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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

#601

Post by rerdavies »

bronlund wrote: post #540
sega_sai wrote: post #425

When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of e…

I will argue that it is not that intelligent either. For the sake of argument, let's say intelligence is about brain processing power and intellect is about how much information you have retained. Then what they have created is more like Artificial Intellect than Artificial Intelligence :) Professors can be an absolute moron and someone who haven't read a book in their life, can be a total genius. People often miss t…

Not sure I follow the argument. Are you one of those people who have never read a book in their life?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#602

Post by starbugs »

sega_sai wrote: post #425

When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of e…

> When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious.

That's like saying if matter itself is not understood and well defined (which it isn't) in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if jumping from a skyscraper is or is not deadly.

A lot of practical aspects of life do not need to be properly defined as long as I can reasonably assume that your experience is similar to mine as a human being. Attributing that to a graphics card computing the next token deserves to be scrutinized.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#603

Post by suddenlybananas »

speak_plainly wrote: post #126
suddenlybananas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some historical examples of people moving the goalposts around consciousness? I agree, perhaps, for aspects of "intelligence" but I can't think of any examples of it with regard to consciousness proper.

There’s over 400 years of philosophical debate about consciousness starting with Locke, shifting with Kant, and continuing onward with real world implications throughout. By some more modern definitions an iPhone has consciousness while others explicitly exclude certain humans, and these definitions served as part of the justification of slavery and sexism, colonialism and more. I started writing an essay on this on…

I'm not questioning whether people have studied consciousness, I'm well aware. I'm talking specifically about moving the goal posts.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#604

Post by ijidak »

pickleRick243 wrote: post #559
the_af wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the whole point of the essay is that it's Anthropic that's making the argument (or roleplaying/hinting as if they believed it). Ted Chiang isn't making the argument, he's saying Anthropic making it is misleading and deceitful, and that it's actually a pointless thing to claim. One of the essay's stronger paragraphs is when Chiang explains that Anthropic doesn't truly believe this, otherwise what they are doing wo…

Does Anthropic claim that Claude's conscious? Isn't the argument more that we don't know? I recently rewatched "Measure of a Man" in Star Trek TNG and Picard's closing argument in Data's trial was quite memorable: PICARD: "Now, tell me, Commander, what is Data?" MADDOX: "I don't understand..." PICARD: "What is he?" MADDOX: "A machine!" PICARD: "Is he? Are you sure? You see, he's met two of your three criteria for sen…

I think of this episode as well. I can't believe, in my lifetime, we've reached the point where we can have this debate.

The current debate also makes me realize that, like that episode "Measure of a Man", even if humans do create sentient machines, we can now see that this debate will continue to rage.

A part of me hopes we never create sentience, because we will mistreat it just as we mistreat each other.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#605

Post by coldtea »

rickydroll wrote: post #505
dpweb wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The danger of anthropomorphism is not we elevate the machines, it's that we debase humanity. I also think different ideas get conflated. It may be possible to build a machine that is super-human in the sense it can outperform the human brain in all kinds of measurable ways. Does not imply it possesses all the same qualities of the brain. I respect a number of things Anthropic has published about the ethical issues at…

I think humanity deserves to be debased in part because it's awfully egocentric and insist on being special in the universe. There are numerous times when humanity's been debased. Copernicus, Kepler, Darwin, and the infinite number of animal behaviorists who have defined and documented consciousness And how it manifests in primates, parrots, dogs, cetaceans, and insects. (I just love the bumble bees taking time off f…

>I think humanity deserves to be debased in part because it's awfully egocentric and insist on being special in the universe.

It is special in the universe unless proven otherwise. Aside from the animal world (also on Earth too, anyway) which is a cruder version of humanity, much more violent as well, the rest of the universe thus far is just uncaring rocks and gases.

>It takes humans a really long time to accept the fact they are no longer as special as they thought they were And make room for yet another conscious intelligence.

A "really long time" is the few years we've built LLMs? Which we have to take for granted (on your word?) they're already "conscious", and chastice ourselves for not already "accepting it"?

>So, if we had an AI demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, how long would it take for you to accept that it is?

"If we had a parrot demonstrating symptoms of discussing with us, how long would it take for you to accept that it is?"

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#606

Post by iLoveOncall »

haktan wrote: post #586

I don't understand the most of the responses here. What does computers getting more intelligent has to do with it getting conscious? Even if AI with current computer architecture gets much more intelligent than humans, it will still have the same amount of consciousness. Its still bunch of instructions. If we got a lot of people together and did all the instructions by hand to get an LLM result would we also create t…

That's the "Chinese room" argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

It has been very well discussed before I don't understand how anyone sane can argue against it (and indeed you can see on Wikipedia that the replies to it are sparse and don't make any sense).

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#607

Post by tsukikage »

overgard wrote: post #475
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…

But the machines don't understand. They predict. And what they predict is the next token. I'm not trying to beat this horse to death, but you have to realize using the word "understand" is anthropomorphising it. It's essentially the chinese room experiment -- if the rules are followed, no understanding is neccessary . If the tokens didn't correlate to words imbued with meaning outside the system, if the LLMs were tra…

What does “understand” mean?

Turing complete systems can be built out of matrix multiplications, out of attention, out of key/value lookups. The Chinese room is Turing complete. By claiming it cannot understand things because it is built out of components computing devices can be built out of, we are claiming no computer can because no computer can. This is a very bold claim indeed, and also we’re assuming the conclusion! The claim is no more convincing than “brains cannot understand things because they are made out of neurons”. The system may or may not have some particular properties, but we have to do more work than just gesturing at the components the system is made of when making claims about it; the alternative is, at best, a world where we prove too much and conclude that humans, too, are not conscious.

For starters, we need to pin down the terms under discussion enough that they don’t just mean whatever we need them to in the moment.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#608

Post by hnfong »

haktan wrote: post #586

I don't understand the most of the responses here. What does computers getting more intelligent has to do with it getting conscious? Even if AI with current computer architecture gets much more intelligent than humans, it will still have the same amount of consciousness. Its still bunch of instructions. If we got a lot of people together and did all the instructions by hand to get an LLM result would we also create t…

It might reflect a prejudice of modern human society to think more highly of people who are intelligent, and think less of people who we deem stupid.

I'd say AI should not by default gain any social status as human-equivalent even if they become (in whatever regard) more intelligent than humans. But that would require us to drop the notion that intelligence ~= respectability/status/ability to have a full subjective experience.

Most of these kind of pseudo-philosophical controversies actually tell more about the issues with humanity than the new tech/stuff...

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#609

Post by MrScruff »

haktan wrote: post #586

I don't understand the most of the responses here. What does computers getting more intelligent has to do with it getting conscious? Even if AI with current computer architecture gets much more intelligent than humans, it will still have the same amount of consciousness. Its still bunch of instructions. If we got a lot of people together and did all the instructions by hand to get an LLM result would we also create t…

Do you believe consciousness to be an emergent property of the laws of physics?
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