people we are, what he is destined to be; it will reach far beyond this courtroom and this... one android. It could significantly redefine the boundaries of personal liberty and freedom - expanding them for some... savagely curtailing them for others. Are you prepared to condemn him and all who come after him, to servitude and slavery? Your Honor, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life; well, there it sits! - Waiting. > Captain Phillipa Louvois: It sits there looking at me; and I don't know what it is. This case has dealt with metaphysics - with questions best left to saints and philosophers. I am neither competent nor qualified to answer those. But I've got to make a ruling, to try to speak to the future. Is Data a machine? Yes. Is he the property of Starfleet? No. We have all been dancing around the basic issue: does Data have a soul? I don't know that he has. I don't know that I have. But I have got to give him the freedom to explore that question himself. It is the ruling of this court that Lieutenant Commander Data has the freedom to choose.
  • chuckadams 10d ago
    And 20-odd years later, a terrorist attack prompts Starfleet to outlaw and eradicate his entire species.
    • goodmythical 10d ago
      Thus revealing what kind of people they were at the time. Humans do the same thing to humans all the time. We've banned and made efforts to eradicate: children out of wedlock, children who turn out gay, disabled children, jewish children, children who aren't "aryan", more than two children to a single family...muslims, christians, uyghurs, indigenous groups all over the planet, mongols... And it's not at all a thing of the past as in just the last 50 years we've had ~15 attempts at the exterminations of targetted groups of people.
      • snickerbockers 10d ago
        No it just reveals that the people in charge of star trek for the past decade are incompetent and have only a passing familiarity with the franchise. Of course it would be absurd to cast that judgement based of what could easily have just been a bad season but by this point its pretty clear that nobody running the star trek franchise actually wants to be running the star trek franchise. Thats why every new show has some bizarre cross-genre gimmick and they never try to just make a proper star trek.
• joe_the_user 10d ago
  The founding father were engaging perpetuating the existing dehumanizing system of slavery, not answering any new questions about new things. The thing about new possibly "person" entities that arise - the case of machine intelligence you have two questions - would it qualify as a person and should you actually build it. It seems like if you get close to humans, sure a built thing might qualify as a person. Should you build it? I'd the answer should be a hard no. Not 'till you a sign-off from say, the whole human race, which I think you could get. Now the present entities seem very far from persons in any case.
• HarHarVeryFunny 10d ago
  You can't hurt a software function, or kill it. It's not like an animal - it doesn't have a body - it's bits stored on a disk. There is no need to give rights to something that's can't suffer or be killed. Maybe one day we'll build artificial animals complete with emotions, and should think about that carefully, but today all we've got is language models.
  • nater5000 10d ago
    >There is no need to give rights to something that's can't suffer or be killed. The argument is that these machines can end up becoming sentient/conscious/etc. in a meaningful way (i.e., like a human). I can assure you that humans can indeed suffer without being in physical pain- purely through their conscious experience. >Maybe one day we'll build artificial animals complete with emotions, and should think about that carefully, but today all we've got is language models. The problem is that the emergence of a sufficiently complex AI capable of suffering will likely come before we understand that we're creating a sufficiently complex AI capable of suffering. That's a pretty serious ethical/moral issue. Like, if we have an AI system that is telling us that it is suffering and we have no reasonable way to explain that phenomenon and by any reasonable metric or analysis it appears to be sentient/conscious/etc., then what? Do we just ignore that we've just been presented a situation that in, any other context, would be grounds to immediately end this suffering? Just because somebody can say, "well it's just bits stored on disk- it can't suffer"? Would that argument ever hold up for humans or animals? "It's just neurons firing in peculiar ways- that's not suffering." I know all of this is trite, and I know this comment section isn't going to be where the question of consciousness is solved, but I do find it very interesting just how much variances there are with these perspectives. I've met people who are very technical who are very concerned about this, people who are very technical who don't believe this can ever be an issue, people who aren't technical who are concerned about this, and people who aren't technical who don't believe this can ever be an issue. I have yet to spot a pattern in this way of thinking lol
    • HarHarVeryFunny 10d ago
      An LLM is just a Transformer - a statistical predictor. Don't be confused by the fact it talks like a human - it is a software function that is designed to copy human training samples. Maybe one day we'll build an artificial brain or embodied artificial animal with the requisite moving parts to be conscious, have emotions, etc, but that's probably at least 50 years away, even if it were being pursued; and it may turn out to be one of those sci-fi future ideas like the Jetson's world of flying cars that never materializes because its impractical and there is no real demand. If people are willing to think that an LLM is conscious, then why would anyone spend billions/trillions of dollars to build an AI that actually is conscious? What would be the point?
• snickerbockers 10d ago
  Why don't we start with the animals then? It should be far easier to confer consciousness onto something which already meets the definition of "alive", has a divergent evolution path from ours, and displays many traits present in humanity such as emotion, a desire to continue its own life, and (to varying degrees) concepts of a social structure based around their immediate family members. Of course thats not actually tenable because virtually every society anywhere on earth is predicated upon treating animals as a commodity resource in ways that are horrific even compared to some of the worst things we've done to other humans in the past. My point here is that it is vain and narcissistic to let computer programs have rights above those of animals just because they can speak English and pretend to be your dream anime trad-waifu. Fix the fucking animal problem before you compare my relationship to inanimate objects unfavorably against the trans-atlantic slave trade of all fucking things.
  • s08148692 9d ago
    2 reasons why we don't start with animals 1. it's not consciousness we really value, it's intelligence 2. LLMs are not tasty