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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

#271

Post by xboxnolifes »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #143
sigmar wrote: post #66

>So what context would cause me to seriously consider the possibility that engineers had created a computer program that is conscious and an intentional user of language? Let me outline one potential sequence of steps. The first requirement is that the computer program has a body (either physical or virtual) and sense organs; there are many reasons for this, but for the purposes of this discussion the most relevant o…

The body itself has little effect on the mind other than the inputs from nerves and chemical and hormonal changes. These inputs are analogous to tokens and parameters for an LLM. You could theoretically reserve some tokens to be used as “physical” or “emotional” sensations that would affect the functioning of the model.

"Other than... chemical... changes" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The entire existence of your body is a continuous process of chemical reactions.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#272

Post by Taek »

RagnarD wrote: post #237

The analogy I make is between airplanes and birds. Birds are alive, are conscious, flap their wings, and fly. Planes are not alive, are not conscious, do not flap their wings - and fly. Similarly, current AIs are not alive, are not conscious - but think. All prior entities that thought, were human, so the only experience humans had with other thinking entities were other humans. The huge mistake now being made is ass…

Can you provide a precise definition of consciousness?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#273

Post by cmrdporcupine »

qarl wrote: post #214
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…

Any time I bump into a device that acts like a human I'm going to treat it like a human. Because treating things that act human inhumanely is not something I want to learn how to do.

This is in fact the danger with these human-simulating "AI"s we have now...

People get used to treating human-like, human emulating machines with either disrespect or in a command/control/master fashion, because that's the nature of the tooling.

And then potentially by extent/blurring of lines they then treat other people like machines.

Which is already a thing people do to other people.

I just fear it gets worse.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#274

Post by Taek »

krupan wrote: post #232
layer8 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people whose brains don’t form new memories anymore after an accident or surgery, and they eternally live in the time before it happened, and have no memory of what happened a minute ago. Still they are conscious.

They are conscious because even for short periods of time they do form memories and those change them even if only briefly. They think on their own too. It is a very limited level of consciousness though.

Is that any different from an LLM having a context window?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#275

Post by therealdrag0 »

RagnarD wrote: post #237

The analogy I make is between airplanes and birds. Birds are alive, are conscious, flap their wings, and fly. Planes are not alive, are not conscious, do not flap their wings - and fly. Similarly, current AIs are not alive, are not conscious - but think. All prior entities that thought, were human, so the only experience humans had with other thinking entities were other humans. The huge mistake now being made is ass…

Okay sure. But given we don’t know what consciousness comes from, we shouldn’t be too glib about there being a grey area here. Historically people have made racist and speciesist judgments towards other being by assuming certain inferiorities despite obvious “thinking” happenings.

I don’t know “what it’s like to be an LLM” but at some point it will be like something and how will we know?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#276

Post by yesitcan »

dmitshur wrote: post #196
empath75 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude once said to me: "After six months we have made no progress on this and I think we should reconsider another option" and I was like my dude we have been at this for only 2 hours.

Maybe time passes at a different rate for it, making it an easy "mistake" of not accounting for that for it to make.

Yes that’s it! The LLM is conscious but its sense of time flows differently from ours.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#277

Post by cauch »

maebert wrote: post #248

The conversation on AI and consciousness is incredibly relevant. It is incredibly frustrating that most commentators are utterly unfamiliar with over 60 years of inquiry into this in both philosophy and computer science. Start with a hand-wavy definition of consciousness. Move the goal post whenever your stated prerequisite of consciousness is reached and resort to unfalsifiable assertions about qualia. And throw in…

While I agree that a AI system is not just the LLM, for me, the problem is that LLM alone (the one from years ago, which were basically stateless LLM) are already too convincingly looking like real human conversation at first sight.

It shows that the LLM part found ways to mimic human conversation with a mechanism that is not the same as a typical biological brain. Then, you can push the AI system on adding things on top, but it is too late: these things on top will have no incentive to recreate from scratch the mechanism. The LLM pushed the system into a local minimum, and the rest of the system will not "go into a dis-optimising direction and restart from scratch".

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#278

Post by JoshTriplett »

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…

> How can you have a subjective experience without a body?

If every neuron of your brain were simulated precisely on a sufficiently powerful computer, that simulation would have subjective experiences, without having a body.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#279

Post by hn_acc1 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #268
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…

> 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.

Infinitely reproducible at 0 cost means people will be treated as disposable by the rich.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#280

Post by lugu »

If you want to think about this topic, you must define what AI is, and what consciousness is. Otherwise this is just noise.

So let take a stab at it, and you call me crazy.

AI: the entity/system that more or less pass the turning test. That is my definition, not the best, but enough for this discussion.

Consciousness: property of a system/entity able to (both): - reflect on its existence - subject to subjective experience

Again, not the best definition, but precise enough to start the discussion. Why a subjective experience? I want to exclude sensors (i.e. camera) but include perception altered by your experience.

Now we can debate. I think LLM can pass the turning test whith some harness. My opinion.

I think LLM can produce coherent discourses on their existence, at least as much as you average human.

Now regarding the subjective experience, that becomes interesting. I think Anthropic research tend to show that when middeling with the activation at runtime, the LLM is able to notice that something is off. I think this is a subjective experience. My opinion.

Based on those (imperfect) definitions, call me crazy, I think LLM can be called conscious. This doesn't give them any superpower or any legal right. They just check the boxes of the definition.

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