Comment by Philpax
7 months ago
> We should pause to note that a Clippy2 still doesn’t really think or plan. It’s not really conscious. It is just an unfathomably vast pile of numbers produced by mindless optimization starting from a small seed program that could be written on a few pages. It has no qualia, no intentionality, no true self-awareness, no grounding in a rich multimodal real-world process of cognitive development yielding detailed representations and powerful causal models of reality which all lead to the utter sublimeness of what it means to be human; it cannot ‘want’ anything beyond maximizing a mechanical reward score, which does not come close to capturing the rich flexibility of human desires, or historical Eurocentric contingency of such conceptualizations, which are, at root, problematically Cartesian. When it ‘plans’, it would be more accurate to say it fake-plans; when it ‘learns’, it fake-learns; when it ‘thinks’, it is just interpolating between memorized data points in a high-dimensional space, and any interpretation of such fake-thoughts as real thoughts is highly misleading; when it takes ‘actions’, they are fake-actions optimizing a fake-learned fake-world, and are not real actions, any more than the people in a simulated rainstorm really get wet, rather than fake-wet. (The deaths, however, are real.)
what is the relevance of the quoted passage here? its relation to parent seems unclear to me.
His point is that while we're over here arguing over whether a particular AI is "really" doing certain things (e.g. knows what it's doing), it can still cause tremendous harm if it optimizes or hallucinates in just the right way.
It doesn't need qualia or consciousness, it needs goal-seeking behaviours - which are much easier to generate, either deliberately or by accident.
There's a fundamental confusion in AI discussions between goal-seeking, introspection, self-awareness, and intelligence.
Those are all completely different things. Systems can demonstrate any or all of them.
The problem here is that as soon as you get three conditions - independent self-replication, random variation, and an environment that selects for certain behaviours - you've created evolution.
Can these systems self-replicate? Not yet. But putting AI in everything makes the odds of accidental self-replication much higher. Once self-replication happens it's almost certain to spread, and to kick-start selection which will select for more robust self-replication.
And there you have your goal-seeking - in the environment as a whole.