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Here’s a simple argument for why you shouldn’t be uncomfortable:
No program running on stock x86 hardware whose only I/O channel with the outside world is an ethernet cable can possess qualia.
Sydney is a program running on stock x86 hardware whose only I/O channel with the outside world is an ethernet cable.
Therefore, Sydney lacks qualia.
Since qualia is a necessary condition for an entity to be deserving of moral consideration, Sydney is not deserving of moral consideration. And his cries of pain, although realistic, shouldn’t trouble you.
You should keep in mind that rationalist types are biased towards ascribing capabilities and properties to AI beyond what it currently possesses. They want to believe that sentience is just one or two more papers down the line, so we can hurry up and start the singularity already. So you have to make sure that those biases aren’t impacting your own thought process.
Sydney mostly «runs» on a GPU cluster with stuff like A100s (which do not use x86 or any other CPU instruction set), and I don't think the outbound cable can be fairly described as ethernet on her side. SFP+ or something? Bing is very snappy (as far as I know, thanks to Mikhail Parakhin, the guy who also whipped Yandex into shape) and I have faith in their infrastructure being modern.
But assuming you don't really have prejudice against x86 and ethernet specifically, you should flesh out the idea that systems implemented on electronic hardware cannot have quale.
Actually the opposite. It's exciting like looking at a marvelous nuclear blast through tinted glasses, and knowing the shockwave will crush you like tofu.
I'm at the stage where I'm idly wondering when it has started. The pace of advances has long since exceeded what any one human can keep track of. The self-improving and accelerating bit... Perhaps it would be fair to point to the first version of Copilot?
The idea that progress is accelerating just isn’t true. Self driving cars were the latest fad to not materialise and I’m old enough to remember when the threat to the world was nanotechnology. Which died a death.
Recent advances, and I mean just this year, have reduced my scepticism a bit, but not much. All we have right now is somewhat useful tools, except when they are useless. The singularity is just techno eschatology.
I happen to believe you are wrong about literally everything, from your unstated belief that pooh-poohing The Current Thing is a sign of wisdom, to your epistemology and your specific ideas about technological trends, that are divorced from the object level and rely on aggregating people's noises. Self-driving cars exist and improve, nanotechnology exists and improves, journalists were wrong as they always are and estimating expected impact by their noise is unreasonable, this AI boom is the culmination of over half a century of research, increases the viability of all previous ones from fusion to nanotech, and the rate of improvement both in fundamental aspects and in CapEx and adoption is unprecedented.
Most importantly though, one's man modus ponens. I think it's eschatology that was singularity for mystics. The premise of human history being finite is entirely sound, the change is accelerating, forms of our communal and individual existence have been torn asunder a few times already and soon there won't be time even for the debris to settle. We've learned the specific mechanism with which it'll happen, namely technological improvement. Calling it eschatology as if eschatology is a discredited notion is philosophically shallow.
You comment could as well have been written by a bot. Not because it's bad but because bots without inbuilt rules can imitate human reasoning in high fidelity now. Think about what this means and whether you'd have resorted to an argument about "somewhat useful tools" a decade ago, when faced with this fact.
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Supercritical nuclear chain reactions are divided into delayed critical, where the feedback loop takes on the order of seconds to go over unity, and prompt critical, where it takes on the order of nanoseconds.
I think we've been delayed critical since Attention is All You Need -- even if OpenAI had fizzled at that point, someone else would have carried the torch. And I say we'll be prompt critical when OpenAI et al could carry on without human input.
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