It’s amusing, from a philosophical point of view, that this has to be said. It’s not quite as amusing from a political point of view, because making people believe that AI is conscious is part of the project of cultivating the prerequisite misanthropic outlook that will induce the passivity necessary to make them accept AI as a fait accompli and no less natural or deserving of existence than regular humans.
and perhaps in using AI extensively, they want us to lose our empathy and compassion for our fellow humans, relying solely on the machine to do our thinking for us and to not question the narratives pushed by the wealthy tech oligarch
Anyone that thinks that AI or LLMs are conscious are likely clueless about what AI technology (artificial intelligence or artificial generative intelligence in the case of LLMs) is. Maybe they missed noticing the word 'ARTIFICIAL' in 'Artificial Intelligence'?
People that equate artificial intelligence with consciousness should be listened to with a grain of salt (and skepticism) (IMHO)
"McDonaldisation" as it was used in social research in the last century is about reducing and re-defining. An aspect of neo-colonialism is part of it too. Think of a McDonald's burger - which is technically not food - and how far it is from a decent burger in your local burgers shop/diner. And then how far it is from the original meat ball that it came from. Reductionism works in several ways here but if we take only Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Theory, computers use only two of the 12 (or whatever latest number) intelligences. Computers are only capable of the Logico-Mathematical and Linguistic intelligences. And obviously even those are used in a very primitive way .......... Re-defining also works in several ways, the most obvious being that a non-intelligence is being referred to as intelligence ... Recall how the owners or chief developers of all the main "AIs" made separate public statements that AI is not intelligent a few months ago .... It was bizarre how they all made those statements/publications at the exact same time. This begs the question - So why is a non-intelligent phenomenon keep being labelled as "intelligence" ??? ......... That kind of stuff. If you throw Overton's Window in the mix, a lot of "unexplainable" developments suddenly become self-evident.
Seeing as they are the ones pushing this nonsense maybe the term should be changed to artificial ignorance. After all , all they are trying to do is incorporate another layer of ignorance on the human population. I don't trust them and I don't trust their AI.
Anyone? Sweeping generalization. Clueless? After 40+ years in IT I'm still clueless, despite being involved in NLP research since 1980. Yes. I must have missed something.
Yes. Science knows a great deal now about electromagnetism and electricity and electrical circuits after 150+ years of physics. So far, there hasn't been a scintilla of scientific evidence that a spin of an electron, or a chemical reaction of any sort - can produce an actual thought or emotion, little alone self-awareness.
In fact, not only does consciousness currently remain a great mystery - the abiogenesis of life (emerging from inert, non-living matter) itself remains entirely unresolved.
Now that doesn't mean one should jump to the conclusion that some all seeing old man with a beard in the sky is responsible for all this. Hell, maybe the Materialists will end up being right after all - we're all just some kind of incredible emergence from a purely mechanical wind-up clock called the Universe. Or maybe something else is going no one has yet been able to imagine. I dunno. I doubt any of us will be around long enough for it to be figured out in our lifetimes. C'est La Vie.
It's becoming increasingly apparent that matter isn't even matter. And so the "hard-nosed materialists" have had to move the goal posts of their religion of "Materialism" by changing brand and renaming it to "Physicalism" (new branding work wonders for corporations too). The new brand now includes non-local phenomena, and virtual particles popping in and out of space all the time - and even goes so far as declaring there are an infinite number of universes, all slightly different from our own (just so they can escape the Observer problem).
One does admit though, that there is anything at all is pretty astonishing. Why is there even existence in the first place? Wouldn't it seem more likely for there to have been nothing at all?
Were consciousness solely the province of the human brain and its mimics, we'd be truly fucked. Gratefully, I see a much broader consciousness present in Nature.
I think I'm having a Gertrude Stein moment, when on her deathbed Stein kept asking: "What is the answer? What is the answer?" *silence* She pauses for a moment, then asks, "In that case, what is the question?"
"This is still just machines mimicking human behavior in the way they were built to..."
