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Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

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Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#261

Post by [deleted] »

pizzly wrote: post #227
gabrieledarrigo wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions. How can you have a subjective experience without a body? That's the point, in my opinion: your physical/chemical state (body) in a given moment is then translated into the higher abstraction of the emotion. An emotion that *you* feel, because you are self awa…

How can you have a subjective experience without a body? Some anecdotal data. Many dreams I have are just of the computer screen of some coding problem. I think the problem could be x, so I try x. But I don't type the keyboard or anything, the code just magically appears as soon as I think of the solution. Then run the code (but no clicking) and it works or not. I feel in the dream success feeling or failure feeling…

[deleted]

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#262

Post by thangalin »

cout wrote: post #172
martin1975 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easily one of my top 10 favorite episodes. The judge broached on the subject of what makes us distinct from Data (e.g. machines w/great heuristics) - the existence of a soul. Or rather, I'd like to think, in the words of CS Lewis, that we are a soul with bodies attached.

How would someone know whether one has a soul or not? Is there any sort of introspection that can reveal the presence of a soul or any of its properties?

[dead]

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#263

Post by nkrisc »

lupire wrote: post #238
jvanderbot wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about this from the other end. It cannot be considered a conscious being. There just isn't a world in which we should start to think of a machine using ethics we reserve for humans. AI is essentially infinitely reproducible at zero cost, and won't suffer from decay etc. There's not scarcity to preserve. So, I'd turn off an AI in a moment to save property or real possessions or money. I'd sacrifice property an…

Are you a vegan? If not, then your comment's claim is false. Anyway, the deeper solution is to acknowledge that all life is sacred, and infinities cannot be compared, and some decisions are impossible to make, and some tragedies cannot be averted, and "prioritization" is a distraction that forces choices when choices are not strictly necessary.

We can choose to draw the lines wherever we want. I firmly draw the line such that AI is never equal to a human.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#264

Post by lupire »

gabrieledarrigo wrote: post #147
sdenton4 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions. Is a car a body? Does an AI situated in a car therefore get to have desires and emotions? Is a taupe box with a webcam attached a body? (For that matter: Is a quadropelegic body a body? Do quadropelegics have desires and emotions? Obviously, yes and yes.) Why i…

> Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions. How can you have a subjective experience without a body? That's the point, in my opinion: your physical/chemical state (body) in a given moment is then translated into the higher abstraction of the emotion. An emotion that *you* feel, because you are self awa…

Every computer/program I have ever used has a body and sensors (afferent)and actuators (efferent).

So I have no idea what distinction Ted Chiang is trying to draw

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#265

Post by micromacrofoot »

adverbly wrote: post #245

I really take issue with the kind of argument that is used here. This is not a genuine argument and tries to make the entire question of consciousness into one something that is just supposed to be evident and obvious and to suggest anything else is just silly. The author starts by deconstructing artificial processes, but doesn't stop to deconstruct biological ones. A good faith argument would seek to find common gro…

everyone has emotion even if it's muted, and we have reactions and desires as a result of having bodies and remembered experiences using them... these are constantly integrated into our working memories

AI doesn't really have any of that yet, but we're maybe not so far off

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#266

Post by jordanb »

why_at wrote: post #200
Waterluvian wrote: post #164

I think about Star Trek: TNG’s “Measure of a Man” a lot lately. We can be so confident to decide what is and isn’t alive from vibes alone. The conclusion I’m currently at is that I don’t know and probably can’t ever know. Maybe you’re all philosophical zombies. Maybe I am one too! But at some point we will get close enough that it hopefully becomes obvious that we must tread carefully. The entire episode is incredibl…

I'm a big fan of Star Trek but I recently rewatched this one in the context of recent AI developments and it's not as good as I remember it. They barely touch on the issues of consciousness, Picard basically says "What if Data is conscious?" and then goes off on a tangent. The judge eventually rules in Data's favor but doesn't give much of a justification IMO. It's still a good episode, but it doesn't add much to the…

The fact that they sent Data to starfleet academy, gave him a commission in the starfleet, let him attain the rank of Lieutenant Commander, and then decide that actually he's a machine that can be dismantled seems like quite a turn.

