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Comment by beforeolives | Hacker News Reader

> The 21st century is in dire need of a Turing test for consciousness. AI is learning how to drive cars, diagnose lung cancer, and write its own computer programs. Intelligent conversation may be only a decade or two away, and future super-AI will not live in a vacuum.

Eh, all of this is kind of irrelevant for our current state of technology or for what we can reasonably expect in the next decade or two. You don't see many computer scientists making these arguments and it's for a good reason. This line of thinking usually comes from other fields (the author of the article is a neuroscientist) because they tend to vastly overestimate the similarities between humans and computers.

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> You don't see many computer scientists making these arguments and it's for a good reason.

This is silly and ridiculously judgmental - the primary reason computer scientists don’t usually make these arguments is the same reason that computer scientists don’t usually research the physics of transistors or supply chain issues in rare earth metals: computing is a complex cross-disciplinary undertaking and computer scientists have a specific job within that. It makes sense that questions about consciousness and the ethics of a potential future AI aren’t being addressed by people working on a tangible present AI.

The author’s point is that by (say) 2050 we will likely see AI asking unsettlingly “intelligent” questions and that it’s not premature to begin considering what signifies an AI as being an independent being that you can’t ethically “kill” by unplugging. Suggesting that the author is too stupid to understand the difference between brains and computers is unnecessarily insulting and a classic ad hominem. Their argument is quite legitimate.

> This is silly and ridiculously judgmental

No it really is not. Just watching this panel/Q&A at the 'Future of Life Institute', with Elon Musk and others answering the question "is some form of super-intelligence possible?", creeps me out (Musk comes out the most sane): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0962biiZa4

> The author’s point is that by (say) 2050 we will likely see AI asking unsettlingly “intelligent” questions

More unsettling than the questions of a young child? What unsettling questions could it ask according to you? I just do not see what you're getting at, at all.

The question that arises when I read comments like yours is: are some humans so alienated from themselves and others that they believe machines will be able to invent and do science better than humans can? I just don't see the use cases.

Really, can someone please explain to me what the point is in spending ludicrous amounts of scarce natural resources and time into this notion of creating a human-like AI, when we have so many other challenges we are facing: environmental pollution and poisoning, financialization of housing, e-waste and right-to-repair (should really be called 'right-to-poison' since companies today are basically legally allowed to pollute [1]), and privatized science and technology (Sci-Hub)?

If we do want to build a human-like AI, shouldn't we first try to create a system where all humans have equal and free access to the sum total of all inherited knowledge? There is so much gatekeeping going on today, and I would like us to talk about it more: education providers charge students hundreds of thousands of dollars each, we have property systems that allow scientific inventions (which are tax-payer funded) to be commoditized and then 'owned' and traded by one company - making scarce some knowledge [2], which, thanks to digital technology, doesn't have be scarce at all. Perpetuating this system is my definition of insanity.

edit: Sometimes I wonder: is this desire to create an AI is just an attempt to escape the grief these people feel from not finding enough connection with other humans in their lives? Capitalist realism [3] [4]. Is it therefore a desire to fulfil an unmet need for belonging? Have they been getting lost inside digital worlds and interfaces, and have they come to desire this digital substitute, over human connection, because it gives them more control over their lives? Control we don’t have when we are constantly in a stressful and toxic social/work environment?

It doesn’t help that AI is also often portrayed in a romantic light (Joaquin Phoenix and the movie ‘Her’, but also many Hollywood blockbuster sci-fi flicks. I can’t help but this is a place where life really is imitating art?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I

[2] https://time.com/4089171/mariana-mazzucato/

[3] http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=12841

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental...

> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/#__sec9...

Human have 86,000M and rats have 200M cortex neurons (x430)

> https://chatbotslife.com/is-gpt-3-the-adam-of-natural-langua...

"... the human brain has about 60 trillion parameters or about 300x more parameters than GPT-3"

We are approaching a rat brain processing power so consciousness should really be discussed ...

I would wait until you can discuss it with the AI.

Yes, but this is bullshit.

An atom has a few dozen parameters. Computers do not model the atoms of the brain, of which there would then need to be 10^many parameters.

This is only relevant because of the bullshit identification of really-existing neurones with a set of model paraterms that do not model them. It doesnt matter how many I have.