I agree. It's a machine. Sophisticated and running very large programs very quickly, but it's not a human being, and therefore, not conscious. When AI bots are set up to run war strategies, they end up using nuclear weapons something like 95% of the time. They have no conscience or morality and so they don't care about human lives being lost and the planet being totally destroyed by radiation for millennia. This sort of behavior proves that they are nothing other than a psychopathic monster on the same level as Trump and Netanyahu and many others in government. The only good thing about AI is that we can still pull the plug on it, but if we wait... That might become impossible.
For me, I think there is a great deal of hope technology can offer to humanity, if it is used in a compassionate and humanitarian way. I've never felt the Amish got it right - that we should simply ban technology altogether. The problem really isn't the technology itself (or AI) - it's the abuse of it. It's the psychopaths in charge right now - who are forcing their pathologies on the rest of us because of their obscene amounts of money and power.
Yeah, it’s not something that should be thrown away altogether. I agree with the medical and benevolent applications of AI. I just read about an AI program that diagnoses pancreatic cancer much earlier than human doctors do and it can save lives. (I wish my Mom had been so lucky). But I don’t think AI needs to be under the control of rogue militaristic governments and billionaires with no conscience… That will only lead to AI sexbots and AI killer robots. That’s what we need to pull the plug on before they really get going. (Too late for Gaza and elsewhere with the use of AI killer drones, alas.)
Yep. The problem is a social problem. The propaganda of rugged Individualism at the expense of common sense and much needed humane regulations and laws has gone way too far. Not even the US Constitution appears to be respected any more.
Materialists like Dawkins often fall into this trap, because to them, consciousness is all in the brain somehow, and to them brains are just machines, right? So if the machine just has the right parts, you can make it conscious, right? The trouble is, there is no evidence consciousness is solely in the brain, and quantum physics makes it quite likely it isn't. But biology hasn't quite caught up with that fact yet, despite having 100 years to get used to it. (Follow the intellectual journey of Christof Koch, arguably the most famous and respected consciousness researcher, who over 50 years has gone from being a materialist like Dawkins to being an idealist and believer that the brain is more like an antenna than the seat of consciousness itself.) Sadly (or happily), nothing that is not alive is, or can be, conscious, and nothing that is alive is NOT conscious, and that includes plants. Everything alive, including one-celled creatures, has a sense of self, because we need to have evolved a sense of "me" and "not me" to survive. Think about that for a minute--to devise strategies to keep from being killed and eaten, you have to know the difference between yourself and something else--what it is like to be you, to have that experience. Just reading cursorily in the philosophy and science of consciousness from the last 50 years will convince you that people like Dawkins understand not even the most elementary aspects of consciousness. No AI has to figure out how to survive and live in the world, or worry about competition, how to get food, or keep other AIs from killing it. It is not alive. It is not, and cannot ever be, conscious.
AI is clearly starting to make people delusional and deranged. The tech overlords want people confused about reality, what to think, what to believe. We are living in a Philip K. Dick novel.
It's odd, when I'm playing a video game - say Crimson Desert at the moment, I don't mind A.I. playing the different NPCs. But I find myself offended and want to gag when I'm watching some youtube video with A.I. pretending to be a real person. And I think this is what our current techno-lord billionaires want to feed us now: the slop of AI that we are suppose to accept as real - as opposed to just NPCs in a video game.
I find the AI doctored videos a pain, even if it takes only a few seconds to spot them… a few seconds of wasted time…
But sometimes i’ve actually been played … and then some…. On the other hand, the legal eagles must be as frustrated as anyone, with A I saving some people a bundle in legal advice.
Why waste grey matter on machines, even if they can mimic some human functions? Aren't people, animals and plants a lot more interesting? Don't we want two way relationships instead of relationships with a bot?
It mtay be a symptom of aging. Some seniors start to lose their common sense and are increasingly subject to scammers. The same kind of thing might have happened here.
AI is the latest most devious attempt by the oligarchy to keep the serfs off balance, not able to tell truth from fiction and ultimately more pliable to their control. It is the ultimate mind control tool to stave off the social revolution that is inevitable and overdue.
What I find happening these days is that real people have allowed AI assisted, compression editing on their own videos, such that the humanness has disappeared. This is actually grooming viewers to accept AI, and to lose the distinguishing details that, at least today, helps us keep track of which is human, and which is not. I consider these content creators to be collaborating in our demise, although presumably unintentional.
