Comment by RVuRnvbM2e
14 hours ago
It is terribly sad when someone undeniably brilliant in a particular field fails to recognize their own incompetence in other areas - in this case mistaking advanced technology for magic.
14 hours ago
It is terribly sad when someone undeniably brilliant in a particular field fails to recognize their own incompetence in other areas - in this case mistaking advanced technology for magic.
We're going to see increasing numbers of older famous (non computer savvy) figures that we have respected follow his views on this. It's like seeing your favourite celebrity sell out an shill crypto coins, all a bit sad.
Thinking positively, it could just be newsworthy because he is famous and he so misses the mark. Other older famous people might agree with us but that's not news.
Given that Dawkins is a biologist in his 80s, I'm more disposed towards being charitable than I am when people actively involved in developing LLMs let themselves get bamboozled.
I don't think you read carefully what he said. At the end he gave three quite interesting thoughts about what might be true assuming LLMs are less conscious than we are (i.e. assuming our consciousness is not a purely algorithmic phenomenon as we obviously know LLMs are).
Are you implying consciousness is magic? Well, I wouldn't disagree with that really.
the problem is asking if ai is conscious is like asking does ai have a soul. it is not a scientific question and presupposes humans are 'conscious' without even defining the term. to me it is 100% irrelevant if ai is conscious and all discussions about it are based on fallacies and assumptions. what matters to me about ai and matters to other people as well in terms of theory of mind about others is: can i predict how it will work. is it useful. thats it. consciouness is a sophist question with no scientific resolution available and no moral weight until it has consequences.
Good - I was scanning down to see if anyone was going to say this.
That's always been Dawkins's shtick though. As an atheist I've generally found him a bit embarrassing
Where does he say it's magic?
LLMs are just math run on your CPU. Autocomplete. Sometimes very useful autocomplete, but still just autocomplete.
To imply it could be conscious requires something else, here the comment uses the phrase magic to fill that gap - since we must agree that a CPU is not conscious on it's own (else everything our computer does would be conscious).
A human brain is not conscious on its own.
Many things the human brain does don’t rise to the level of conscious awareness.
It remains to be seen whether a human brain can be conscious in a jar. If it can, then I’d still argue that some sub-unit of the whole brain is not conscious on its own, similarly a GPU running a GPT probably isn’t conscious, but there may be some scale of number of GPUs running software that might give rise to consciousness as an emergent ability.
GTP’s have exhibited emergent abilities as scale increased dramatically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Emergent_behavior
It sound like you believe in magic then? What is this "something else" to consciousness that can't be done with sufficiently advanced math?
They stopped being autocomplete years ago with RLHF
Neurons are just summing up their inputs according to the laws of chemistry. What's the difference?
6 replies →
So, how is consciousness generated?
Not simply by reading every word ever written by a conscious being and learning to reproduce them with high probability.
At least, that’s certainly not how I got here.
Think of the poor Xerox machines.