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Okay it's Sunday so I'm going tp try my hand at a low-stakes OP. Apparently Richard Dawkins thinks Claude is conscious. The reaction seems to universally be that he's a dumb old boomer making a fool of himself and I guess that's true. I'm not prepared to come to his defense on it.
Still, I can't help noticing that we totally have what most people would have cheerfully considered "sentient computers" in a sci-fi movie at any point before they were actually invented. Don't get me wrong, I understand that the reality of AI technology has turned out differently than what a lot of people expected. I understand its limitations, and I recognize that the apparent goalpost-moving isn't necessarily cynical. But boy those goalposts sure have been flying down the fucking field ever since this stopped being hypothetical and infinite money hit the table.
As a layman, I just want to put it out there: Anti AI consciousness people, you haven't lost me, but I wish you were making better arguments. Every time I hear about qualia my eyes start to glaze over. Unfalsifiable philosophical constructs and arbitrary opinion on where they might "exist" are not the kind of reassurance I'm looking for when machines are getting this convincing.
This seems to be the main piece of criticism floating around out there about Dawkins on this subject, and I find it kind of shit.
This seems to be all the author has to say on the actual subject. "Just trust me bro, I'm the feelings detector and I say no." Garbage. Come on guys, think ahead. Right now it's still mostly a boring tool, but they're just going to get smaller, and cheaper, and put into robots, and put into peoples houses. You need to have more than this in terms of argument, and it needs to be comprehensible to normal people, or sooner or later the right toy is going to come down the pipe and one-shot society. Dawkins might be a dumb old boomer, but if you lose everyone dumber than him the game is beyond over.
The archive link wouldn’t load for me so I can’t go in-depth about Dawkin’s viewpoint, but Gary Marcus is a hack who has been saying deep learning can’t possibly work for years, and now pivoted to shallow dismissals of LLMs and continually moving the goalposts when they inevitably beat his test questions “proving” they don’t have X capability.
I don’t see any reason to dismiss the possibility that LLMs have a form of consciousness, albeit extremely different from our own. It’s not something you can really test, the only consciousness that I can be sure of exists is my own, but I’m not sophistic enough to believe in philosophical zombies. If humans are conscious, then so are chimpanzees, dogs, and all the way down to nematodes. And if C. elegans with its 302 neurons experiences (some form of) consciousness, why not a trillion parameter LLM?
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