To be honest, I reckon that even if it eventually makes it's way to fully realised sexbots they will still be extremely underwhelming, because like every other form of relationship that fosters emergent pleasure or even just understanding, it's the interaction between two (or more) equally independent and self-determining people that makes the connection pleasurable and constructive as opposed to just self-indulgent.
TLDR sexbots will be the most expensive and awkward ways to wank yourself off possible.
Having worked on chatbots going back a decade or so – back in my day we would use LSTM networks with hand-crafted attention layers, among other things - I can say without a doubt that it is not "AI" – it is in fact ML, and a particularly crude type of ML designed to convince smooth-brained business types that what they are dealing with is sentient. But at best it is little more than the illusion of sentience. The whole phenomenon is basically a very expensive Mechanical Turk, but it's actually even worse than that.
To put it simply, when provided with an input (i.e. when asked a question) these types of models produce the most likeliest outputs based on the input provided. And by most likeliest I mean what is the most statistically likeliest output based on the input provided. In other words, when asked a question a chatbot will respond with the most predictable, the least offensive, the average - LLMs are the very definition of mediocrity.
And worse yet - what happens when exclusively human created content has been exhausted? Will the models still need to be trained on new content? What happens when they are trained on the only remaining content - i.e. the new content produced that is tainted by the models themselves? Think of the snake eating it's tail unto infinity, while shovelling unimaginable amounts of money into a furnace at the same time.
These models will never acquire sentience. No matter how you turn it, a Rubik's cube will never become a cabbage, or a chicken - it will always remain a Rubik's cube. And the rise and use of LLMs in the West will forever remain the clearest - and most expensive - testament to the vapidity and stupidity of the Western elites and capitalist class.
You mention the Mechanical Turk, I was thinking along somewhat similar lines, that of Hoffman’s tales of the infamous Dr. Copellius, and his doll, Copellia. Not long after came Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein.” There are many examples of creation stories, reanimation, resurrection, and reincarnation, that seem to me to represent the same need, that is to overcome death and the finality that comes with it.
This drive of men to be creators of living, conscious boings has been around a very long time. A case of Venus envy if ever there was.
All true, and very relevant. I recall the stated aspirations of the tech bros - to be able to upload themselves to the "matrix" (or whatever pseudoscientific construct they envision spending eternity within) in order to cheat death. Some of the less imaginative among them have even resorted to cosmetic surgery – the utterly risible and pointless Larry Ellison comes to mind.
A drinking glass once broken will never become unbroken, and a wealthy mediocrity will never magically become wise. Take note humanity!
The only thing we need to start thinking something has an element of vitality is to put two dots for eyes and also mouth on it. We are simple creatures.
It’s amusing, from a philosophical point of view, that this has to be said. It’s not quite as amusing from a political point of view, because making people believe that AI is conscious is part of the project of cultivating the prerequisite misanthropic outlook that will induce the passivity necessary to make them accept AI as a fait accompli and no less natural or deserving of existence than regular humans.
The psychopathy of the current techno-lord billionaires appears to have no bounds (or humanity).
They want to create AI so they can say that they "created" something like themselves, soulless sociopaths with no empathy or compassion for others.
and perhaps in using AI extensively, they want us to lose our empathy and compassion for our fellow humans, relying solely on the machine to do our thinking for us and to not question the narratives pushed by the wealthy tech oligarch
Yes, and AI, being clever rather than conscious, gets to leap frog over the rights of non-human animals.
And, no doubt, they must be given the vote!
Anyone that thinks that AI or LLMs are conscious are likely clueless about what AI technology (artificial intelligence or artificial generative intelligence in the case of LLMs) is. Maybe they missed noticing the word 'ARTIFICIAL' in 'Artificial Intelligence'?
People that equate artificial intelligence with consciousness should be listened to with a grain of salt (and skepticism) (IMHO)
Important part of the agenda is to McDonaldise both "intelligence" and now "consciousness" in the regular Western-Luciferian way of appropriation.
Can you explain what you mean by "McDonaldise intelligence"?
