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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

#151

Post by pasquinelli »

sdenton4 wrote: post #109
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…

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.

the subject is consciousness, not intelligence.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#152

Post by andoando »

sdenton4 wrote: post #142
lwarfield wrote: post #127

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. Damn, what a line! Another thing that bothered me with his baseline for consciousness was that it did not involve the ability to change one's self. A big part of being conscious in my mind is how one's experiences shape them, and how someone can shape themselv…

The thing is... Interactive updates happen, just in a different way than it does for animal brains. The system is updated with new training data more-or-less constantly. Suppose OpenAI (or whoever) collects a week's worth of conversations with up-thumbs and down-thumbs, or rewritten continuations from human operators, then fine-tunes the current version of ChatGPT with that data. That's an interactive update, and lea…

Yup, you could definitely take it offline (sleep) every night, update it and turn it back on.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#153

Post by [deleted] »

swatcoder wrote: post #75
throwaway713 wrote: post #22

Suppose one selects an arbitrary hot-button issue [X] with two opposing sides and one side has anything less than overwhelming support. And then that person writes an article titled "Side 1 of issue [X] is true". Not "maybe" or "possibly". Just a straight-up declaration by fiat. Would you categorize this particular style of rhetoric to be persuasive or annoying? And before you say "persuasive" because you're thinking…

> Would you categorize this particular style of rhetoric to be persuasive or annoying? Why are those the choices? Essays are situated along countless dimensions: tone, vocabulary, author, zeitgeist, publication context, intent, subtext, relationship to other works and expressions, etc A "good faith" reader takes all of those into consideration as they absorb the essay, and integrate it with their own intellectual sit…

[deleted]

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#155

Post by solid_fuel »

sdenton4 wrote: post #109
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…

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…

I think you're missing his point. It's not about the hormones and physics of our bodies, and indeed he specifically allows for "either physical or virtual" bodies even in the block ~~~you~~~ grandparent quoted.

The point here is not that it must have a body like ours, the point is that a conscious entity must have a boundary line between internal (the body) and external (everything else).

A virtual sense organ can simply be an encoder or a web camera or a magnetometer, the specifics don't matter, what matters is that there are only a few bridges between the outer world and the inner world.

Even if you want to call a tokenizer and autoencoder a "sense organ", LLMs are not embodied because there is no boundary line - there is no internal "thought" that is not directly descended from the prompt and there is no internal reasoning which is not immediately dumped into the external environment.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#156

Post by cluckindan »

>We and our 1255 technology partners ask you to consent to …

That’s a new record!

Also, please don’t use archive.is/archive.today etc, they are known to use visitor browsers as a DDoS attack botnet and have been caught altering archived content.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#157

Post by empath75 »

vmg12 wrote: post #88

People are constantly talking past eachother when they discuss this. Is there even a concrete definition of consciousness? When people talk about consciousness it's more than just self-awareness. It's self awareness + sensory stimulus + emotions + some level of intelligence. Now onto AI: I don't even think it's self aware. Notice how if you ask an AI to estimate how long a certain task will take, it estimates arbitra…

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.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#158

Post by ryanisnan »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #150

The argument about AI consciousness is largely silly. The idea that we should be considerate of AI’s happiness seems even more ridiculous given that we breed, imprison, torture and kill tens if not hundreds of billions of beings we know are conscious and suffer every year for trivial reasons. Maybe we should consider our moral responsibility with how we treat sentient bejngs we are sure are conscious before we worry…

I don't think that's a fair point at all.

Some humans do shit things to other humans.

Some humans do not, and would object to it, or do something about it if they perceived that they could.

Also, treating the world around you negatively doesn't just harm the world around you - it damages your character and your morality.

I don't disagree that humans should on whole do better, but I disagree with everything else you said.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#160

Post by elevaet »

eberkund wrote: post #112

Something I've found under discussed when it comes to artificial consciousness is how LLMs interact with the passage of time. I don't know exactly how to articulate this idea but don't see how something which takes an input, performs a calculation and stops can be considered conscious regardless of how life-like the responses end up being. I don't see context windows or the ability to reference a clock each time they…

I completely agree, and came here to say the same thing but thought I'd check if someone else mentioned it first. I also have a hard time articulating it, but my intuition is that it's more of a prerequisite than embodiment is. I've never seen a great rationale for why embodiment matters.
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