Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea
nautil.us
Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea
1–10 of 310 posts
Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea
#2Kurzgesagt has a video about the origin of consciousness
Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea
#3There are certainly a lot of people who have given much thought about AI and consciousness, but how can we talk about sentient machines when we clearly do not understand consciousness in us, human beings[1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea
#4> Our minds haven’t evolved to deal with machines we believe have consciousness.
Neither has evolved to drive cars, fly planes, or build space rockets. If you start proving a point based on what evolution has done, your reasoning is flawed.
Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea
#5Curious how long until we have ai rights activists.
Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea
#6> Although precise definitions are hard to come by, intuitively we all know what consciousness is.
This is the key problem. To me it looks like most of this article is conflicted about what the definition exactly is:
- basic conscious experiences such as pleasure and pain might not require much species-level intelligence at all
- [there will come] a point at which they also become aware—at which the inner lights come on for them
Based on the text, I don't think I understand what the author believes being concious is. I also don't think this argument will advance further until we start defining precisely what we mean.
Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea
#7All this junk alarmism being given relevance is just an attempt to regulate computing and create a cartel benefitting from a State imposed monopoly.
This is a recurring event in the history of all industries, we have not found a way to stop it.
If you don't gain anything from destroying other people"s freedom, don't play into their propaganda and fake worry.
Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea
#8There are certainly a lot of people who have given much thought about AI and consciousness, but how can we talk about sentient machines when we clearly do not understand consciousness in us, human beings[1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
That's part of the reason to be wary about the possibility that our AI models may become conscious.
Most people happily dismiss the idea that a GPT-like model can be conscious, but the truth is that we don't know practically anything about how consciousness arises in living beings that are more similar to us and that we have been coexisting with for thousands of years. We don't even know how to tell if such a being is conscious or not (most would agree that a dog is conscious and a bacterium is not, but what about a mouse? A mosquito? A tardigrade? Where is the limit?). It takes a lot of hubris to make claims about if and when AI models can become conscious, with what we know right now.
Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea
#9Some pretty sloppy definitions and a faulty assertion right out of the gate. I’d argue it’s plainly obvious that humans are adapted to living in a world populated by conscious objects, we already treat inanimate objects as if they had personality and intent. If we came across one that actually did have a mind we’d immediately know how to interact with it as long as we could communicate. As for that definition of consciousness as that which goes away under anesthesia or when we sleep, just look into the varying states and gradations of awareness that occur all the time during those processes. We’re not a single light bulb that just turns on and off. They also ignore the all important self awareness aspect for some reason. This type of badly framed argument isn’t worth your time to read.
Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea
#10“Conscious AI” would have to be “conscious like us”: having been assessed to be fundamentally human in self-awareness, agency, thinking and understanding (much more than octopi or great apes for example), shared cultural baggage, ways of learning, and so on. This is because between “conscious in a different way” and “conscious like us”, for all intents and purposes, the latter is the only one we can recognize and reason about. (As a close-to-home example, modern human is known to not care that e.g. animals or plant systems could be conscious in some different ways, it was not a concern so far so it’s not like we are going to start to care.) “Conscious in a different way” can matter, but some pretty mainstream philosophical assumptions would have to be turned upside down first.
Personally, in part due to the above, I don’t think “conscious AI” is a theoretical possibility in foreseeable future (and while it remains a simple inhuman tool, incidentally and tangentially but importantly, the excuse of “learning” cannot waive copyright protections: if there is no human doing the learning in there, it is nothing more than scraping original works in order to create derivatives).
However, if it were to happen, bad or not, “conscious AI” should spell the end of the industry which hinges on its exploitation (for all our faults, we tend to abhor blatant abuse of our fellow thinking human beings).