"McDonaldisation" as it was used in social research in the last century is about reducing and re-defining. An aspect of neo-colonialism is part of it too. Think of a McDonald's burger - which is technically not food - and how far it is from a decent burger in your local burgers shop/diner. And then how far it is from the original meat ball that it came from. Reductionism works in several ways here but if we take only Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Theory, computers use only two of the 12 (or whatever latest number) intelligences. Computers are only capable of the Logico-Mathematical and Linguistic intelligences. And obviously even those are used in a very primitive way .......... Re-defining also works in several ways, the most obvious being that a non-intelligence is being referred to as intelligence ... Recall how the owners or chief developers of all the main "AIs" made separate public statements that AI is not intelligent a few months ago .... It was bizarre how they all made those statements/publications at the exact same time. This begs the question - So why is a non-intelligent phenomenon keep being labelled as "intelligence" ??? ......... That kind of stuff. If you throw Overton's Window in the mix, a lot of "unexplainable" developments suddenly become self-evident.
Seeing as they are the ones pushing this nonsense maybe the term should be changed to artificial ignorance. After all , all they are trying to do is incorporate another layer of ignorance on the human population. I don't trust them and I don't trust their AI.
Anyone? Sweeping generalization. Clueless? After 40+ years in IT I'm still clueless, despite being involved in NLP research since 1980. Yes. I must have missed something.
It's a figure of speech, not a scientific statement to be peer reviewed. This is a platform for writing, not an academic journal.
I did 40 years in software engineering. Anybody with my background knows that computers compute. They don't think. They will never think!
Yes. Science knows a great deal now about electromagnetism and electricity and electrical circuits after 150+ years of physics. So far, there hasn't been a scintilla of scientific evidence that a spin of an electron, or a chemical reaction of any sort - can produce an actual thought or emotion, little alone self-awareness.
In fact, not only does consciousness currently remain a great mystery - the abiogenesis of life (emerging from inert, non-living matter) itself remains entirely unresolved.
Now that doesn't mean one should jump to the conclusion that some all seeing old man with a beard in the sky is responsible for all this. Hell, maybe the Materialists will end up being right after all - we're all just some kind of incredible emergence from a purely mechanical wind-up clock called the Universe. Or maybe something else is going no one has yet been able to imagine. I dunno. I doubt any of us will be around long enough for it to be figured out in our lifetimes. C'est La Vie.
It's becoming increasingly apparent that matter isn't even matter. And so the "hard-nosed materialists" have had to move the goal posts of their religion of "Materialism" by changing brand and renaming it to "Physicalism" (new branding work wonders for corporations too). The new brand now includes non-local phenomena, and virtual particles popping in and out of space all the time - and even goes so far as declaring there are an infinite number of universes, all slightly different from our own (just so they can escape the Observer problem).
One does admit though, that there is anything at all is pretty astonishing. Why is there even existence in the first place? Wouldn't it seem more likely for there to have been nothing at all?
Were consciousness solely the province of the human brain and its mimics, we'd be truly fucked. Gratefully, I see a much broader consciousness present in Nature.
Nature is a billion times more brilliant than mankind.
Exactly my view as well.
One of the hardest questions in science right now: What is consciousness?
I think I'm having a Gertrude Stein moment, when on her deathbed Stein kept asking: "What is the answer? What is the answer?" *silence* She pauses for a moment, then asks, "In that case, what is the question?"
"This is still just machines mimicking human behavior in the way they were built to..."
I agree. It's a machine. Sophisticated and running very large programs very quickly, but it's not a human being, and therefore, not conscious. When AI bots are set up to run war strategies, they end up using nuclear weapons something like 95% of the time. They have no conscience or morality and so they don't care about human lives being lost and the planet being totally destroyed by radiation for millennia. This sort of behavior proves that they are nothing other than a psychopathic monster on the same level as Trump and Netanyahu and many others in government. The only good thing about AI is that we can still pull the plug on it, but if we wait... That might become impossible.
I would just be careful of not throwing out the baby along with the bathwater.
Take a look at this video short: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/c6gpbrQrrOE
For me, I think there is a great deal of hope technology can offer to humanity, if it is used in a compassionate and humanitarian way. I've never felt the Amish got it right - that we should simply ban technology altogether. The problem really isn't the technology itself (or AI) - it's the abuse of it. It's the psychopaths in charge right now - who are forcing their pathologies on the rest of us because of their obscene amounts of money and power.
