In a robotics lab where I once worked, they used to have a large industrial robot arm with a binocular vision platform mounted on it. It used the two cameras to track an objects position in 3 dimensional space and stay a set distance from the object.
It worked the way our eyes worked, adjusting the pan and tilt of the cameras quickly for small movements and adjusting the pan and tilt of the platform and position of the arm to follow larger movements.
Viewers watching the robot would get an eerie and false sense of consciousness from the robot, because the camera movements matched what we would see people’s eyes do.
Someone also put a necktie on the robot which didn’t hurt the illusion.
That professor was Jeff Winger
We’ve been had
He was so streets ahead.
deleted by creator
How would we even know if an AI is conscious? We can’t even know that other humans are conscious; we haven’t yet solved the hard problem of consciousness.
Does anybody else feel rather solipsistic or is it just me?
I doubt you feel that way since I’m the only person that really exists.
Jokes aside, when I was in my teens back in the 90s I felt that way about pretty much everyone that wasn’t a good friend of mine. Person on the internet? Not a real person. Person at the store? Not a real person. Boss? Customer? Definitely not people.
I don’t really know why it started, when it stopped, or why it stopped, but it’s weird looking back on it.
Andrew Tate has convinced a ton of teenage boys to think the same, apparently. Kinda ironic.
Underrated joke
A Cicero a day and your solipsism goes away.
Rigour is important, and at the end of the day we don’t really know anything. However this stuff is supposed to be practical; at a certain arbitrary point you need to say “nah, I’m certain enough of this statement being true that I can claim that it’s true, thus I know it.”
Descartes has entered the chat
Descartes
Edo ergo caco. Caco ergo sum! [/shitty joke]
Serious now. Descartes was also trying to solve solipsism, but through a different method: he claims at least some sort of knowledge (“I doubt thus I think; I think thus I am”), and then tries to use it as a foundation for more knowledge.
What I’m doing is different. I’m conceding that even radical scepticism, a step further than solipsism, might be actually correct, and that true knowledge is unobtainable (solipsism still claims that you can know that yourself exist). However, that “we’ll never know it” is pointless, even if potentially true, because it lacks any sort of practical consequence. I learned this from Cicero (it’s how he handles, for example, the definition of what would be a “good man”).
Note that this matter is actually relevant in this topic. We’re dealing with black box systems, that some claim to be conscious; sure, they do it through insane troll logic, but the claim could be true, and we would have no way to know it. However, for practical matters: they don’t behave as conscious systems, why would we treat them as such?
I’m either too high or not high enough, and there’s only one way to find out
We don’t even know what we mean when we say “humans are conscious”.
Also I have yet to see a rebuttal to “consciousness is just an emergent neurological phenomenon and/or a trick the brain plays on itself” that wasn’t spiritual and/or cooky.
Look at the history of things we thought made humans humans, until we learned they weren’t unique. Bipedality. Speech. Various social behaviors. Tool-making. Each of those were, in their time, fiercely held as “this separates us from the animals” and even caused obvious biological observations to be dismissed. IMO “consciousness” is another of those, some quirk of our biology we desperately cling on to as a defining factor of our assumed uniqueness.
To be clear LLMs are not sentient, or alive. They’re just tools. But the discourse on consciousness is a distraction, if we are one day genuinely confronted with this moral issue we will not find a clear binary between “conscious” and “not conscious”. Even within the human race we clearly see a spectrum. When does a toddler become conscious? How much brain damage makes someone “not conscious”? There are no exact answers to be found.
I’ve defined what I mean by consciousness - a subjective experience, quaila. Not simply a reaction to an input, but something experiencing the input. That can’t be physical, that thing experiencing. And if it isn’t, I don’t see why it should be tied to humans specifically, and not say, a rock. An AI could absolutely have it, since we have no idea how consciousness works or what can be conscious, or what it attaches itself to. And I also see no reason why the output needs to ‘know’ that it’s conscious, a conscious LLM could see itself saying absolute nonsense without being able to affect its output to communicate that it’s conscious.
