Comment by tompark
7 hours ago
A belief: Just as human exceptionalism misled us to believe in a geocentric universe, we'll discover we've been wrong about consciousness too. That is, non-human animals have degrees of consciousness, and we'll see that it's possible for machines too.
A correlated belief: AGI is coming, eventually, AI technology will get there before climate change and economic pressures stop it from happening.
An obvious observation: Large scale upheaval doesn't affect everyone to the same degree or even in the same direction. Some people and companies actually prospered during the Great Depression. People died and suffered during wars and plagues, while others gained advantage and opportunity -- often due to circumstances and chance, but sometimes beliefs/decisions/actions/preparation made a difference.
An example of my bias: during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.
It's a way bigger leap to go from "non-human animals have degrees of consciousness" to "and we'll see that it's possible for machines too" than it is to go from "humans are conscious" to "non-human animals have degrees of consciousness".
The latter is a comparison of biological organism : biological organism, both of which are the outcomes of hundreds of millions of years of evolution; the former is biological organism : inanimate object.
You're right. It's a belief, could be wrong.
> during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.
I wish you were more wrong about that than you ended up being. A lot of companies pushed hard to bring people back to the office. Has made me disinclined to want to look for a new job because of it, since I can work from home all but a few days out of the year here.
The few times I have gone to the office, I commute for 1.5 hours each way, pay $20+ for a parking spot (or take the bus and spend $10 round trip), just to sit at a random desk and either work on my laptop or sit in on Teams/Slack calls anyway, maybe chat with 1-2 people for a few minutes in person over the course of the day. The only highlight of the day is getting to try a different restaurant than usual for lunch. Why bother?
Yeah. I hate commutes like that. I had a job where the commute was 30 min bike or bus to Caltrain then 1-1.5 hour train. It was expensive and ate 3-4 hrs/day.
But after being unemployed almost two years, would do that commute again if I had to.
Following Michael Levin’s work, one could argue that small collections of skin cells are conscious. AI tech has a long way to go until it’s autonomous and self-motivated.
Not enough people are talking about the 1st point
Learning that it’s all just computation has some uncomfortable philosophical implications, perhaps religious too