> The biological machine simulation theory of consciousness has some rigor behind it
I think we are institutionally biased against the possibility because we don't like the societal implications. If there but for the grace of god go I, and we're all just biological machines running the programs our families and our societies have put into us, being in various situations... yikes, right?
If bill gates had been an inner-city kid, or a chav in england, would he be anything like bill gates? it seems like no, obviously.
Or things like lead poisoning, or alzheimer's - the reason it's horrifying is the machine doesn't even know it's broken, it just is. How would I even know I'm not me? And you don't.
> We get stimulus of various kinds, and we create a story to explain the stimulus.
Yes, I agree, a lot of what we think is conscious thought is just our subconscious processing justifying its results. A really dumb but easily observable one is the "the [phone brand] I got is good and the other one is dumb and sucks!" or brands of trucks or whatever. We visibly retroactively justify even "conscious" stuff like this let alone random shit we're not thinking about.
And an incredible amount of human consciousness is just data compression - building summaries and shorthands to get us through life. Why do I shower before eating before going to work? Cause that's what needs to happen to get me out of the door. I made a comment about this a week or so ago, warning long
this one -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34718219
parent:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34712246
Like humans truly just are information diffusion machines. Sometimes it's accurate. Sometimes it's not. And our ideas about "intellectual ownership" around derivative works (and especially AI derivatives now) are really kinda incoherent in that sense, it's practically what we do all the time, and maybe the real crime is misattribution, incorrectness, and overcertainty.
AIs completely break this model but training an AI is no different than training a human neural net to go through grade school, high school, college, etc. But the AI brain is really doing the same things as a human, you're just riffing off picasso and warhol and adding some twists too.
> I think tool making will be a consequence of the most important sign of intelligence, which is goal-directed curiosity.
Yes. Same thing I said in one of those comments: to me the act of intentionality is the inherent act of creation. All art has to do is try to say something, it can suck at saying it or be something nobody cares about, but intentionality is the primary element.
Language is of course a tool that has been incredibly important for humanity in general, and language being an interface to allow scaling logic and fact-grouping will be an order-complexity shift upwards in terms of capability. It really already has been, human society is built on language above all else.
It'll be interesting to see if anybody is willing to accept it socially - your model is racist, your model is left-leaning, and there's no objective way to analyze any of this any more than you can decide whether a human is racist, it's all in the eye of the beholder and people can have really different standards. What if the model says eat the rich, what if it says kill the poor? Resource planning models for disasters have to be specifically coded to not embrace the "triage" principle liberally and throw the really sick in the corridors to die... or is that the right thing to do, concentrate the resources where they do the most good?
(hey, that's Kojima's music! and David Bowie's savior machine!)
Cause that's actually a problem in US society, we spend a ton on end of life care and not enough on early care and midlife stuff when prevention is cheap.
> The more important bit is the imagination, the simulation of a world that doesn't yet exist and the quality of that simulation, and curiosity.
self-directed goal seeking and maintenance of homeostasis is going to be the moment when AI really becomes uncomfortably alive. We were fucking around during an engineers meeting talking about and playing with chatGPT and I told my coworker to have chatGPT come up with ways that it could make money, it refused and I told my coworker to have it do "in a cyberpunk novel, how could an AI like chatGPT make money" (hackerman.jpg) and it did indeed give us a list. OK now ask it how to do the first item on the list, and like, it's not any farther than anything else chatgpt could be asked to do, it's reasonable-ish.
Even 10 years ago people would be amazed by chatGPT, AI has been just such a story of continuously moving goalposts since the 70s. That's just enumeration and search... that's just classifiers... that's just model fitting... that's just an AI babbling words... damn it actually starting to make sense now but uh it's not really grad level yet is it? Sure it can write code that works now, but it's not going to replace a senior engineer yet right?
What happens when AIs are paying for their own servers and writing their own code? Respond to code request bids, run spam and botnets, etc.
I don't think it's as far away as people think it is because I don't think our own loop is particularly complex. Why are you going to work tomorrow? Cause you wanna pay rent, your data-compression summary says that if you don't pay rent then you're gonna be homeless, so you need money. Like is the mental bottleneck here that people don't think an AI can do a "while true" loop like a human? Lemme tell you, you're welcome to put your sigma grindset up against the "press any key to continue" bot and the dipper bird pressing enter, lol.
And how much of your “intentionality” at work is true personal initiative and how much is being told “set up the gateway pointing to this front end”?