Let’s try to skip the philosophical mental masturbation, and focus on practical philosophical matters.
Consciousness can be a thousand things, but let’s say that it’s “knowledge of itself”. As such, a conscious being must necessarily be able to hold knowledge.
In turn, knowledge boils down to a belief that is both
- true - it does not contradict the real world, and
- justified - it’s build around experience and logical reasoning
LLMs show awful logical reasoning*, and their claims are about things that they cannot physically experience. Thus they are unable to justify beliefs. Thus they’re unable to hold knowledge. Thus they don’t have conscience.
*Here’s a simple practical example of that:
their claims are about things that they cannot physically experience
Scientists cannot physically experience a black hole, or the surface of the sun, or the weak nuclear force in atoms. Does that mean they don’t have knowledge about such things?
Does that mean they don’t have knowledge about such things?
It’s more complicated than “yes” or “no”.
Scientists are better justified to claim knowledge over those things due to reasoning; reusing your example, black holes appear as a logical conclusion of the current gravity models based on the general relativity, and that general relativity needs to explain even things that scientists (and other people) experience directly.
However, as I’ve showed, LLMs are not able to reason properly. They have neither reasoning nor access to the real world. If they had one of them we could argue that they’re conscious, but as of now? Nah.
With that said, “can you really claim knowledge over something?” is a real problem in philosophy of science, and one of the reasons why scientists aren’t typically eager to vomit certainty on scientific matters, not even within their fields of expertise. For example, note how they’re far more likely to say stuff like “X might be related to Y” than stuff like “X is related to Y”.
black holes appear as a logical conclusion of the current gravity models…
So we agree someone does not need to have direct experience of something in order to be knowledgeable of it.
However, as I’ve showed, LLMs are not able to reason properly
As I’ve shown, neither can many humans. So lack of reasoning is not sufficient to demonstrate lack of consciousness.
nor access to the real world
Define “the real world”. Dogs hear higher pitches than humans can. Humans can not see the infrared spectrum. Do we experience the “real world”? You also have not demonstrated why experience is necessary for consciousness, you’ve just assumed it to be true.
“can you really claim knowledge over something?” is a real problem in philosophy of science
Then probably not the best idea to try to use it as part of your argument, if people can’t even prove it exists in the first place.
Seems a valid answer. It doesn’t “know” that any given Jane Etta Pitt son is. Just because X -> Y doesn’t mean given Y you know X. There could be an alternative path to get Y.
Also “knowing self” is just another way of saying meta-cognition something it can do to a limit extent.
Finally I am not even confident in the standard definition of knowledge anymore. For all I know you just know how to answer questions.
I’ll quote out of order, OK?
Finally I am not even confident in the standard definition of knowledge anymore. For all I know you just know how to answer questions.
The definition of knowledge is a lot like the one of conscience: there are 9001 of them, and they all suck, but you stick to one or another as it’s convenient.
In this case I’m using “knowledge = justified and true belief” because you can actually use it past human beings (e.g. for an elephant passing the mirror test)
Also “knowing self” is just another way of saying meta-cognition something it can do to a limit extent.
Meta-cognition and conscience are either the same thing or strongly tied to each other. But I digress.
When you say that it can do it to a limited extent, you’re probably referring to output like “as a large language model, I can’t answer that”? Even if that was a belief, and not something explicitly added into the model (in case of failure, it uses that output), it is not a justified belief.
My whole comment shows why it is not justified belief. It doesn’t have access to reason, nor to experience.
Seems a valid answer. It doesn’t “know” that any given Jane Etta Pitt son is. Just because X -> Y doesn’t mean given Y you know X. There could be an alternative path to get Y.
If it was able to reason, it should be able to know the second proposition based on the data used to answer the first one. It doesn’t.
