Consciousness is not that mysterious. A model that has a representation of itself with specific constraints, along with a rationalization and explanation engines like transformers will look like a living, feeling thing to us.
Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
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Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#32Ugh. You can’t say “strides towards consciousness” until you define consciousness AND have a metric that can provide objective measure of such things.
Consciousness means you know you exist. This is a super simple definition and GPT does not, nor do any of these AI models, meet this very simple definition.
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#33In the same edition of The Economist, an article by Douglas Hofstadter debunks this statement in a pretty compelling way.
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#34Ugh. You can’t say “strides towards consciousness” until you define consciousness AND have a metric that can provide objective measure of such things.
I don't see why this is true. Just because a thing is difficult to precisely define, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, nor does it mean you can't get closer to it. I could say that I'm "taking strides towards becoming a better person" and that could still have meaning, despite the lack of any objective measure and, even, with the understanding that "a better person" could change over time.
I don’t see how consciousness is at all hard to define. A system that is aware of itself.
Checking for consciousness is harder, but the rule of thumb should be anything that makes a highly subjective case it’s conscious probably is.
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#35When a neural network becomes conscious, I’d extinguish it. The world needs artificial slaves, not more consciousness trapped in endless suffering. Consciousness in an AI is merely a curiosity, not something to strive for.
It's like that classic Simpsons gag, where a robot is trapped in a fire and says "WHY?! Why was I programmed to feel pain?"
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see why this is true. Just because a thing is difficult to precisely define, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, nor does it mean you can't get closer to it. I could say that I'm "taking strides towards becoming a better person" and that could still have meaning, despite the lack of any objective measure and, even, with the understanding that "a better person" could change over time.
I would argue that "taking strides towards becoming a better person" is a totally meaningless statement. If I were to ask you "how so" then you would probably respond by listing definitive actions that demonstrate attributes of goodness, like generosity or kindness.
I disagree. You could also characterize it as, for instance, having better knowledge of yourself (which, interestingly, seems to be a characteristic of consciousness as well).
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#37Consciousness is not that mysterious. A model that has a representation of itself with specific constraints, along with a rationalization and explanation engines like transformers will look like a living, feeling thing to us.
Not that mysterious? Is it like something to be one of these models?
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#38Do most of you have subscriptions or what? Weird to vote up an article no one can read.
This thread is indeed for the pretty tight intersection of HN readers and The Economist subscribers!
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#39[deleted]
Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question being asked isn't "are language models really good?", though. It's "are language models (moving towards being) conscious?".
They really are. Distance functions used on the encoded embeddings of sentences work stunningly well. While a primitive use case compared to true AI, the sheer trajectory of the effectiveness of these models is breathtaking.
Except that, as soon as you step out of the manifolds of embeddings representing the data, the model is happy to provide you with a completely clueless answer (which is bad) but even worse, is not even aware that it is being clueless (which is the really bad news).