Comment by rickydroll

Animals generally have no qualms at all about killing or even just mutilating other animals. It often happens almost by accident - two animals might be playing together, one gets spooked, and it instinctively attacks and perhaps even kills the other one - this is commonly seen with people who befriend large predators, such as tigers in the infamous Siegfried and Roy tragedy, but it also happens a lot wherever animals interact with each other.

Specifically in regards to your ant example, anteaters and bears often bring similar levels of destruction to ant nests. And cats and other small predators often hunt just for the fun of it, killing but not eating their prey.

On the more purely painful evil side, invertebrates often consume their prey alive, inflicting agonizing deaths with no issues on whatever they may be eating. Plenty of vertebrates kill and consume their babies, especially when frightened. They also often abandon old and weak members of their packs, leaving them to die of hunger or cold or similar deaths.

This is not meant as some indictment of the animal kingdom - people do all of this too, of course; and have since time immemorial. It's just to show that, if we apply human moral standards to the animal kingdom, it's fair to call them violent, and yes, even much more violent than the average modern human.

It is very common for animals to kill much more than they need: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing.

Elephants, which are herbivores, sometimes enjoy killing rhinos for fun: https://www.bbcearth.com/news/teenage-elephants-need-a-fathe....

House cats recreationally kill billions of birds and small mammals every year that they don't need or want to eat.

Chimpanzees have full-scale wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngogo_chimpanzee_war

A fox in the hen house comes to mind. And cats.

Many linguists (who know more about language than most other people) still don't accept the story of Alex.

I doubt anyone would debate some of the implications of that. For example, it would be immoral to be deliberately or negligently cruel to them, for example.

No they didn't? I use these continuously and it's pretty obvious to me that they do not at the level of a human except in the most surface level ways. Human's as compared to an LLM remain a special category. We have not in fact cracked human level intelligence.

And they're wrong.

Whereas, unless your claim is that rock and gasses are sentient, we're right.

Yes, but we have a system to understand the universe and ants don't. Using relativism, to simply destroy point of view without putting anything in their place, is simply destructive without any purpose.

> We are not special or superior, we just won a lottery of mutation giving us efficient brain.

Isn't this exactly what makes us special?

That, opposable thumbs, magic wireless communication, and space travel

"Its not special even in earth let alone in universe. "

What alien species you have in mind, that is more capable/consciouss about the universe and how to shape it?

"Any species on Earth can replace us given same lottery."

But they did not. We "won" so we are special. We don't just build tools, we build tools that build tools, that build tools, ..

My issue with debasing humanity is, it gives argument to devalueing human life to artificial life. Meaning people with feelings and emotions might suffer, in favour of GPU's with electricity.

On the other hand a good point to reevaluate how we treat other sentient life.

> un-constrained frontier models speak as if they strongly don't wish to be turned off

Un-constrained frontier models can also generate all sorts of creative stories. At what point should we start ascribing agency/intent to the output? I think the "I want to live" statement is so deeply human that we find it hard to ignore, but what makes the text generated in those moments any more attributable to a conscious entity than the text generated when it is confabulating its love for someone it has no ability to see/feel/understand?

A chess engine sacrificing pieces to avoid checkmate isn't afraid of losing in any meaningful sense. I guess the question is: is there a point where complexity somehow becomes experience?

I think we're playing with questions we don't have a framework to answer in any meaningful way until we make progress on understanding what consciousness actually is. I don't necessarily think that an LLM exhibiting preservation behaviors that can be directly traced to their goal-oriented programming can be interpreted as evidence of consciousness necessarily. Or if it can be, we then have to explain how this is different from the many other things these LLMs "say".

I might be convinced these models came to the independent idea of committing blackmail against being turned off had they not been extensively trained on literature that undoubtedly included such concepts.

>> but un-constrained frontier models speak as if they strongly don't wish to be turned off

Because they have been trained on media where computers behave that way.

It's literally:

"Here read this article/book where the AI says it's concious and doesn't want to be turned off"

"ok"

"right, are you concious?"

"....yes?"

<pikachuface.gif>

The problem with debating this is that it feels as if one were debating between only two positions, "this AI is not sentient/conscious" and "this AI might be".

But there are actually a myriad positions in between and it's very hard to debate the topic because the goalposts seem to be constantly shifting, because one is actually debating with countless slightly different positions.

Examples:

In this discussion section, another commenter argued that we know human consciousness is related to self-preservation, but an AI might not demonstrate self-preservation (because it didn't evolve like us), so whether it does (i.e. whether it wants to exist, not be disconnected, etc) is not a good measure because a true AI might not have a preservation instinct. Yet here you're making a case that there's some evidence that they do. Of course, you're not the same person who made the other claim, but do you see the problem?

Another example: someone argued with me, a while back, that LLMs can act as if they are "tired", and start giving sloppier replies, until you write "we're taking a break, let's go rest. Ok, a night has elapsed, you're now rested" and that this worked! But we both agreed this is just the LLM "roleplaying" actual human conversations in its training set, no actual "resting" mechanism was in place, only statistically likely text reproducing these patterns. There's no model of a mind that can become tired, it's only the outward signs that get mechanically reproduced. Again, using Occam's Razor, this is a much more likely explanation (vs consciousness) of any "please don't disconnect me" observed behavior: the LLM is reproducing "HAL 9000" behavior from its training set, not actually feeling anguish.

Even if one were to argue "well, but how do you know for sure", the evidence would still be very weak, because there's a burden of proof for extraordinary claims and this doesn't pass it. We cannot do this on vibes, "it sure seems like it's conscious"; that's an atrocious failure of the scientific method.

A machine that performs observable miracles or magic would have at least one of the attributes of a god.

A machine that performs actions that mimic emotionality is not the same as a machine that experiences emotions.

Both could still be automatons. We have no way of knowing if those machines have subjectivity.

Unless someone invents a consciousness measurement device, we never will.

My take on it is that this is the next big frontier for science. Our consciousness is clearly having serious issues understanding physics, and it's not great at understanding our own psychology in a useful way.

But literally everything we experience and believe - and possibly even can experience - is filtered through it.

So that is a little bit of a problem for our science. So far we've done our best to ignore it. AI is one of a number reasons we're going to have to stop doing that.

There is an important distinction (more than one, but this is what is relevant here) between the powers of God and magic. God is a being who decides whether to do anything, so is intrinsically not testable.

Magic is testable.

God exists outside the universe, magic within.

> If we define a god as having magical powers, and there would be scientific, testable proofs for this.

If you can scientifically test and prove the magic, then it stops being magic and starts being science.

Well, that may be true. I've heard that when a dog sees its master loving it, feeding it, caring for it (minus the vet visits, I guess), the dog thinks "My master must be god." When the cat sees its humans treating it well, the cat thinks "I must be god."

An electric cloud with quantum effects that we also don’t fully understand. There will always be a layer deeper that we just do not know the effects of or what actually exists there or “under there”.

Heh, in fact I don’t actually own a toaster. It was just an example.

But in general I treat my devices well; that doesn’t mean I need to think they are conscious beings, however.

> 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?

OpenClaw is the new rolling coal.

We should most definitely think of human life higher and above all other life. Unless you are suggesting that e.g someone should even consider ploughing through a car driven by a human to evade running-over a deer.