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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

#331

Post by [deleted] »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #298
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 would maybe agree with you if the entire realm of human existence was limited to words. There are many human experiences that transcend text, and indeed can hardly be adequately described using text. Sure, it's the best we have online, but that does not make "the internet" the sum of all human experience. To reduce all of humanity down to the text on the internet is reducing us to the level of machines to fit the r…

[deleted]

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#336

Post by BLKNSLVR »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #298
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 would maybe agree with you if the entire realm of human existence was limited to words. There are many human experiences that transcend text, and indeed can hardly be adequately described using text. Sure, it's the best we have online, but that does not make "the internet" the sum of all human experience. To reduce all of humanity down to the text on the internet is reducing us to the level of machines to fit the r…

In the life of humanity, text has only existed a relatively short time.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#337

Post by scotty79 »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #18

This makes sense. However there is an issue where many people conflate "consciousness" with the ability to make novel insights, think genuinely, etc. They use this to claim that since AI is not conscious, AI could never actually "think" and is instead just always a regurgitation of its training data. It is a natural human hubris to make our abilities seem unquantifiable and mysterious, but all the useful things the h…

> people conflate "consciousness" with the ability to make novel insights, think genuinely, etc.

The funniest thing is that LLMs will lap people in those capacities way before people who think like that accept that they might be conscious.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#338

Post by hn_acc1 »

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…

If you feed the same prompt to the same AI with the same random seed, you'll get the same answer every time.

If a hundred people see the same event, will they all respond the same?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#339

Post by kirrent »

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…

There are birds that go far longer than typical aeroplane flight times without a single flap of their wings either using thermal, ridge, or other sources of lift. Are these flying birds? I've shared thermals with eagles flying the same circles, neither one of us flapping our wings but making minor adjustments for the same goal.

An albatross might be able to go days flying without a single wing flap and no vertical sources of lift by using dynamic soaring in the wind gradient at the surface of the ocean. Perhaps that's something only birds can do. Except the glider pilot Ingo Renner once found an amazing shear layer at 300m altitude and stayed there with dynamic soaring. Remote control gliders use the lee of ridgelines to approach Mach 1 with dynamic soaring.

Perhaps what defines a bird that flies as opposed to a plane is that a bird produces thrust by flapping its wings? Even an Albatross must flap its wings if it has to take-off from water. Maybe we could add that the flapping is driven by animal muscles? But then is the human powered ornithopter Snowbird a bird that flies as opposed to a plane?

Of course this is all ridiculous because everyone knows what you mean when you refer to a bird or plane. We have other ways to definitively identify the difference rather than their mode of flight. It's trickier when I'm asked if an AI is conscious. There is no definitive base-line to fall back on to decide if this is a conscious or conscious-less thinker.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#340

Post by scotty79 »

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…

What if somebody simulated all neurons of a bird and fed them appropriate stimuli? Would a bird neural replica be conscious? It would flap, that's for sure.
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