5 ms·

I fully agree with this. I find it strange how quickly the novelty of AI chatbots has passed. This used to be a thing of science fiction, that people dreamed, f

I fully agree with this. I find it strange how quickly the novelty of AI chatbots has passed. This used to be a thing of science fiction, that people dreamed, fantasized about. Now they are everywhere, people rely on them for the most mundane of tasks, and the only debates happening about them are - is their water use efficient enough? Is this CEO likable enough? There seems to be no sense of wonder. Do androids dream of electric sheep? Do humans still dream at all?

mnewme 2mo ago
Most sci-fi is about genuinely sentient AI, and we are far from that. There is no sign of any intent or internal motivation. If you know anything about machine learning, you know that the idea that LLMs have any form of consciousness is ridiculous. Humans just like to anthropomorphise, that is all.
- indigo945 2mo ago
  This is exactly the thought-terminating cliché that I see everywhere, and it's driving me up a wall. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is, but everybody is 100% sure that LLMs don't "have any form" of it. Yes, I know about machine learning, but I also know about how natural biological systems learn. It is, just from what we know, very different, yes, but the crucial point is that it, also, has zero identifiable things that you could point at and say: oh, look, that over there is consciousness. So the fact that there is no such thing in an ANN proves nothing.
  - ChrisGreenHeur 2mo ago
    If it drives you up a wall maybe you can look intoning there are any arguments for the positing driving you up there.
  - perpetuallunch 2mo ago
    I like your argument. It is said that absent any input these thinking machines we are inert, quiescent. That they have no intrinsic motivation of their own. Whereas we, along with at least some other mammals but especially humans, seem to be infinitely inquisitive about the world. But our minds don’t exist in a substrate of hyper sterile rigid silicon form. What if some of the differences between us and our silicon based machines are merely embodiment (senses both internally and externally oriented, limbs and locomotion, etc) plus the noise of biochemistry? Would be very interesting to be a fly on the wall in the labs these experiments are, presumably, taking place.
  - breuleux 2mo ago
    > We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is We do, in the sense that it is a definite feeling. What we don't have is a formal, objective, checkable definition of it. I suspect that no such definition exists: if we took the ensemble of all the intuitions and beliefs we have about what consciousness is or must entail, it may very well fail to be logically coherent. There may be no logically consistent conception of consciousness that includes the entities we strongly feel are conscious while also excluding those we strongly feel aren't. At that point we must either reconceptualize consciousness or treat it (and everything it "entails") as a brute fact, something that's true for no reason and is therefore not subject to the laws of reasoning.
    - kelseyfrog 2mo ago
      If you ask people when they first realized they're conscious, you'll overwhelmingly receive responses detailing peoples' first memories. Do LLMs form and recall memories? With the appropriate harnesses, sure. Yet, the reluctance to label LLMs as conscious remains. These beliefs are incompatible and dissonant.
      - mnewme 2mo ago
        No they don’t have memories. With an harness you just send historic data into the prompt.
        indigo945 2mo ago
        There's no inherent, technological reason to feed the historic data into the prompt, though. You could train a network with a second input for model-states, and during inference, feed into that input historic model-states that occured for the same LLM when consuming input that is somehow associatively related to whatever input is currently being consumed. Can you definitely show that this would be meaningfully different from how humans "experience" memories?
