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Notes -
The irony being, our attempts at AI are now all circling around "are they really conscious or beginning to be?" because in order to be agentic, they have to want things, and in order to want things, there has to be something there to do the wanting.
Watt's Very Smart Machine is perfectly fine, I don't think machines are or will be conscious. So load it up with programming about being Very Smart and winning at trading on the stock market or whatever, sure. But that's not at all the same thing as "now invent an entire system from scratch to be part of"; the AIs are operating in the system we humans have created. Ex nihilo, why would they care about scientific discoveries or whatever, before we asked them to think about these things?
To get back to the analogy with sharks, I don't think sharks are conscious, or very much if at all. They don't have to be, they're optimised for what they do and they do it so well they really haven't had to evolve with the times. So murder machine vampires? Yeah, sure, why not. Hyper-intelligent, though? Not needed if not conscious and if optimised to be murder machines. Very finely tuned to be the optimum at being murder machines in their environment might look like hyper-intelligence but I think instinct would be doing most of the heavy lifting there.
But Watts wants these creatures in order to show that humans are a mistake, so let him have his toys.
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