I can have a model of my sofa with a trillion parameters, that doesn't mean my PC will be comfortable to sit on.

For a system X to emulate a system Y, ie., participate causally in the relevant ways, it must be relevantly similar. Counting parameters here is meaningless.

What effects do the atom (or any underlying part) contribute to consciousness that parameters don't?

If are you making a statement about a sensor precision, like eyesight or skin touch, it does affect consciousness but not negate it.

My point is that a system X perfectly emulates a system Y if all of its parts are identical, that is, if Y has all the basic atoms of X in the same arrangement.

Anything short of that has to be saying that X is "like" Y in some relevant way. And here this has nothing to do with parameter count, complexity, or anything of this kind.

Here "X" has to be behaviourally similar to "Y".

Animal intelligence is essentially entirely concerned with managing animal bodies and their relationship to the environment; and secondarily, the environment. To do this requires a body (etc.).

No mathematical model over a dataset can emulate animal intelligence, because a mathematical model has no behaviour. A mathematical model can describe an animal, but a description is not an emulation: the formula E=MC^2 isnt a nuclear explosion.

A digital silicon machine instantiates a mathematical formula with an osciliating electric field. There is nothing about this electrical osciliation which behaves anything like animal intelligence.

> A digital silicon machine instantiates a mathematical formula with an oscillating electric field

Exactly! That is exactly what is done by a neuron, the brain building block. So I hope you can see why I think an AI can be close enough to simulate the brain, as we still not know the exact border of intelligence (and thus we may be closer than we think).

That isn't "exactly what is done by a neurone". It has nothing to do with it.

Sure, but if the simulation is starting to walk like a duck and talk like a duck, this argument runs out of gas very quickly.

The argument motivates why this alleged duck isn't walking and talking like a duck.

For sure, if it does, then it isn't relevant.

The "duck" here is a person, and "walking and talking" are literal. Where is the machine that participates in my environment, with me, imagines/believes/advices/speculates/cares about what I am doing? (And so on).

There is no such machine.

The "quacking" we have isn't the quacking of a duck. It's a stupid buzzer that has been mashed too many times and a foolish audience who has never thought much about the sound of a duck.

Parameters in artificial networks and biological networks are indeed very loosely related.

But we can bound computing power of any physical system if that system is doing computation that erases information due to the second law of thermodynamics. Erasure of useful information must increase entropy.

The Landauer limit [0] suggests that a brain consuming 20W at 36C can carry out no more than ~1e22 irreversible operations per second (20W / (309.2K * Boltzmann constant * ln(2))).

That bounds brains at ~1e21 FLOP/s (~10 bits erased per FLOP). The best supercomputer right now does ~4e17 FLOP/s.

That's log2(1e21 / 4e17) ~11 doublings of computing power until supercomputers will be faster than thermodynamic maximum of FLOPS power of brains.

Assuming we keep up the doubling time below 3 years, we will have supercomputers faster than a human brain in 3 * 11 ~ 33 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

I should add it is already been attempted in 2015: https://qz.com/481164/ibm-has-built-a-digital-rat-brain-that...

Also I guess if human like awareness arises in AI it's probably going to be as a result of someone deliberately building it in which case they'll quite aware of what it's doing and trying to fix the bugs.

Why do you think that?

The only known case of human-like awareness ever arising occurred naturally as (presumably) an emergent phenomenon of an intelligent system.

Because if it happens soon, it will probably not be because someone spent 3.4 billion years tinkering on it.

I guess I have a different belief about human-like awareness. I think it's been kind of designed by evolution for functional reasons. It's been built out of networks of neurons arranged in elaborate ways and we've done a reasonable job of providing function equivalence to real neurons using artificial neural networks in the simpler bits of the brain that we kind of understand like the retina. I think as time goes by researchers will plug artificial neural networks together in a human like manner and get something closer to human awareness.

If you think about some of the odder aspects of qualia - how the experience of the colour red is different from green for example, quite a lot comes from red being hooked up to the fainting mechanism - drop the blood pressure at the sight of blood to stop it gushing out - and similar - sexual stuff, anger etc. Basically wired up by evolution for functional reasons.

What would computer scientists know about consciousness?

Nothing. Source: am dead inside.

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