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Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea

nautil.us

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Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea

#211

Post by nobodyandproud »

kajaktum wrote: post #79

> We think we’re intelligent, know we’re conscious, and so assume the two go together. Excuse me, I know _I_ am conscious. There is literally nothing you can do to proof that there's anything outside of what I am conscious of. The world could be a very stable illusion, a dream, a simulation and it would all be the same. I don't understand why people think that it matters whether AI is conscious or not. We can't even…

Good old Descartes. At least for myself, some things hint (though not prove irrefutably) that there are or were consciousnesses other than my own.

There are some ideas, some questions, and some solutions that I would never think of.

Yet the information is there if I so choose to explore.

Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea

#213

Post by x86x87 »

What is consciousness?

Personally I am tired of all the snake AI salesmen trying to convince everyone that the singularity is around the corner.

I am not afraid of AGI and personally I think we are hundreds of years away from something like this, if it ever happens. I am afraid of people using AI as a way to justify crappy decisions and greed.

Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea

#214

Post by x86x87 »

byyyy wrote: post #143

I'm curious about the AI at Google that was claimed by a person who has since been fired to be conscious. I mean I know everyone was attacking him but in a way I suspect it's similar to a lot of the unreasonable dismissive attitudes towards chatGPT. We really can't say anything either way until we are able to access and play with that version of AI that Google is hiding. I believe it's called lambda? The point is tha…

lol. no.

As a thought experiment, I am going to challenge you to define what being conscious is. Go ahead, try it.

Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea

#215

Post by x86x87 »

Xcelerate wrote: post #13

I’ve thought about this quite a bit, and ultimately I think it’s not too much of a concern because by the point AI reaches “consciousness” (whatever that may be), it is likely that it will have also reached—or is very close to reaching—human intelligence. Once it has, it will probably go on to surpass our intelligence, at least by a little bit, which is enough to ensure that it will be able to acquire any rights that…

Intelligence does not exist in a void. If you distill it to the core, intelligence is about manipulating the environment in order to gain an advantage. You want to gain an advantage to maximize your chances of survival and reproduction.

To me: we cannot talk about intelligent without talking about the environment. Also being intelligent in an environment is worthless unless there is competition. Reproduction/replication is also key IMHO. No matter how intelligent you are entropy is going to take over eventually. Reproduction is life's way of cheating entropy.

Consciousness may be just an emergent property of really complex organisms. Everything may be intelligent and conscious to a certain degree.

Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea

#216

Post by adameasterling »

zvmaz wrote: post #3

There 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

I haven't heard of the idea of the "hard problem of consciousness" before, but after reading this Wikipedia article, it sounds like nonsense. Like, take this passage:

> For example, it is logically possible for a perfect replica of [David] Chalmers to have no experience at all, or for it to have a different set of experiences (such as an inverted visible spectrum, so that the blue-yellow red-green axes of its visual field are flipped).

A perfect replica? So you somehow make an exact copy of a person and his environment, down the last gluon, and play time forward, and you'd think that the two people might have different experiences?

No way. In every other situation, if you set up a system in the exact same way, you'll get the same outcome. (Yes, randomness can come into play, but the distribution of outcomes will be the same.)

I agree with this:

> The philosopher Thomas Metzinger likens the hard problem of consciousness to vitalism, a formerly widespread view in biology which was not so much solved as abandoned. Brian Jonathan Garrett has also argued that the hard problem suffers from flaws analogous to those of vitalism.[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism

Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea

#217

Post by byyyy »

skybrian wrote: post #208
byyyy wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>no program is running Not true. This is irrational. A program runs when you input a query and it generates a response. There is nothing that says consciousness must be always running. When you ask me a question and I answer it... In that time span of processing you're query all humans are conscious. Therefore it is a possibility that LLMs are too. What is obvious here is that the consciousness an AI exhibits because…

I think most people would say that when you don't experience time passing, you're not conscious at that time. (For example, when you're asleep and not dreaming.) It's pretty clear that a chatbot cannot experience time as we do. Also, it actually is the case that ChatGPT API calls are stateless. This means it can't have any extra short-term memory other than what's written down in the chat session. It doesn't forget w…

> I think most people would say that when you don't experience time passing, you're not conscious at that time. (For example, when you're asleep and not dreaming.) It's pretty clear that a chatbot cannot experience time as we do.

There is a time delta that occurs when LLMs processes input. The LLM does experience time in that sense in the same way you experience time when you process a query given to you by another person.

There isn't anything known to science that happens instantaneously. All processes and change go through a time delta.

>Also, it actually is the case that ChatGPT API calls are stateless. This means it can't have any extra short-term memory other than what's written down in the chat session. It doesn't forget what it wrote in a few minutes, for forgets it immediately.

If it remembers what's in the chat Session then that is in itself memory. Everyone is aware it forgets things between sessions, I never denied that. Either way, again, there are examples of humans who have shorter memories than a chat session. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterograde_amnesia

>I'm not sure what we should conclude from people who have severe memory problems? I've read about them, but I have hardly any direct experience. How about you?

You can look up the condition and even find a video about it. These humans exist and they are considered conscious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o79p1b1SGk4

Look at the video yourself. Do you think the subject (who has Anterograde amnesia) is not conscious? I don't think so. Thus the argument of memory is orthogonal to consciousness. It has nothing to do with it.

Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea

#218

Post by xjwm »

kajaktum wrote: post #79

> We think we’re intelligent, know we’re conscious, and so assume the two go together. Excuse me, I know _I_ am conscious. There is literally nothing you can do to proof that there's anything outside of what I am conscious of. The world could be a very stable illusion, a dream, a simulation and it would all be the same. I don't understand why people think that it matters whether AI is conscious or not. We can't even…

>What I am trying to say is, it doesn't matter if the subject is actually conscious. All that matter is we (I), feel/think that it is conscious, or deserving of care and respect.

The law of gravity is nonsense. No such law exists. If I think I float, and you think I float, then it happens.

Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea

#219

Post by billy_bitchtits »

"The dawn of conscious machines will introduce vast new potential for suffering in the world, suffering we might not even be able to recognize, and which might flicker into existence in innumerable server farms at the click of a mouse."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...

Re: Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea

#220

Post by haswell »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #206
cubefox wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat related, there are people who say aphantasia can be cured: https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/i-cured-my-aphantasia-wit...

Interesting. As an aphantasiac myself, I find it surprising that this person has such a negative perspective, wanting to "cure" his aphantasia. As far as I know, aphantasia has never had any meaningful negative impact on my life. We just think without mental images, but we can solve the same kind of problems as the rest. That's why most of us don't even find out that we are different until we read about it somewhere…

I do think the “cure” framing is a bit odd, but then started thinking back to my own initial discovery.

When I first learned this is a thing and realized that I have it, I initially started feeling like I’d been deprived of something. That this mode of experience was so absent in me that I couldn’t even imagine what other people actually meant when they talked about visualization, and this bothered me.

But over time my perspective shifted, and I stopped seeing it as a disability of some kind and instead as a different flavor of experiencing the world. To your point, I have linguistic strengths that are far more attuned than the strong visualizers I know. They come to me when they need something written. I go to them when I need advice about arranging my living room.

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