        mnewme 2mo ago
        That would still be circumventing. There are other architectures that could be more dynamic, LLMs are not. It is completely different. Our brain rewires itself to store memories, there is no memory storage for humans.
  - mnewme 2mo ago
    We use the same terms for computers and brain, but the analogies are misleading. LLMs don’t even have memory, how do you have consciousness without memory? The architecture probibits any signs of consciousness.
- eru 2mo ago
  Yes, our current systems are likely still to primitive to be properly conscious. Probably. But I wouldn't rule out that ChatGPT 10 or Claude Fable 15 might get conscious.
  - prmph 2mo ago
    You are committing a type error. Consciousness does not necessarily arise from computation, just as simulating snowfall on the computer does not make it cold
    - perpetuallunch 2mo ago
      We can’t measure the temperature of consciousness like we can the temperature of simulated snow. As you write consciousness does not necessarily arise from computation, but it may, at least to some degree, we don’t know. We don’t have reliable methods of testing for the presence or absence of consciousness, or even a rigorous and agreed upon set of metrics to measure. Where as simulated snow is most certainly not real snow at all.
    - eru 2mo ago
      I'm with Turing on this one.
  - mnewme 2mo ago
    Nope, only if the architecture changes. Still probabilistic prediction models
- bitwize 2mo ago
  Mass Effect distinguishes between AI, which is sentient enough to be a person; and VI (Virtual Intelligence) which is more like a conversational user interface. What we have built in real life may qualify as a VI by the Mass Effect standard, but it's a crappy one.
- f6v 2mo ago
  > There is no sign of any intent or internal motivation. I don't think that the way we frame the question about consciousness makes it easy to resolve. But I do want to point out that humans are very diverse. There're many functional adults lacking any internal motivation besides getting food, sleep, and some kind of entertainment. There're millions of people who just act on external stimuli. So the gap between the "least conscious" human and the "most conscious" machine might be more narrow than we expect.
  - mnewme 2mo ago
    That is a lazy definition. A machine doesn’t even want to watch TV. Apes are conscious, dolphins are, maybe octopus, but definitely not LLMs
    - f6v 2mo ago
      > That is a lazy definition. I didn't even try to define consciousness, but you're welcome to try yourself.
cwillu 2mo ago
I never thought I'd have so much sympathy for Kate “Forgive me, Mr Data; I am not accustomed to work with non-living devices that… Forgive me again. Your service record says that you are alive.” Pulaski, but here we are.
f6v 2mo ago
> I find it strange how quickly the novelty of AI chatbots has passed. I had an eye surgery last year. The first day after was magical, I felt like I was on acid because the entire world felt different. I went for a checkup one week later and told the doctor the vision has gone down since. They checked and it was objectively the same as on the first day. They told me: "People get used to good vision very fast". I think it's just human nature.
gpderetta 2mo ago
Agree. Unscientifically, I don't think current LLM are conscious because I don't think they have enough awareness of their own thoughts (I, again unscientifically don't believe that the context window is enough). Still, tthey are the stuff of sci-fi: it is the first time in recorded history that we can communicate with language with something that is not human! The consciousness "problem" is just a distraction. Do androids dream of electric sheep indeed.
elif 2mo ago
Remember when we thought the Turing test would be some mind blowing pinnacle of computer science? I do because I was in college in the early 2000's. We flew right by that and now we are pretending it was no big deal. There is a lot to learn about psychological coping mechanisms deployed by humans desperate to maintain the illusion of absolute control

