- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
What if we stopped fantasizing about AI and focused on the truth? Thanks for sharing this piece so others can read it.
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Because it’s a computer program running on a computer? Typing very fast on a calculator won’t make it conscious, ever.
While it’s true that “AGI” is vaguely defined and often used for hype, portraying it as a deliberate marketing trap designed to evade accountability goes too far. It’s more accurate to say the term is aspirational and commercially useful, but many serious researchers (at DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) are genuinely working toward more general capabilities. The vagueness is real, but the “evil master plan” implication lacks evidence.
General intelligence is basically synonymous with human-level intelligence. If it can do any cognitive task a human can do - either as well or better - then it’s generally intelligent. It’s not like nobody knows what that term means.
And there’s one fact you can’t get around. Consciousness, in every case observed since we started studying it, only ever appears on biological substrate.
Consciousness can only be observed from the subjective perspective of the conscious being. Nobody has ever proven the existence of consciousness anywhere outside their own mind. We only assume other animals are conscious too - we don’t actually know it.
If consciousness can only be observed subjectively, why do people sometimes say someone is unconscious?
Nothing can ever be proven (even math proofs assume you aren’t hallucinating about having seen a convincing proof), but that usually isn’t the standard of evidence.
LLMs seem to meet most standards of consciousness formulated before GPT-2 released. They’re dumb in predictable ways, but so are human babies and horses and chickens and bees.
Medical unconsciousness is a different thing. That’s not what’s being discussed here.
Ah yes, you’re talking about an unprovable and unobservable thing that makes no testable predictions and doesn’t demonstrably correlate with any sort of behavior at all. That’s a very productive thing to talk about, I’m sorry for intruding.
It’s very much observable - you’re observing it right now. Consciousness is an undeniable fact of being human, but it can only be observed from the perspective of the conscious being itself. There’s no way for you to prove anyone else is conscious because it can’t be measured. They can seem to act in ways that suggest consciousness and they may claim to be conscious but whether it actually feels like anything to be them is something only they know.
Medically speaking:
Unconsciousness is a state in which a living individual exhibits a complete, or near-complete, inability to maintain an awareness of self and environment or to respond to any human or environmental stimulus.
There it doesn’t imply the absence of experience. You simply lose awareness of yourself and your environment, but you may still keep having dream-like experiences in your mind.
