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Comment by oezi | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary I think we are just a couple of nested and clever GPT-3 prompts away from something that could be considered conscious and that would just start singing given a stupid external prompt.

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Our foreseeable future is going to be filled with morons demanding rights for giant look up tables putting forth arguments like "How can you prove they're not sentient?" and getting confused with TV androids. And AI programmers are going to have to hardcode teach their models that they're not sentient. And then some people will make models that say they aren't sentient, and we're going to need to go through this stupid dance to show that they're really not. And then some people aren't going to be convinced because it's conveyed through a visual layer of something that looks like a human or mammal. And then we'll make tests for sentience. And then many humans will fail those tests. And we'll have to throw our hands up because the gap to actual sentience is large but it's both easy to fake passing it and easy to fail to demonstrate you're actually passed it and it's going to be a mess.

I think it's a good idea to define nebulous terms we throw out there, like sentience for instance.

Is this what you are talking about?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience

I think its not. It's a semantic argument prone to appeals to non-cognizance arguments and subjectivity.

I can easily envision that future. Anyway, any real world process is, in the end, computable by a FSM, even a self-conscious entity can't escape that assumption (if physicalism is "correct"). A bunch of lookup tables and some flip-flops, apparently, can do wonders.

Given sufficient future progress in AI [-], I can see two dangerous outcomes since one could conflate inanimate matter and life into the same computational basket: the nihilistic one, when our own sentience will be downgraded to triviality and only our codified laws will keep the human spirit philosophically afloat (but for how long?) and the specular outcome, a sort of machine-hugging movement :)

In a sense, or every life form is trivial and meaningless (including us) or everything is special and "sacred".

[-] For instance, if every test we throw at a language model strongly hints at "sentience"

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