mnewme 2mo ago

Most sci-fi is about genuinely sentient AI, and we are far from that. There is no sign of any intent or internal motivation. If you know anything about machine learning, you know that the idea that LLMs have any form of consciousness is ridiculous. Humans just like to anthropomorphise, that is all.

indigo945 2mo ago
This is exactly the thought-terminating cliché that I see everywhere, and it's driving me up a wall. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is, but everybody is 100% sure that LLMs don't "have any form" of it. Yes, I know about machine learning, but I also know about how natural biological systems learn. It is, just from what we know, very different, yes, but the crucial point is that it, also, has zero identifiable things that you could point at and say: oh, look, that over there is consciousness. So the fact that there is no such thing in an ANN proves nothing.
- ChrisGreenHeur 2mo ago
  If it drives you up a wall maybe you can look intoning there are any arguments for the positing driving you up there.
- perpetuallunch 2mo ago
  I like your argument. It is said that absent any input these thinking machines we are inert, quiescent. That they have no intrinsic motivation of their own. Whereas we, along with at least some other mammals but especially humans, seem to be infinitely inquisitive about the world. But our minds don’t exist in a substrate of hyper sterile rigid silicon form. What if some of the differences between us and our silicon based machines are merely embodiment (senses both internally and externally oriented, limbs and locomotion, etc) plus the noise of biochemistry? Would be very interesting to be a fly on the wall in the labs these experiments are, presumably, taking place.
- breuleux 2mo ago
  > We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is We do, in the sense that it is a definite feeling. What we don't have is a formal, objective, checkable definition of it. I suspect that no such definition exists: if we took the ensemble of all the intuitions and beliefs we have about what consciousness is or must entail, it may very well fail to be logically coherent. There may be no logically consistent conception of consciousness that includes the entities we strongly feel are conscious while also excluding those we strongly feel aren't. At that point we must either reconceptualize consciousness or treat it (and everything it "entails") as a brute fact, something that's true for no reason and is therefore not subject to the laws of reasoning.
  - kelseyfrog 2mo ago
    If you ask people when they first realized they're conscious, you'll overwhelmingly receive responses detailing peoples' first memories. Do LLMs form and recall memories? With the appropriate harnesses, sure. Yet, the reluctance to label LLMs as conscious remains. These beliefs are incompatible and dissonant.
    - mnewme 2mo ago
      No they don’t have memories. With an harness you just send historic data into the prompt.
      - indigo945 2mo ago
        There's no inherent, technological reason to feed the historic data into the prompt, though. You could train a network with a second input for model-states, and during inference, feed into that input historic model-states that occured for the same LLM when consuming input that is somehow associatively related to whatever input is currently being consumed. Can you definitely show that this would be meaningfully different from how humans "experience" memories?
        mnewme 2mo ago
        That would still be circumventing. There are other architectures that could be more dynamic, LLMs are not. It is completely different. Our brain rewires itself to store memories, there is no memory storage for humans.
- mnewme 2mo ago
  We use the same terms for computers and brain, but the analogies are misleading. LLMs don’t even have memory, how do you have consciousness without memory? The architecture probibits any signs of consciousness.
eru 2mo ago
Yes, our current systems are likely still to primitive to be properly conscious. Probably. But I wouldn't rule out that ChatGPT 10 or Claude Fable 15 might get conscious.
- prmph 2mo ago
  You are committing a type error. Consciousness does not necessarily arise from computation, just as simulating snowfall on the computer does not make it cold
  - perpetuallunch 2mo ago
    We can’t measure the temperature of consciousness like we can the temperature of simulated snow. As you write consciousness does not necessarily arise from computation, but it may, at least to some degree, we don’t know. We don’t have reliable methods of testing for the presence or absence of consciousness, or even a rigorous and agreed upon set of metrics to measure. Where as simulated snow is most certainly not real snow at all.
  - eru 2mo ago
    I'm with Turing on this one.
- mnewme 2mo ago
  Nope, only if the architecture changes. Still probabilistic prediction models
bitwize 2mo ago
Mass Effect distinguishes between AI, which is sentient enough to be a person; and VI (Virtual Intelligence) which is more like a conversational user interface. What we have built in real life may qualify as a VI by the Mass Effect standard, but it's a crappy one.
f6v 2mo ago
> There is no sign of any intent or internal motivation. I don't think that the way we frame the question about consciousness makes it easy to resolve. But I do want to point out that humans are very diverse. There're many functional adults lacking any internal motivation besides getting food, sleep, and some kind of entertainment. There're millions of people who just act on external stimuli. So the gap between the "least conscious" human and the "most conscious" machine might be more narrow than we expect.
- mnewme 2mo ago
  That is a lazy definition. A machine doesn’t even want to watch TV. Apes are conscious, dolphins are, maybe octopus, but definitely not LLMs
  - f6v 2mo ago
    > That is a lazy definition. I didn't even try to define consciousness, but you're welcome to try yourself.

cwillu 2mo ago

I never thought I'd have so much sympathy for Kate “Forgive me, Mr Data; I am not accustomed to work with non-living devices that… Forgive me again. Your service record says that you are alive.” Pulaski, but here we are.

f6v 2mo ago

> I find it strange how quickly the novelty of AI chatbots has passed. I had an eye surgery last year. The first day after was magical, I felt like I was on acid because the entire world felt different. I went for a checkup one week later and told the doctor the vision has gone down since. They checked and it was objectively the same as on the first day. They told me: "People get used to good vision very fast". I think it's just human nature.

gpderetta 2mo ago

Agree. Unscientifically, I don't think current LLM are conscious because I don't think they have enough awareness of their own thoughts (I, again unscientifically don't believe that the context window is enough). Still, tthey are the stuff of sci-fi: it is the first time in recorded history that we can communicate with language with something that is not human! The consciousness "problem" is just a distraction. Do androids dream of electric sheep indeed.

elif 2mo ago

Remember when we thought the Turing test would be some mind blowing pinnacle of computer science? I do because I was in college in the early 2000's. We flew right by that and now we are pretending it was no big deal. There is a lot to learn about psychological coping mechanisms deployed by humans desperate to maintain the illusion of absolute control