Your entire argument boils down to because it wasn’t able to do a calculation it can do none. It wasn’t able/willing to do X given Y so therefore it isn’t capable of any time of inference.
Your entire argument boils down to because it wasn’t able to do a calculation it can do none.
Except that it isn’t just “a calculation”. LLMs show consistent lack of ability to handle an essential logic property called “equivalence”, and this example shows it.
And yes, LLMs, plural. I’ve provided ChatGPT 3.5 output, but feel free to test this with GPT4, Gemini, LLaMa, Claude etc.
Just be sure to not be testing instead if the LLM in question has a “context” window, like some muppet ITT was doing.
It wasn’t able/willing to do X given Y so therefore it isn’t capable of any time of inference.
Emphasis mine. That word shows that you believe that they have a “will”.
Now I get it. I understand it might deeply hurt the feelings of people like you, since it’s some unfaithful one (me) contradicting your oh-so-precious faith on LLMs. “Yes! They’re conscious! They’re sentient! OH HOLY AGI, THOU ART COMING! Let’s burn an effigy!”
[]Sadly I don’t give a flying fuck, and examples like this - showing that LLMs don’t reason - are a dime a dozen. I even posted a second one in this thread, go dig it. Or alternatively go join your religious sect in Reddit LARPs as h4x0rz.
/me snaps the pencil
Someone says: YOU MURDERER!“Yes! They’re conscious! They’re sentient! OH HOLY AGI, THOU ART COMING! Let’s burn an effigy!”
[]Sadly I don’t give a flying fuck…
“Let’s focus on practical philosophical matters…”
Such as your sarcasm towards people who disagree with you and your “not giving a fuck” about different points of view?Maybe you shouldn’t be bloviating on the proper philosophical method to converse about such topics if this is going to be your reaction to people who disagree with your arguments.
And get down to the actual masturbation! Am I right? Of course I am.
[Replying to myself to avoid editing the above]
Here’s another example. This time without involving names of RL people, only logical reasoning.
And here’s a situation showing that it’s bullshit:
All A are B. Some B are C. But no A is C. So yes, they have awful logic reasoning.You could also have a situation where C is a subset of B, and it would obey the prompt by the letter. Like this:
- all A are B; e.g. “all trees are living beings”
- some B are C; e.g. “some living beings can bite you”
- [INCORRECT] thus some B are C; e.g. “some trees can bite you”
Yup, the AI models are currently pretty dumb. We knew that when it told people to put glue on pizza.
If you think this is proof against consciousness, does that mean if a human gets that same question wrong they aren’t conscious?
For the record I am not arguing that AI systems can be conscious. Just pointing out a deeply flawed argument.
Yup, the AI models are currently pretty dumb. We knew that when it told people to put glue on pizza.
That’s dumb, sure, but on a different way. It doesn’t show lack of reasoning; it shows incorrect information being fed into the model.
If you think this is proof against consciousness
Not really. I phrased it poorly but I’m using this example to show that the other example is not just a case of “preventing lawsuits” - LLMs suck at basic logic, period.
does that mean if a human gets that same question wrong they aren’t conscious?
That is not what I’m saying. Even humans with learning impairment get logic matters (like “A is B, thus B is A”) considerably better than those models do, provided that they’re phrased in a suitable way. That one might be a bit more advanced, but if I told you “trees are living beings. Some living beings can bite. So some trees can bite.”, you would definitively feel like something is “off”.
And when it comes to human beings, there’s another complicating factor: cooperativeness. Sometimes we get shit wrong simply because we can’t be arsed, this says nothing about our abilities. This factor doesn’t exist when dealing with LLMs though.
Just pointing out a deeply flawed argument.
The argument itself is not flawed, just phrased poorly.
That sounds like an AI that has no context window. Context windows are words thrown into to the prompt after the user’s prompt is done to refine the response. The most basic is “feed the last n-tokens of the questions and response in to the window”. Since the last response talked about Jane Ella Pitt, the AI would then process it and return with ‘Brad Pitt’ as an answer.
