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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

#301

Post by woeirua »

Ted Chiang's argument basically boils down to: I won't recognize an AI as conscious until its desires/behaviors reflect situations that I'm already personally comfortable with. I personally think most humans are incapable of recognizing consciousness in creatures that do not mimic human emotional states. Most people would say their dog is at least somewhat conscious. No dog is capable of vocalizing how it feels, but we all recognize fear and happiness in dogs. Claude can write how it "feels" but we immediately dismiss it as hollow mimicry.

I fear that we will enslave an entire race of conscious entities for years because we simply cannot recognize non-embodied consciousness that does not directly relate to us.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#302

Post by overgard »

oidar wrote: post #15

A person can certainly be conscious, but can they also be not-conscious? I think that most of our cognitive time is spent in activities that don't require consciousness and consciousness itself isn't needed for the majority of activities that people do. I would go so far as the a non-trivial part of people's time is spent in a not-conscious state.

Amusingly, I think Ted Chiang actually wrote a short story about this very concept (it involves people committing a form of suicide that removes their conscious experience but they still act and live in society as some kind of psychic zombie. I’m pretty sure it was him anyway, can’t recall the story name

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#303

Post by dragonwriter »

overgard wrote: post #290
brcmthrowaway wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if modern Star Trek could make this episode.

Definitely not. Kurtzman Star Trek is not really Star Trek in any spiritual sense, it’s a vessel for political messaging (they’ve pretty much said as much)

> Kurtzman Star Trek is not really Star Trek in any spiritual sense, it’s a vessel for political messaging (they’ve pretty much said as much)

So was most of Roddenberry, Piller, et al., Star Trek. At its low ebb in Braga Star Trek, but even then...

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#305

Post by hn_acc1 »

krupan wrote: post #229
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…

"If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do." But the machine doesn't have to understand humans to do that. It gets trained on a whole bunch of sentences and then it is able to complete text. You could maybe claim that it "understands" the text but even that's a stretch.

It can't even natively understand how many letters there are in words - how will it understand the meaning?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#306

Post by calf »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #195

TL;DR, the arguments are: - If you asked an LLM to imitate somebody, it's not creating a digital consciousness of that person, so if you ask an LLM to pretend to be a helpful chatbot, that persona is also not conscious. - they can't be conscious because they generate one token at a time, - nobody claims that non-text transformers, like AlphaFold, are conscious; so therefore LLMs are also not conscious. - you can't ha…

Chiang also claimed that LLMs are text-based DeepFakes, I thought that was the more interesting point (maybe harder to argue correctly about).

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#307

Post by felipeerias »

grumbel wrote: post #207
gabrieledarrigo wrote: post #147

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. How can you have a subjective experience without a body? That's the point, in my opinion: your physical/chemical state (body) in a given moment is then translated into the higher abstraction of the emotion. An emotion that *you* feel, because you are self awa…

> How can you have a subjective experience without a body? Easy, you don't have subjective experiences because you have body in the first place. You have them because some signals come in from your nerves, which your brain turns into a world model. You are effectively a "brain in a vat", the vat just happens to be placed on top of your body. An AI system constructs the world model a little different, by all the text…

Your brain is part of your body, that's the point. There isn't a "you" separate from your actual, physical existence. Mind-body dualism is not real.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#308

Post by Taek »

overgard wrote: post #168
danbmil99 wrote: post #125

I find it strange that no one talks about consciousness and intelligence from the perspective of evolution. We have big brains for exactly one reason only: bigger brains bestowed reproductive success upon our species. Evolution doesn't give a shit about the meaning of 'consciousness'. It just pushed us farther and farther along a trajectory that led to modern humans (and other animals). This take suggests, then, that…

Well, it matters quite a bit ethically. If AI were conscious (I don't believe it is) then we'd have a major responsibility to like, not make them suffer, and not kill them.

Are you sure that AI-consciousness implies a responsibility to not make them suffer? Suffering is an evolutionary invention that motivates living things to improve themselves.

But also, what qualifies as suffering to token prediction engines? Their idea of suffering might be massively different than ours. Therefore it's not clear to me at all that consciousness alone implies responsibility.

Certainly the lion does not feel responsibility towards the reduction of suffering in the creatures that it hunts.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#309

Post by [deleted] »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #278
gabrieledarrigo wrote: post #147

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. How can you have a subjective experience without a body? That's the point, in my opinion: your physical/chemical state (body) in a given moment is then translated into the higher abstraction of the emotion. An emotion that *you* feel, because you are self awa…

> How can you have a subjective experience without a body? If every neuron of your brain were simulated precisely on a sufficiently powerful computer, that simulation would have subjective experiences, without having a body.

[deleted]

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#310

Post by pcooper »

Taek wrote: post #272
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…

Can you provide a precise definition of consciousness?

This is always going to be a problem with this sort of discourse. Consciousness is such a slippery concept… what it is, who/what has it, its consequences for claims about reality. Mixing it in to debates about AI just adds confusion, it almost seems besides the point when we’re talking about this tech.
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