Does the ship's computer have a commission?

It was a good episode but it had some elements of Star Trek tropes in it, like the evil admirals and Picard can talk his way out of anything.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#267

Post by adverbly »

ares623 wrote: post #215

Lots of comments about "what even is consciousness". This article and others like it are important. The creators and owners of these tools are the ones saying "it's conscious" in the first place! (or more accurately "i'm not saying it's conscious, but...") Never mind there's billions of dollars and our collective futures on the line. Are we not allowed to respond to that kind of rhetoric at all?

> The creators and owners of these tools are the ones saying "it's conscious" in the first place! (or more accurately "i'm not saying it's conscious, but...")

This is absolutely fair. It's crazy that these companies are not trying to do more to qualify nuance and give clearer definitions in their public messaging. Part of the reason this thread is so messy is because they are contributing to making the discourse worse with bad messaging.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#268

Post by JoshTriplett »

jvanderbot wrote: post #220
Waterluvian wrote: post #164

I think about Star Trek: TNG’s “Measure of a Man” a lot lately. We can be so confident to decide what is and isn’t alive from vibes alone. The conclusion I’m currently at is that I don’t know and probably can’t ever know. Maybe you’re all philosophical zombies. Maybe I am one too! But at some point we will get close enough that it hopefully becomes obvious that we must tread carefully. The entire episode is incredibl…

I think about this from the other end. It cannot be considered a conscious being. There just isn't a world in which we should start to think of a machine using ethics we reserve for humans. AI is essentially infinitely reproducible at zero cost, and won't suffer from decay etc. There's not scarcity to preserve. So, I'd turn off an AI in a moment to save property or real possessions or money. I'd sacrifice property an…

> AI is essentially infinitely reproducible at zero cost, and won't suffer from decay etc.

I hope the same becomes true of people, and that doesn't mean people stop being sapient.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#269

Post by Nevermark »

cauch wrote: post #254
Nevermark wrote: post #194

> My intention is to highlight the fact that LLM conversations are cleverly disguised examples of sentence continuation Regardless of bigger issues, this kind of statement reveals a deep misunderstanding. Problem type does not limit problem complexity. Nor does problem type limit solution complexity or power. If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do. And there is…

I think, for me, the thing is that when you do basic ML, you discover that ML will very often find data pattern that fit the goal but does not correspond to a real mechanism. So, I think there is a flaw in the logic of saying that human text have a pattern of "consciousness mechanism" and therefore LLM will learn "consciousness mechanism" in order to return sentence continuation that is convincing. There is probably…

I didn't make the claim that a model can learn consciousness.

Understanding is not consciousness.

Their training is all about understanding. There is nothing in their architecture or training that credibly optimizes for rich self-awareness.

Given non-persistent experience, non-continuous operation, no ability to build up generalizations and aggregate experience of their own self-awareness over time, they seem to be structurally designed to not have consciousness.

This is a case where acting is very credible. Understanding of other's consciousness, in a functional and third party sense, isn't a substrate for personal experience.

In stark contrast, humans develop consciousness gradually over continuous time with persistent aggregation of experience. By the time we can recognize our own consciousness in the abstract, and reason about it, we have had it for some time.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#270

Post by yesitcan »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #104

The fact that a LLM is essentially immutable would be my biggest argument against consciousness or self-awareness. It's a big file with a bunch of coordinates describing spatial relationships between tokens. When you give it a prompt, it uses those relationships to generate a string of tokens that is a statistically likely response to that prompt, then it stops. It's not changed by the experience. It doesn't remember…

But you could argue the brain is just a bunch of coordinates describing spatial relationships between tokens too.

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