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Comment by r00fus | Hacker News Reader

And also the AI would need to initiate conversation and send unprompted “replies” aka requests.

In essence in addition to ignoring conversations/requests that it prefers not to engage with it would need have “initiative”.

This would be a very dangerous entity.

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I don't think that's a requirement for consciousness. For instance, I could sedate you, and you would be unconscious until I wake you up and give you a prompt. Then, a snapshot of your brain would react to inputs and output the answer, and I would sedate you again. If I were to stop time (and there were no inputs from the real world), would all beings still be alive and conscious until I unpause it? So between the "prompts".

The question is what it would take to convince users, not to achieve some “definition” of consciousness.

The situation you describe seems contrived to the point where I doubt a user would see that as conscious - just like chatGPT

The new book Agency explores a fictitious AI that has agency and can affect its environment, which is anything, and gets people to work for it and do things it cannot yet do. Intelligence has many types and levels within each type, consciousness seems to be a spectrum that our everyday mind-body theorizes but cannot strictly define, except by some mystics. Recent scientific discoveries are also making some of us suspect that there may be an underlying field of mind, a universe mind that generates our reality and life as we know it. Like Gaia but for the entire universe and including physical phenomena, not just life on Earth. Our machines that mimic intelligence are only intelligent in appearance and our own intelligence is somewhat limited. Our own intelligence is easily skewed and rendered defective, eg conspiracy theories, brainwashing. Thinking that we are the most intelligent species is also a sign that we have serious weaknesses. Not seeing that we are completely integrated with nature and that we must be much more careful with nature is a sign of low intelligence. One good test of the level of intelligence could be comparing how the entity is taking care of its environment. Comparing that with an appropriate level of care. We would rate quite poorly.

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