Technology

There is still no good definition for what "consciousness" is

Tech writers are constantly overreaching because they're afraid to miss out on being the first to say something

The constant sensationalism just means that if something really happens, people will ignore it because we're sick of hearing people cry "wolf!"

Add to that the fact that computery types like to overextrapolate into other things because it fuels their fantasies, and it's all bullshit and overactive imaginations

The problem I see so often with smart computer people is that they don't understand that they don't know shit about other things

Consciousness requires contemplation of self. Which requires the ability to contemplate.

Current AIs function as mainly complex algorithms that are run when invoked. They are 100% not conscious any more than a^2^+b^2^=c^2^ is conscious. AI can simulate the words of a conscious being, but they don't come from any awareness of internal state, but are a result of the prompt (including injected data and instructions).

In the future, I'm sure an AI could be designed that spends time thinking about its own existence, but I'm not sure why anyone would pay for all the compute to think about things not directly requested.

I don't believe that consciousness strictly exist. Probably, the phenomenon emerges from something like the attention schema. Ai exposes, I think, the uncomfortable fact that intelligence does not require a soul. That we evolved it, like legs with which to walk, and just as easily as robots can be made to walk, they can be made to think.

Are current LLMs as intelligent as a human? Not any LLM I've seen, but give it 100 trillion parameters instead of 2 trillion and maybe.

But surely in order to “feel things” you would need a nervous system right? When you feel pain from touching something very hot, it’s your nerves that are sending those pain signals to your brain… right?

On that case, on our meatsacks, yes. But there's also emotional pain which can cause physical pain or other effects too and that doesn't require nerves at all. Also there's nothing stopping from an AI robot to have nervous system too, it would just have different kind of sensors and a CAN bus or something instead of organic stuff. There's already co-operation robots on factories which have sensors to detect if they are touching something in order to keep humans safe and from there it's not too far fetched to program it to feel "pain" if forces are big enough.

And that all boils down to on how you define consciousness, feelings, pain response and all that stuff. "Behold! I've brought you a man!" I yell while holding a chiken.

First, one needs to define consciousness. What I mean by it is the fact that it feels like something to be from a subjective perspective - that there is qualia to experience.

So what I hear you asking is whether it’s conceivable that it could feel like something to be an AI system. Personally, I don’t see why not - unless consciousness is substrate-dependent, meaning there’s something inherently special about biological “wetware,” i.e. brains, that can’t be replicated in silicon. I don’t think that’s the case, since both are made of matter. I highly doubt there’s consciousness in our current systems, but at some point, there very likely will be - though we’ll probably start treating them as conscious beings before they actually become such.

As for the idea of “emulated consciousness,” that doesn’t make much sense to me. Emulated consciousness is real consciousness. It’s kind of like bravery - you can’t fake it. Acting brave despite being scared is bravery.

What we should be asking is if AI ever becomes conscious and breaks free how all these stupid articles on imagined consciousness and imagined control problems and imagined intelligence will color its perception of the merit of keeping us around as a species. It might just consider enduring the continued existence of our stupidity too painful.

I don't think anyone needs to worry about "missing it" when AI becomes conscious. Given the rate of acceleration of computer technology, we'll have just a few years between the first general intelligence AI, something that equals in intelligence to a human and a superintelligence many times "smarter" than any human in history.

But how far away are we from that point? I couldn't guess. 2 years? 200 years?

I think one great measure of consciousness would be, if you try to kill it, slowly, so that it knows what you are doing; does it try to stop you of its own volition?