I am one of those people who’s pretty concerned about AI, but not cause of the singularity thing. (the singularity hypothesis seems kinda silly to me)

I’m mostly concerned about the stuff that billionaires are gonna do with AI to screw us over, and the ways that it’ll be used as a political tool, like to spread misinformation and such.

I think those other things exacerbate the fear in “AI”. Like, on top of all of that other stuff, some fancy new software is starting to take jobs in writing, journalism, art, voiceovers, etc.

My only hope that some kind of stable global civilization will survive the problems you point out is that we get a Singularity and it’s a combination of benevolent AND assertive. I feel like there’s like… lottery ticket chances of that, and yet it’s MORE likely than humans being able to enact solutions before it’s too late.

It’s called displacement

Everyone has different experiences, interests, & focuses in life which determine what they prioritize.

Communities survive & die due to shared desires, understandings, & experiences after all, no matter how quaint or in someone’s eyes, misinformed it may be.

Regardless, I think the AI singularity thing is just the old mindset of we have a problem today, let’s make up a solution because it’s more comfortable to do that than accept the powerlessness of no answer.

I think we can very strongly infere that other humans are conscious from knowing that we are conscious ourselves and seeing that other peoples brains work in the same way as ours and people think and behave in a very similar way as us and also have a concept of what consciousness is that corresponds with our own. In my opinion believing that other people aren’t conscious is in the same category of beliefs as the past, the future or even the world and physical laws not existing outside of our subjective experiences. Sure you can not mathematically prove any of that but questioning it isn’t really useful for more than a philosophical exercise of scepticism. As for AI I think it is a tricky question that I can’t answer. Right now I don’t think it is but maybe in the future it will be.

The weirdest problem we’re going to have is that AI could get really good at faking consciousness. It could merely be mimicking consciousness based on how it’s learned consciousness should look like, but is really just regurgitating information.

So how do we tell the difference between “real” consciousness and mimicry?

I’ll be sure to take a picture of the moment with some Kodachrome film!

@MJBrune and it depends on the definition to be honest

There seems to be no argument about what is conscious that doesn’t have a substantial human-centric bias. So many of the criticisms of chat gpt are present in people who cant list hordes of facts they once read or make up stuff whole cloth. The other large class of critique is based on knowing how it works, which is fundamentally not an aspect you can use to make judgments about emergent behavior.

While I agree that artificial intelligence can theoretically in time become advanced enough to be sentient, it doesn’t seem to be anywhere close to that currently.

Computers aren’t biological creatures. They don’t have any self-regulation or internal motivations guiding their actions/beliefs. It’s not possible for the AI to be “brainwashed”, because that would imply that it had a pre-existing personality and set of goals.

It’s also not entirely fair to say that humans only take in ideas and remix them. If that was the case, then there wouldn’t be any art or writing to begin with. Our creative output is prompted and directed not only by the world around us but the world inside us as well.

When we try to express a concept like “love” through writing/drawing/song, we’re not only outputting a reflection of our society/culture’s perception of “love”, we’re also filtering it through our own personal interpretation of what it means to us as biological creatures. It’s a strong internal desire that pushes us to form communities and raise our young, and that’s shown not only in the art we produce but also in the fact that we’re even making the art in the first place.

Sure, you can give a prompt to ChatGPT or other AI applications and have it output something similar to the kind of emotionally-driven creative works that humans create, but even having to give a prompt in itself is a significant difference between AI and actual sentience. Humans don’t need prompts, we create out of our own volition due to our own internal motivations/desires. A human taught from birth that they were a computer would likely be able to break free from that “programming” pretty easily even without intervention. All you’d have to do is stop feeding them.

Unless some AI app starts talking to us unprompted, I don’t think the idea of it possibly being sentient is even an issue. If the AI doesn’t have any actual internal motivations or desires, then whatever perceived signs of sentience it might display are likely just pareidolia.

Honestly, you should watch the video. Let me know if it changes your mind at all about that last part. I’m not saying hate on chat bots but realize they aren’t humans and treating them as human is dangerous.

It’s the title of the youtube video. It has some good insight into what LLMs are, and how they aren’t conscious right now but emulects. Emulect is an emulation of human consciousness. It also deeply dives into how emulects are potentially dangerous and covers all or a lot of the scenarios of an AI actually being conscious.