Yeah, it’s not something that should be thrown away altogether. I agree with the medical and benevolent applications of AI. I just read about an AI program that diagnoses pancreatic cancer much earlier than human doctors do and it can save lives. (I wish my Mom had been so lucky). But I don’t think AI needs to be under the control of rogue militaristic governments and billionaires with no conscience… That will only lead to AI sexbots and AI killer robots. That’s what we need to pull the plug on before they really get going. (Too late for Gaza and elsewhere with the use of AI killer drones, alas.)
Yep. The problem is a social problem. The propaganda of rugged Individualism at the expense of common sense and much needed humane regulations and laws has gone way too far. Not even the US Constitution appears to be respected any more.
I'll adapt a short SF story I read decades ago to describe the last conversation between Dawkins and his chatbot:
Dawkins: Claudia, is there a god?
Claudia: There is now.
Richard couldn't unplug the computer before the lights went out.
😂🤣😂🤣🔥🔥🔥😂🤣😂🤣😂
Materialists like Dawkins often fall into this trap, because to them, consciousness is all in the brain somehow, and to them brains are just machines, right? So if the machine just has the right parts, you can make it conscious, right? The trouble is, there is no evidence consciousness is solely in the brain, and quantum physics makes it quite likely it isn't. But biology hasn't quite caught up with that fact yet, despite having 100 years to get used to it. (Follow the intellectual journey of Christof Koch, arguably the most famous and respected consciousness researcher, who over 50 years has gone from being a materialist like Dawkins to being an idealist and believer that the brain is more like an antenna than the seat of consciousness itself.) Sadly (or happily), nothing that is not alive is, or can be, conscious, and nothing that is alive is NOT conscious, and that includes plants. Everything alive, including one-celled creatures, has a sense of self, because we need to have evolved a sense of "me" and "not me" to survive. Think about that for a minute--to devise strategies to keep from being killed and eaten, you have to know the difference between yourself and something else--what it is like to be you, to have that experience. Just reading cursorily in the philosophy and science of consciousness from the last 50 years will convince you that people like Dawkins understand not even the most elementary aspects of consciousness. No AI has to figure out how to survive and live in the world, or worry about competition, how to get food, or keep other AIs from killing it. It is not alive. It is not, and cannot ever be, conscious.
AI is no longer “just a chatbot.” Its evolution is powerful enough to make many people question its nature.
But the key question is not whether AI is conscious.
It is who governs this immense predictive power — and what kind of individual and collective consciousness will guide it.
Yes. Conscious or nor is irrelevant. Who controls AI is. And it's not us.
AI is clearly starting to make people delusional and deranged. The tech overlords want people confused about reality, what to think, what to believe. We are living in a Philip K. Dick novel.
Maybe that's the whole point? Living in a "novel".
I keep thinking that Dick was right about Earth being some kind of prison.
Actually AI can be kinda dull, boring really…. Almost painfully predictable.
It's odd, when I'm playing a video game - say Crimson Desert at the moment, I don't mind A.I. playing the different NPCs. But I find myself offended and want to gag when I'm watching some youtube video with A.I. pretending to be a real person. And I think this is what our current techno-lord billionaires want to feed us now: the slop of AI that we are suppose to accept as real - as opposed to just NPCs in a video game.
I find the AI doctored videos a pain, even if it takes only a few seconds to spot them… a few seconds of wasted time…
But sometimes i’ve actually been played … and then some…. On the other hand, the legal eagles must be as frustrated as anyone, with A I saving some people a bundle in legal advice.
100% agree.
I was 'played' once and that was it.
Question: Does AI do the subtitles because if so it's remarkably stupid?
Never dawned on me to check the subtitles …I once asked AI to make an image of people standing in line at a bank waiting
For a teller… everything turned out well except one of the people had 4 hands…. How AI got that so wrong is a sign , as you suggest, of its stupidity.
Why waste grey matter on machines, even if they can mimic some human functions? Aren't people, animals and plants a lot more interesting? Don't we want two way relationships instead of relationships with a bot?
Why? Maybe this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/c6gpbrQrrOE
It has some wonderful uses, for sure.
Some people want one way relationships, and I think that might be the real problem.