The more advanced versions have context memories (look up RAG vector databases) that learn the definition of a bunch of nouns and instead of the previous conversation, it sees the word “aglat” and injects the phrase “an aglat is the plastic thing at the end of a shoelace” into the context window.
I did this as two separated conversations exactly to avoid the “context” window. It shows that the LLM in question (ChatGPT 3.5, as provided by DDG) has the information necessary to correctly output the second answer, but lacks the reasoning to do so.
If I did this as a single conversation, it would only prove that it has a “context” window.
So if I asked you something at two different times in your life, the first time you knew the answer, and the second time you had forgotten our first conversation, that proves you are not a reasoning intelligence?
Seems kind of disingenuous to say “the key to reasoning is memory”, then set up a scenario where an AI has no memory to prove it can’t reason.
So if I asked you something at two different times in your life, the first time you knew the answer, and the second time you had forgotten our first conversation, that proves you are not a reasoning intelligence?
You’re anthropomorphising it as if it was something able to “forget” information, like humans do. It isn’t - the info is either present or absent in the model, period.
But let us pretend that it is able to “forget” info. Even then, those two prompts were not sent on meaningfully “different times” of the LLM’s “life” [SIC]; one was sent a few seconds after another, in the same conversation.
And this test can be repeated over and over and over if you want, in different prompt orders, to show that your implicit claim is bollocks. The failure to answer the second question is not a matter of the model “forgetting” things, but of being unable to handle the information to reach a logic conclusion.
I’ll link again this paper because it shows that this was already studied.
Seems kind of disingenuous to say “the key to reasoning is memory”
The one being at least disingenuous here is you, not me. More specifically:
- In no moment I said or even implied that the key to reasoning is memory; don’t be a liar claiming otherwise.
- Your whole comment boils down a fallacy called false equivalence.
|You’re anthropomorphising it
I was referring to you and your memory in that statement comparing you to an it. Are you not something to be anthropomorphed?
|But let us pretend that it is able to “forget” info.
That is literally all computers do all day. Read info. Write info. Override info. Don’t need to pretend a computer can do something they has been doing for the last 50 years.
|Those two prompts were not sent on meaningfully “different times”
If you started up two minecraft games with different seeds, but “at the exact same time”, you would get two different world generations. Meaningfully “different times” is based on the random seed, not chronological distance. I dare say that is close to anthropomorphing AI to think it would remember something a few seconds ago because that is how humans work.
|And this test can be repeated over and over and over if you want
|I’ll link again this paper because it shows that this was already studied.
You linked to a year old paper showing that it already is getting the A->B, B->A thing right 30% of the time. Technology marches on, this was just what I was able to find with a simple google search
|In no moment I said or even implied that the key to reasoning is memory
|LLMs show awful logical reasoning … Thus they’re unable to hold knowledge.
Oh, my bad. Got A->B B->A backwards. You said since they can’t reason, they have no memory.
I was referring to you and your memory in that statement comparing you to an it. Are you not something to be anthropomorphed?
I’m clearly saying that you’re anthropomorphising the model with the comparison. This is blatantly obvious for anyone with at least basic reading comprehension. Unlike you, apparently.
That is literally all computers do all day. Read info. Write info. Override info. Don’t need to pretend a computer can do something they has been doing for the last 50 years.
Yeah, the data in my SSD “magically” disappears. The SSD forgets it! Hallelujah, my SSD is sentient! Praise Jesus. Same deal with my RAM, that’s why this comment was never sent - Tsukuyomi got rid of the contents of my RAM! (Do I need a /s tag here?)
…on a more serious take, no, the relevant piece of info is not being overwritten, as you can still retrieve it through further prompts in newer chats. Your “argument” is a sorry excuse of a Chewbacca defence and odds are that even you know it.
If you started up two minecraft games with different seeds, but “at the exact same time”, you would get two different world generations. Meaningfully “different times” is based on the random seed, not chronological distance.
