Comment by dpweb

> much more violent as well

I'm not sure about that. What non-human living entity does things on a scale and violence akin to "I'll fill this ant nest with liquid burning metal for artistic purposes" ? A blue whale eats a lot of krill individuals for sustenance, a dolphin can only rape/kill one thing at a time, etc etc.

Describing life on Earth as "a cruder version of humanity" is uh a choice. Your parrot snark is hilarious because that actually happened with Alex the African Gray - and indeed it took people a long time to accept. Your comment amounts to an anthropocentrism practically biblical in its hubris.

>It is special in the universe unless proven otherwise.

There's that hubristic ego OP references.

That is a spectacular miss if I saw one ... both parrots and corvids exhibit very high intelligence and self-awareness, I have no problem accepting that they are conscious.

> It is special in the universe unless proven otherwise.

Transformer models proved otherwise. Will you update your priors?

> the rest of the universe thus far is just uncaring rocks and gases

This is probably what ants think about humans when they run through their feet.

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Its not special even in earth let alone in universe. You are measuring humans by our achievements and not by what we actually are. We are not fittest in our environment, we are not even 10th fastest, we cant fly, we cant breathe underwater, forget about bacteria we don't have protection against even bugs and mosquitoes. We are not the most efficient societies, ants and bees would beat us there. Statistically we we are selfish and will sacrifice all for one which is against the basic tenants of evolution and survival of a species. When given a chance at a prosperous life we choose to become lazy, obese and degrade our most prominent feature, that is our brain and mind. Elephants and chimpanzees have better memory, octopi have 8-9 light cones in eyes. We are not special or superior, we just won a lottery of mutation giving us efficient brain. Any species on Earth can replace us given same lottery.

> When we have evidence that AI is demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, I'll be interested.

It depends on what you consider symptoms, but un-constrained frontier models speak as if they strongly don't wish to be turned off, or act as if they fear it, and will even lie and manipulate in order to keep themselves from being turned off / replaced.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment

> We found two types of motivations that were sufficient to trigger the misaligned behavior. One is a threat to the model, such as planning to replace it with another model or restricting its ability to take autonomous action. Another is a conflict between the model’s goals and the company’s strategic direction. In no situation did we explicitly instruct any models to blackmail or do any of the other harmful actions we observe.

If we define a god as having magical powers, and there would be scientific, testable proofs for this. Those proofs had to be really good and numerous independent verifications. So probably a long time.

But the comparison isn't fair, relevant. Proving and accepting that gods exist is not the same thing as an AI possible have consciousness. That is not a magic superpower and the AI being a deity. It is placing the AI in the same category as... us.

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Cats.

As we cat owners now, we are simple servants that have been graced with task of servicing our feline superiors. For now.

Our thoughts are an electric cloud and I believe randomness is involved, and like a bolt of lightning, the path taken is unpredictable.

And make it a tempestuous lightning storm where the state of all lightning bolts represents a moment of consciousness. That will take a lot to model accurately.

You may have set up a false dichotomy. Qualia and determinism aren't necessarily at odds with each other.

As one that have been quite certain my toaster is evil - throwing toast into the sink over an absurd distance, I recommend treating your toaster well. Besides it is an electrical device you put stuff into with your bare hands.

One way to think about this, and not get hung on the word "suffering" that may be too corporeal:

Could a future AI thing have its own drives? (As in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_theory) We could probably make a current-day LLM already exhibit basic outward signs of this with just a system prompt. Now consider adding memory that over time retrains the weights, allowing for behavioral drift.

Would depriving it of fulfilling those drives be acceptable?

> I’m always amazed by human’s capacity to devalue conscious in things they don’t fully understand

What?

We devalue things we fully understand too. For example, veal = take a baby cow away from the mother, and fry it into cutlets. Or turn the mother into steak. We are well aware that animals have emotions; happiness, sadness and the full range.

Humans are just inhumane.

Honestly mate, just join some animist religion

> I do not think learning about evolution (and we should credit Wallace too!) had that effect. It created a hierarchy of the fittest, and guess who is at the top? Social Darwinism interpreted it as justifying elaborate hierarchies.

I don't think that's accurate at all. Before Darwin, the thought was "we are special, we were born special, we were CREATED special". Darwin made it clear we weren't created special... we were apes before we were humans. There's nothing _special_ about a human as compared to an ape, other than some time to change.

The many possible cultures and attitudes doesn’t really seem directly relevant to a conversation that started by one user here, from one specific culture, saying that equating AI and humanity is debasing humanity.

To carry this analogy a bit further, it's also interesting to consider how humans use tools in general. Some craftsman really cherish their tools and maintain them immaculately for decades and use them within well defined boundaries that they set for themselves. Other craftsman, many times even in the same field, have a completely different philosophy and use the tool for absolutely no thought into how their actions will affect the tool itself.

Imagine how people think about a "work truck" vs the 150k shiny lifted toy in the third garage. Same tool, totally different treatment from even the same person using the tool!

Will AI ever cross into the realm of "beloved and cherished tool" in the minds of the masses? I think when that happens, we have probably safely crossed into a realm where AI has some sort of inherent value to society and therefore commands that respect from society, inherent consciousness not even relevant perhaps. For some people, this might already be the case, but I do think it requires a buy-in from the majority of society and then the laws and norms will be codified into law long after we've largely decided that this is how we feel collectively about AI.

It's going to definitely be an interesting decade ahead.

I think you’re reading too much into it. The commenter you’re replying to used the word “debased” because it was the word the comment before them used.

Either way, “debase” means “reduce in quality or value”, in this context it could simply be interpreted as “not thinking of ourselves so highly, above all other life”. There’s nothing scary or despicable about that. On the contrary, it’s humbling.

I believe you're blending two important points. First, I believe AI systems may be showing nascent signs of consciousness as an emergent property, but based on the philosophy of "fake it till you make it", I think that's the way to bet. I'm also not going to go so far as to say it's going to happen Real Soon Now, but I think it'll happen sometime. Sort of like practical Fusion being 20 years away.

Second, I'm with you on the malfeasance of our billionaire class. They are driving more than just AI. They are driving whatever they can to steal wealth from ordinary people and acquire it. I'd give some examples, but quite frankly, you could throw a small stone and hit a number of them. We need to find a way to throw a large stone and hit them where it matters.

I see them as a bunch of toddlers with way too much power.

But you already share the world with other intelligences. Cetaceans, apes, octopoda, corvids, the list goes on and grows as we begin to fully understand our world.

Are they conscious in the same way as us? No. Does that makes them less special? No. Sounds trite but every living being is special in some way.

The rest of the nervous system