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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

#251

Post by dyauspitr »

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…

Who cares about consciousness. Consciousness and AGI can be mutually exclusive.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#252

Post by jvanderbot »

Waterluvian wrote: post #234
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…

What is the connection between scarcity and consciousness?

A loose one. In nature consciousness is very scarce and therefore special. The more human the consciousness the more we probably naturally react to it. And the closer to us it is, even more so.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#253

Post by pixelpoet »

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…

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#254

Post by cauch »

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 tons of data pattern that LLM can learn from to be able to reproduce a sentence continuation that is convincing without having to learn the specific mechanism that is "conscious".

For me, one element that shows it is the case is the absence of world model (or "human-like" world model) despite the fact that the sentence continuation is convincing. If indeed the only way to produce sentence continuation convincingly would be by "simulating a brain", then it would not explain the first LLM from several years ago (before the extra layers of RLHF, ...). They were able to have quite convincing conversation on a lot of non-trivial aspect, and yet failed on some aspects that should have been basic for a system that would have been trained to work like a human brain. It shows that it is possible to "cleverly disguise examples of sentence continuation" without having to build elements that one expect on a conscious being.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#255

Post by stitched2gethr »

ycui7 wrote: post #231

does it really matter if LLM has conscious? if they produce working code, then it is useful, whoever if they have real conscious of fake intelligence. we don't know what the conscious in human brain is either.

Without saying that I think LLMs are alive, I do think it matters. I have personally been cruel to an LLM in ways that would make me ashamed if I suddenly understand that it had feelings.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#256

Post by micromacrofoot »

layer8 wrote: post #111
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…

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 still have memory, just not new ones - they lived experiences

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#257

Post by felipeerias »

lwarfield wrote: post #127
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. 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…

A stronger version of that argument is that LLMs are not intrinsically affected by the passage of time.

Input stream comes in, input stream comes out. The LLM doesn't care whether this happens once a minute or once a year.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#258

Post by Waterluvian »

lupire wrote: post #250
why_at wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It asks important questions. It's not so presumptuous as to try to answer them conclusively.

In fact I think the conclusion it comes to is the one that people, especially the smart ones, so easily miss: we don't know the answer. It might be that we can't know the answer. But ignorance is not a defense.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#259

Post by jvanderbot »

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.

I'm not. You're right. Some animals are property to be traded and used to support human life. I should separate companion animals and the rest.

If you believe sanctity of all life is a solution, then I'm curious what you believe the problem is that such a belief solves.

I bet it's circularly defined as justifying the preservation of sacred nonhuman life? I'm not trying to be provocative just curious.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#260

Post by computably »

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.

Presumably they meant that they'd sacrifice some material value for some animals, not that every animal on Earth has infinitely more value than inanimate goods.

> infinities cannot be compared

That's either a mathematically illiterate assumption or a very strange philosophical hill to die on.

> some tragedies cannot be averted

Sure. The question is what to do about the ones that can be averted.

> some decisions are impossible to make

> and "prioritization" is a distraction that forces choices when choices are not strictly necessary.

Again, the question is what choices to make when you can (arguably must) make them. Saying they're impossible is just refusing to take responsibility. You either do something, or you don't.

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