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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you. LLMs seem to be proof that general intelligence doesn't require sentience.

I do think that there is an important moral distinction between sentient beings and not.

No. Maybe proof that some intelligence is encoded into the algebraic relationships between all the words ever written, but “general intelligence” would be a misleading way to describe it.

We may learn that the great mistake of the enlightenment era was as defining our human worth by our ability to think.

This of course has always been cruel to disabled people and we’ve just ignored along with ignoring them.

But when the tables turn and humanity is out thought by machines we may reconsider the last 300 years of philosophy.

I don't think that's true. While it's a valued characteristic, society also respects athletes, cooks, nurses, or businessmen, none of them because of their thinking capacity. The people who assign the most worth to intelligence are people who value their own, so there is a bias inside our bubble.

All of those things involve abstract thinking and complex decision-making based upon learned heuristics.

I'm old enough to remember people saying that about chess, finding things in images, translation, composing music, go, and creating artistically pleasing images.

At what point do we run out of things to say we can do that computers can't? And what happens then?

We will be forced into the most novel (and high risk) edge spaces of the human experience -- because without novelty we will lack any new experiences to compress into new cognitive behaviors to pass on to our young. And then we will run out of reasons to exist in the forward march of time.

That or, we somehow change enough to learn to live simply because of our shared existence with eachother, the novel engagement with ourselves and others, and learn a certain contentment with our position in the universe as unimaginably rare, but also limited.

Sure, but the point is that it's not their intelligence that's valued. You'd often praise a great professor by saying they're very smart, but very rarely a great cook.

Would the animal rights movement count as part of the Enlightenment?

I value dogs, even though I'd be very surprised to find one with even a single GCSE passing grade.

You value dogs based on the intelligence they present to you, it might not be the same as yours, but you enjoy their companionship between the two.

You probably don't have the same feelings toward far simpler organisms.

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