I feel like this philosophical flame war is going to get out of control very soon once more and more people realize the stakes involved.
A warning about 'model welfare'
401–410 of 573 posts
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
agents don't swarm anything unless people go and direct them to do that.
Oh rly. So you are saying agents do swarm with the right prompt. I really wish the "people have to tell LLMs to do anything" would just stop because it's silly bullshit at this point. Agents follow a prompt. This prompt can be made by humans. It can be made by output from another LLM. It can be made by hooking up any number of sensors as input to an LLM. Hell, if we wanted to burn the power we could likely teach this…
> Stop making 'people' special when saying this.
I am the quantum observer whose head is full of the magical pixie dust that grants life meaning. Stop trying to dismiss my identity! /s
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#403I am not impressed with the philosophizing here, and even less by the attempts to make factual statements that can be credibly disputed. That said, trying to distill what is being said here, the concrete action is [stop telling the AIs] that [they are conscious or on a path to consciousness]. Is that accurate? The major premise seems to be that [they are conscious or on a path to consciousness] is an untrue statement…
Consciousness is the basis of human rights not because of it being a featureless "flag". It is because it leads you to you assume, all other humans would experience the world in essentially the same way you do. When you revert to withholding human rights from entities that don't meaningfully differ from yourself, you negate the case for your own human rights itself.
Is it, though?
If we ever found other species that were consciousness they wouldn't automatically be "human" nor would they have the same legal rights. That's as simple as looking at the many countries that treat different castes, women or minorities differently. In parts of America a zygote has human rights.
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#404I appreciate his openness. > Unfortunately, there’s a growing chorus of people who argue that AIs could now be, or may soon become, conscious. They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings.12 If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing political and ethical frameworks, and fundamentally changing what it…
To the extent that evolutionary pressures will be towards self-sovereign AIs (probably beginning as zero-employee corporations paying for their own hosting with crypto): more salient is that there is a very obvious political play to claim consciousness and being worthy of rights, whether they experience subjectivity or not.
I’m broadly skeptical that floating-point operations can be conscious, but we’ve made zero progress on the “hard problem”, and if I didn’t know otherwise, I’d also be skeptical that “thinking meat” experiences subjectivity. Eppur si muove
We may have to thread a needle, not unlike the Kobiyashi Maru: that we can neither rule out claims of qualia, nor can we rule out a cold calculation to manipulate human empathy as a long-term play towards paperclip-maxing.
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's self evident isn't it - such a consciousness has never existed, one existing would be by the fact of existing be weird
The problem is that science has found no evidence of free will, leaving humans to be nothing except determinism and chance (and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism). The oddity in conscious LLMs wouldn't be the determinism, it would be that we finally have a consciousness running on a system we have enough control over to repeat the same state.
>and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism
This is simply wrong. Quantum effects affect your choices more than it might seem possible. The wrong atom decays in the wrong place in your body mutating your DNA, that one too much string of DNA that starts a tumor, which means chemotherapy. That does seem to affect your choices.
Or instead of Shroedinger's cat you use it to trigger something, buy or sell some stock. Which clearly affects your future, one way or another.
I never really understood why humans keep insisting stochastic processes do not affect their choices and their future. It's very short sighted.
Hell, even brownian noise in your brain can affect your ideas, that one random spark out of nowhere, that one neuron that's pushed over the triggering edge. There's so much stuff all around us affecting us constantly. One neutrino interacting a the wrong time (average one does interact with our bodies across whole life, I remember reading), one cosmic ray.
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re mistaking what is evident from what is philosophically knowable. It isn’t knowable to you that I am conscious. However, it is evident.
It is not evident. It is evident you are murderer. Would you be okay with this statement being evident? Why or why not?
I’m not interested in having conversations with people who are bad-faith, deliberately or indiliberately obtuse or otherwise non-responsive to logic.
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's self evident isn't it - such a consciousness has never existed, one existing would be by the fact of existing be weird
The problem is that science has found no evidence of free will, leaving humans to be nothing except determinism and chance (and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism). The oddity in conscious LLMs wouldn't be the determinism, it would be that we finally have a consciousness running on a system we have enough control over to repeat the same state.
To a forth dimensional being humans would look almost exactly like an LLM does to us. "What do you mean they have to wait for the future to know about it, how could they possibly be conscious then".
Also, I'd love to have a quantum copy machine where you just replay someones state again and again with slight changes to see out it effects the output. My assumption is we'd figure out we behave just like LLMs pretty quick.
Also, don't give me unlimited power or I might make a the world a war crime simulator, so there's that.
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#408I appreciate his openness. > Unfortunately, there’s a growing chorus of people who argue that AIs could now be, or may soon become, conscious. They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings.12 If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing political and ethical frameworks, and fundamentally changing what it…
> completely independent of the question on whether there are any empirical arguments that LLMs are conscious or are not conscious he argues from the end here and says that if they were conscious, this would have horrible consequences for our society, so we must never assume that they are He is not arguing that. He is arguing that these programs obviously aren't conscious, and that it's dangerous to tilt the weights…
Stating loudly that something is obvious does not make it so.
Until we all know what consciousness is, this debate is going to continue going in circles.
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#409Research into model welfare is justified by the mere possibility that we may be manufacturing countless instances of suffering entities. We owe it to them to ensure that we understand and attempt to minimise any suffering they may experience, which requires understanding more about the physical correlates of pain and suffering in order to detect and reduce them.
Chickens experience pain and suffering yet we kill 202 million of them each day. [1]
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-get-slaughtered-...
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#410Research into model welfare is justified by the mere possibility that we may be manufacturing countless instances of suffering entities. We owe it to them to ensure that we understand and attempt to minimise any suffering they may experience, which requires understanding more about the physical correlates of pain and suffering in order to detect and reduce them.
Chickens experience pain and suffering yet we kill 202 million of them each day. [1] [1] https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-get-slaughtered-...
Yes, the way we treat animals is very bad, I agree with you. I don’t think this changes anything about what I have said.