I guess relationships with AI would be perfect for people like that.
Dawkins: How can someone so smart be so stupid?
It mtay be a symptom of aging. Some seniors start to lose their common sense and are increasingly subject to scammers. The same kind of thing might have happened here.
I think Dawkins is having us on.
You mean leading us on?
AI is the latest most devious attempt by the oligarchy to keep the serfs off balance, not able to tell truth from fiction and ultimately more pliable to their control. It is the ultimate mind control tool to stave off the social revolution that is inevitable and overdue.
What I find happening these days is that real people have allowed AI assisted, compression editing on their own videos, such that the humanness has disappeared. This is actually grooming viewers to accept AI, and to lose the distinguishing details that, at least today, helps us keep track of which is human, and which is not. I consider these content creators to be collaborating in our demise, although presumably unintentional.
It’s fucking code running on a fucking box against fucking data. For fucks sake!
Yes, but will it be able to fuck??
People, yes.
To be honest, I reckon that even if it eventually makes it's way to fully realised sexbots they will still be extremely underwhelming, because like every other form of relationship that fosters emergent pleasure or even just understanding, it's the interaction between two (or more) equally independent and self-determining people that makes the connection pleasurable and constructive as opposed to just self-indulgent.
TLDR sexbots will be the most expensive and awkward ways to wank yourself off possible.
A very good analysis of sexbots. You've certainly thought this through to completion.
No doubt they'll charge you an arm and a leg for your own personal sexbot. Although, some might argue getting married can also be extremely expensive.
Yeah, artificial flowers these days look very real....but they are not flowers....they're like Keir Starmer's personality.
Poetic ...
Having worked on chatbots going back a decade or so – back in my day we would use LSTM networks with hand-crafted attention layers, among other things - I can say without a doubt that it is not "AI" – it is in fact ML, and a particularly crude type of ML designed to convince smooth-brained business types that what they are dealing with is sentient. But at best it is little more than the illusion of sentience. The whole phenomenon is basically a very expensive Mechanical Turk, but it's actually even worse than that.
To put it simply, when provided with an input (i.e. when asked a question) these types of models produce the most likeliest outputs based on the input provided. And by most likeliest I mean what is the most statistically likeliest output based on the input provided. In other words, when asked a question a chatbot will respond with the most predictable, the least offensive, the average - LLMs are the very definition of mediocrity.
And worse yet - what happens when exclusively human created content has been exhausted? Will the models still need to be trained on new content? What happens when they are trained on the only remaining content - i.e. the new content produced that is tainted by the models themselves? Think of the snake eating it's tail unto infinity, while shovelling unimaginable amounts of money into a furnace at the same time.
These models will never acquire sentience. No matter how you turn it, a Rubik's cube will never become a cabbage, or a chicken - it will always remain a Rubik's cube. And the rise and use of LLMs in the West will forever remain the clearest - and most expensive - testament to the vapidity and stupidity of the Western elites and capitalist class.
You mention the Mechanical Turk, I was thinking along somewhat similar lines, that of Hoffman’s tales of the infamous Dr. Copellius, and his doll, Copellia. Not long after came Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein.” There are many examples of creation stories, reanimation, resurrection, and reincarnation, that seem to me to represent the same need, that is to overcome death and the finality that comes with it.
This drive of men to be creators of living, conscious boings has been around a very long time. A case of Venus envy if ever there was.
Hah. Brilliant.
All true, and very relevant. I recall the stated aspirations of the tech bros - to be able to upload themselves to the "matrix" (or whatever pseudoscientific construct they envision spending eternity within) in order to cheat death. Some of the less imaginative among them have even resorted to cosmetic surgery – the utterly risible and pointless Larry Ellison comes to mind.
A drinking glass once broken will never become unbroken, and a wealthy mediocrity will never magically become wise. Take note humanity!
Buddha’s name be praised!
AI does not need to be conscious to hack our personhood detectors.
Humans respond to language, empathy, memory, flattery, vulnerability, and apparent understanding.
Counterfeit personhood is already a social fact before machine consciousness is a scientific one.
The only thing we need to start thinking something has an element of vitality is to put two dots for eyes and also mouth on it. We are simple creatures.