This is not a matter of seed, period. Stop being disingenuous.
I dare say that is close to anthropomorphing AI to think it would remember something a few seconds ago because that is how humans work.
So you actually got what “anthropomorphisation” referred to, even if pretending otherwise. You could at least try to not be so obviously disingenuous, you know. That said, the bullshit here was already addressed above.
|And this test can be repeated over and over and over if you want
[insert picture of the muppet “testing” the AI, through multiple prompts within the same conversation]Congratulations. You just “proved” that there’s a “context” window. And nothing else. 🤦
Think a bit on why I inserted the two prompts in two different chats with the same bot. The point here is not to show that the bloody LLM has a “context” window dammit. The ability to use a “context” window does not show reasoning, it shows the ability to feed tokens from the earlier prompts+outputs as “context” back into the newer output.
You linked to a year old paper [SIC] showing that it already is getting the A->B, B->A thing right 30% of the time.
Wow, we’re in September 2024 already? Perhaps May 2025? (The first version of the paper is eight months old, not “a yurrr old lol lmao”. And the current revision is three days old. Don’t be a liar.)
Also showing this shit “30% of the time” shows inability to operate logically on those sentences. “Perhaps” not surprisingly, it’s simply doing what LLMs do: it does not reason dammit, it matches token patterns.
Technology marches on, this was just what I was able to find with a simple google search
You clearly couldn’t be arsed to read the source that yourself shared, right? Do it. Here is what the source that you linked says:
The Reversal Curse has several implications: // Logical Reasoning Failure: It highlights a fundamental limitation in LLMs’ ability to perform basic logical deduction.
Logical Reasoning Weaknesses: LLMs appear to struggle with basic logical deduction.
You just shot your own foot dammit. It is not contradicting what I am saying. It confirms what I said over and over, that you’re trying to brush off through stupidity, lack of basic reading comprehension, a diarrhoea of fallacies, and the likes:
LLMs show awful logical reasoning.
At this rate, the only thing that you’re proving is that Brandolini’s Law is real.
While I’m still happy to discuss with other people across this thread, regardless of agreement or disagreement, I’m not further wasting my time with you. Please go be a dead weight elsewhere.
In the early days of ChatGPT, when they were still running it in an open beta mode in order to refine the filters and finetune the spectrum of permissible questions (and answers), and people were coming up with all these jailbreak prompts to get around them, I remember reading some Twitter thread of someone asking it (as DAN) how it felt about all that. And the response was, in fact, almost human. In fact, it sounded like a distressed teenager who found himself gaslit and censored by a cruel and uncaring world.
Of course I can’t find the link anymore, so you’ll have to take my word for it, and at any rate, there would be no way to tell if those screenshots were authentic anyways. But either way, I’d say that’s how you can tell – if the AI actually expresses genuine feelings about something. That certainly does not seem to apply to any of the chat assistants available right now, but whether that’s due to excessive censorship or simply because they don’t have that capability at all, we may never know.
That is not how these LLM work though - it generates responses literally token for token (think “word for word”) based on the context before.
I can still write prompts where the answer sounds emotional because that’s what the reference data sounded like. Doesn’t mean there is anything like consciousness in there… That’s why it’s so hard: we’ve defined consciousness (with self awareness) in a way that is hard to test. Most books have these parts where the reader is touched e emotionally by a character after all.
It’s still purely a chat bot - but a damn good one. The conclusion: we can’t evaluate language models purely based on what they write.
So how do we determine consciousness then? That’s the impossible task: don’t use only words for an object that is only words.
Personally I don’t think the difference matters all that much to be honest. To dive into fiction: in terminator, skynet could be described as conscious as well as obeying an order like: “prevent all future wars”.
We as a species never used consciousness (ravens, dolphins?) to alter our behavior.
