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Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

theatlantic.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#11

Post by exe34 »

solid_fuel wrote: post #6

> We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category. Well said. I think it is obvious and it has been obvious from the start that next token predictors are not conscious. Of course the extremely predictable clapback from AI-psychosis enjoyers is typically "you're just a next token predictor too!…

> so obviously incorrect and misanthropic that it can be dismissed out of hand

To be fair, that's the best thought terminating cliché, which saves you having to explain what you mean by consciousness.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#12

Post by drooby »

solid_fuel wrote: post #6

> We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category. Well said. I think it is obvious and it has been obvious from the start that next token predictors are not conscious. Of course the extremely predictable clapback from AI-psychosis enjoyers is typically "you're just a next token predictor too!…

I get the sense that he is misidentifying the potential locus of consciousness..

In the same way that the sound waves and facial expressions I produce are not conscious, the output json of an LLM is obviously not conscious either.

The locus of consciousness and subjective experience may be in the computer, either at inference time or training time..

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#13

Post by kelseyfrog »

Edman274 wrote: post #9
kelseyfrog wrote: post #5

Consciousness is a label like fat, smart, man, grumpy, cool. Like money, property, or the idea of a week, it's something that we've loosely agreed to out of convenience, not because it's some intrinsic property of the mind. It's a useful label because it determines how we treat things - that's fine. But insisting on searching for it is like searching for cognitive aether. It's the social equivalent of phlogiston. Lik…

Do you believe in the existence of any noun words which serve as something other than a "useful label, loosely agreed to out of convenience"?

Like non-referential nouns?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#14

Post by Edman274 »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #13
Edman274 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe in the existence of any noun words which serve as something other than a "useful label, loosely agreed to out of convenience"?

Like non-referential nouns?

I'm not trying to be difficult, but could you give me an example?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#15

Post by oidar »

A person can certainly be conscious, but can they also be not-conscious? I think that most of our cognitive time is spent in activities that don't require consciousness and consciousness itself isn't needed for the majority of activities that people do. I would go so far as the a non-trivial part of people's time is spent in a not-conscious state.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#18

Post by atleastoptimal »

This makes sense. However there is an issue where many people conflate "consciousness" with the ability to make novel insights, think genuinely, etc. They use this to claim that since AI is not conscious, AI could never actually "think" and is instead just always a regurgitation of its training data.

It is a natural human hubris to make our abilities seem unquantifiable and mysterious, but all the useful things the human brain does are just finding patterns in data, running lossy simulations, and estimating on abstraction, all things it is theoretically possible for any non-conscious machine to do.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#19

Post by speak_plainly »

“Counsciousness” is the ultimate moving goalpost, and historically, it’s been one of humanity’s most effective intellectual weapons. An indefinable black box we intentionally gatekeep to draw an arbitrary line between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

I don’t know if AI is conscious or not, and I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious. historically, by claiming a monopoly on it, we’ve successfully manufactured the philosophical cover to exploit animals, subjugate other cultures, and appoint ourselves the top spot of the cosmic hierarchy guilt-free.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#20

Post by chinabot »

solid_fuel wrote: post #6

> We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category. Well said. I think it is obvious and it has been obvious from the start that next token predictors are not conscious. Of course the extremely predictable clapback from AI-psychosis enjoyers is typically "you're just a next token predictor too!…

I think its obvious that a few billion neurons connected together are not conscious either.. Yet!
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