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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.
Given my great dislike of Dawkins, I have no objection to seeing him make a fool of himself. But to be fair, little as I want to be fair, deciding that machine consciousness can exist is part of his entire worldview by necessity. Humans aren't special, we're just animals, there are no souls or magic non-material bits to differentiate us from the rest of life on earth, the brain is the mind and the mind is the brain, and if consciousness can arise by evolution in the lump of meat between our ears, there is no reason it can't also arise in complex mechanical systems like Claude.
Do go on.
I've long thought he was too arrogant in how he presented himself (the Four Horsemen thing was silly but hey, this is how you generate online content and interaction). He did seem to believe his own publicity rather too much, unlike Hitchens who at least was abrasive enough that a damn good row could be had by all parties but there would be no flouncing off. I know privilege is a terrible term, but Dawkins is privileged and never seems to have recognised or acknowledged that. Elevatorgate was a storm in a teacup, but by the same token, I could see why a woman in a strange place very late at night might not feel the safest with a guy putting forwards 'come have sex with me' (and the amount of "he only asked her back for coffee! that just means he was offering her a cup of coffee!" disclaimers I saw made me even more cynical), and Dawkins of all fucking people evoking Muslim women while he lectured about how this woman was over-reacting because she was white Westerner was too richly ironic. I've mentioned him commenting on the North so you know my reaction there.
Terry Eagleton's takedown was funny, at least to me. Dawkins has sort of faded into the background now along with New Atheism but the guy has his own little fanclub and continues to stick his nose in to various topics regardless of whether or not he has anything useful to say. His fifteen minutes are up but he doesn't realise that.
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