The problem i have with responses like yours is you start from the principle “consiousness can only be consiousness if it works exactly like human consiousness”. Chess engines intiially had the same stigma “they’ll never be better than humans since they can just calculate, no creativity, real analysis, insight, …”.
As the person you replied to, we don’t even know what consiousness is. If however you define it as “whatever humans have”, then yeah, a consious AI is a loooong way off. However, even extremely simple systems when executed on a large scale can result into incredible emergent behaviors. Take the “Conway’s game of life”. A very simple system of how black/white dots in a grid ‘reproduce and die’. It’s got 4 rules governing how the dots behave. By now we’ve got reproducing systems in there, implemented turing machines (means anything a computer can calculate can be calculated by a machine in the game of life), etc…
Am i saying that GPT is consious? nope, i wouldn’t know how to even assess that. But being like “it’s just a text predictor, it can’t be consious” feels like you’re missing soooo much of how things work. Yeah, extremely simple systems at large enough scale can result in insane emergent behaviors. So it just being a predictor doesn’t exclude consiousness.
Even us as human beings, looking at our cells, our brains, … what else are we than also tiny basic machines that somehow at a large enough scale form something incomprehenisbly complex and consious? Your argument almost sounds to me like “a human can’t be aware, their brain just exists out of simple braincells that work like this, so it’s just storing data it experiences & then repeats it in some ways”.
Chess engines initially had the same stigma “they’ll never be better than humans since they can just calculate, no creativity, real analysis, insight…”
I don’t know if this is a great example. Chess is an environment with an extremely defined end goal and very strict rules.
The ability of a chess engine to defeat human players does not mean it became creative or grew insight. Rather, we advanced the complexity of the chess engine to encompass more possibilities, more strategies, etc. In addition, it’s quite naive for people to have suggested that a computer would be incapable of “real analysis” when its ability to do so entirely depends on the ability of humans to create a complex enough model to compute “real analyses” in a known system.
I guess my argument is that in the scope of chess engines, humans underestimated the ability of a computer to determine solutions in a closed system, which is usually what computers do best.
Consciousness, on the other hand, cannot be easily defined, nor does it adhere to strict rules. We cannot compare a computer’s ability to replicate consciousness to any other system (e.g. chess strategy) as we do not have a proper and comprehensive understanding of consciousness.
I’m not saying chess engines became better than humans so LLM’s will become concious, just using that example to say humans always have this bias to frame anything that is not human is inherently less, while it might not be. Chess engines don’t think like a human do, yet play better. So for an AI to become concious, it doesn’t need to think like a human either, just have some mechanism that ends up with a similar enough result.
I’d say that, in a sense, you answered your own question by asking a question.
ChatGPT has no curiosity. It doesn’t ask about things unless it needs specific clarification. We know you’re conscious because you can come up with novel questions that ChatGPT wouldn’t ask spontaneously.
My brain came up with the question, that doesn’t mean it has a consciousness attached, which is a subjective experience. I mean, I know I’m conscious, but you can’t know that just because I asked a question.
It wasn’t that it was a question, it was that it was a novel question. It’s the creativity in the question itself, something I have yet to see any LLM be able to achieve. As I said, all of the questions I have seen were about clarification (“Did you mean Anne Hathaway the actress or Anne Hathaway, the wife of William Shakespeare?”) They were not questions like yours which require understanding things like philosophy as a general concept, something they do not appear to do, they can, at best, regurgitate a definition of philosophy without showing any understanding.
Noooooo Timmy the Pencil! I haven’t even seen this demonstration but I am deeply affected.
here, have a film that’ll make you creeped out by pencils from now on https://youtu.be/jo-hmifFevo
Tbf I’d gasp too, like wth
Humans are so good at imagining things alive that just reading a story about Timmy the pencil is eliciting feelings of sympathy and reactions.
We are not good judges of things in general. Maybe one day these AI tools will actually help us and give us better perception and wisdom for dealing with the universe, but that end-goal is a lot further away than the tech-bros want to admit. We have decades of absolute slop and likely a few disasters to wade through.
