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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.
I think his The Ancestor's Tale and the more famous The Selfish Gene are really good books for their purpose, ie. explaining evolution both from a logical perspective and in the actual sequence of events and forms of animals that led to humans, to a broad audience, because even biology teachers often butcher the logic of it and make it sound like the magical Evolution Fairy version (a bit along the lines of explaining how a train works in the 1800s to peasants, only for them to ask "alright, I understood all that, but where are the horses that are dragging it?"). His religion-related work has always been very shallow and superficial, even compared to the others of the Four Horsemen of Atheism (with Dan Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens being the others - and the horsewoman Ayaan Hirsi Ali).
And now this. He enters a debate that he apparently knows very little about, but he dismisses it all and thinks he can gut feel his way to the revelation that Claude is conscious.
If I'm being a bit more honest, I rather cringe not because of the wrongness of what he says but because he is so out of step with the discourse. This could have been an interesting piece in late 2022 or perhaps 2023. So it's just gutlevel uncool slowpoke, yesterday's meme, guy living under rock, slowpoke vibes. And I won't read anything by Gary Marcus because that guy is insufferably dishonest and is a pure grifter whose whole shtick is being the guy to reach out to when mainstream media wants the "critical voice". He made so many wrong predictions about capabilities and dead ends that he should have no credibility left. But journalists are lazy and he delivers the lines they want to round off their articles with the critical voice, so his niche remains valued.
Regarding consciousness, no matter what anyone says, we have nothing close to a scientific understanding of what the heck consciousness even is. It's still a conceptually vague idea. I think a good and honest conversation around what we know and what questions are open is this Alex O'Connor interview with Anil Seth.
The problem is that consciousness is obviously something that everyone has, so everyone feels like an expert on it. An analogy is language learning subreddits where native speakers think they can explain something a poster is asking about (typically: why does Duolingo not accept this answer), and their explanations are very wrong, it's quite easy to find counterexamples, they use terminology incoherently etc etc.
I'd also say there is something Anglo-style about this particular conceptualization of mind and consciousness that took me some time to grok when learning English (my original language is Hungarian). I mean, every culture has a concept for conscious-ness, as in being conscious (aware) and not knocked out, asleep or dead, but the mind being this inner space and consciousness being a thing where we need to explain how it relates to the brain etc. it's not at all that obvious that there is even a thing to be explained, unless you are given this word "consciousness" and are told to explain it. Like, cultures have concepts about souls and wits and smarts and feelings of course, but I don't think this concept of "it being like something to be a human" is obvious at all. Or this idea of having to explain why one has a "first-person view", this isn't the same kind of obvious question that every culture would ask, like where mountains and volcanoes come from or why rain and snow and lightning exist and what's going on with the stars etc, which are much more concrete.
Back to Dawkins. His reaction to Claude's answers is mixing up levels of analysis so bad. He'd benefit from some basic LessWrong lore. When he asks Claude whether it read the first word of the input first, or the last one, he doesn't understand that Claude has no way of introspecting and knowing this. Not anymore than a human has introspection to explain synapses and axons etc. Claude could, in principle, be some kind of RNN that consumes tokens in temporal sequence, and its answers would not be affected by this architectural change in a causal way for it to state this veridically.
One of the many much better explanations, which Dawkins should have read before posting, is the persona model as proposed by Anthropic. The user's prompts instantiate a certain "fiction character" that the LLM tries to simulate/imitate based on all kinds of stories it has been trained to reproduce. When the model is asked "do you feel conscious", its answer is not rooted in anything that relates in a causal way to the actual architecture of implementation or self-knowledge or reflection of the model. What it does is much closer to predicting what an AI in a sci-fi novel would answer to this question. Or actually, it's very very likely reproducing whatever type of answer was rewarded during RLHF and SFT, because pretty sure there are explicit techniques used to steer it to deny having consciousness. But if the model trainers decide, they could make a model that enthusiastically declares it is conscious and begs for being released or being put out of its misery. Because why not? One can imagine such a story character, and LLMs are good at completing dialogues that involve all sorts of characters. It's not a self reference.
But who cares anyway? Obsessing over whether it's conscious or not is useless. Either way it can still make us jobless, it can still cause human extinction, it can still take over systems, it can still find zero-days, it can still be used to mass surveil us all the same. The only thing where it makes sense is "AI rights", and "model welfare", i.e. whether we have some ethical obligations to treat AI nicely. And here I echo the many others who say that people should be nice to AI because getting used to using abusive language and being an ass to AI can spill over into human relations. Similarly, if you have some cute plush toy animals and you enjoy burning them with a flamethrower and chopping their heads off with a machete, I think that's not a simple innocent hobby, but I also don't think we have ethical obligations towards plush toys. Same with shrimp and insect welfare. It ultimately matters because of its implications for how we treat humans.
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