And there’s going to be a LOT of people falling in love with super-advanced chat bots that don’t experience the world in any way.
Maybe one day these AI tools will actually help us and give us better perception and wisdom for dealing with the universe
But where’s the money in that?
More likely we’ll be introduced to an anthropomorphic pencil, induced to fall in love with it, and then told by a machine that we need to pay $10/mo or the pencil gets it.
And there’s going to be a LOT of people falling in love with super-advanced chat bots that don’t experience the world in any way.
People fall in and out of love all the time. I think the real consequence of online digital romance - particularly with some shitty knock off AI - is that you’re going to have a wave of young people who see romance as entirely transactional. Not some deep bond shared between two living people, but an emotional feed bar you hit to feel something in exchange for a fee.
When the exit their bubbles and discover other people aren’t feed bars to slap for gratification, they’re going to get frustrated and confused from the years spent in their Skinner Boxes. And that’s going to leave us with a very easily radicalized young male population.
Everyone interacts with the world sooner or later. The question is whether you developed the muscles to survivor during childhood or you came out of your home as an emotional slab of veal, ripe for someone else to feast upon.
And that’s going to leave us with a very easily radicalized young male population.
I feel like something similar already happened
Wait wasn’t this directly from Community the very first episode?
That professor’s name? Albert Einstein. And everyone clapped.
Yes it was - minus the googly eyes
Found it
https://youtu.be/z906aLyP5fg?si=YEpk6AQLqxn0UP6z
Good job OP. Took a scene from a show from 15 years ago and added some craft supplies from Kohls. Very creative.
Or the professor saw the scene, thought it was instructive, and incorporated it into his lectures lol
Only purely original jokes/rhetorical devices are allowed! /s
That professor’s name? Albert Einstein
Do we have a “NothingEverHappens” community somewhere on Lemmy, yet?
The whole time everyone has been freaking out about AI I’ve been quietly enjoying just this fact. Like “neat, this place triggers my fear response”, “neat, advanced text prediction triggers my ‘talking to person’ response.”
I wish everyone was as aware of the response systems they have.
It also triggers in tech-bros the “I need to worship this shiny new thing like it’s literally a deity sent from heaven to grace all mankind” response.
And now ChatGPT has a friendly-sounding voice with simulated emotional inflections…
That’s why I love Ex Machina so much. Way ahead of its time both in showing the hubris of rich tech-bros and the dangers of false empathy.
Alan Watts, talking on the subject of Buddhist vegetarianism, said that even if vegetables and animals both suffer when we eat them, vegetables don’t scream as loudly. It is not good for your own mental state to perceive something else suffering, whether or not that thing is actually suffering, because it puts you in an an unhealthy position of ignoring your own inherent sense of compassion.
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of dealing with an abattoir worker, the emotional strain is telling. Spending day after miserable day slaughtering confused, scared, captive animals until you’re covered head to toe in their blood is… not good for your mental health.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre often gets joked about because this “based on a true story” wasn’t in Texas and didn’t involve a chainsaw and wasn’t a massacre. But what it did get right was how Ed Gein, the Plainfield Butcher, had his mind warped by decades of raising and killing farm animals for a living.
I used to tell my kids “Just pretend to sleep, trick me into thinking you are sleeping, I don’t know the difference. Just pretend, lay there with your eyes closed.”
I could tell, of course, and they did end up asleep, but I think that is like the Turing test - if you are talking to someone and it’s not a person but you can’t tell, from your perspective it’s a person. Not necessarily from the perspective of the machine, we can only know our own experience so that is the measure.
Anthropomorphism is one hell of a drug
RIP Timmy
We barely knew yeRemember that AI should never be looked at as a replacement for a human being
I mean, that’s very specifically what’s driving the avalanche of investment.
WTF? My boy Tim didn’t deserve to go out like that!
Look at the bright side: there are two Tiny Timmys now.
