You apparently have a better sense of what the argument is than I do [0], would you explain?
* LLMs provide a mirage: there is really nothing there at all, but they sometimes can look like they are exhibiting intelligence but that's because they are repeating statistically-remixed intelligent input.
* However, the tech-bro culture that has fermented in Silicon Valley has resulted in a large bunch of people who are irrational, have no concern for logic or truth, but who feed on each other's groupthink, and from that culture, a religious-like mindset has emerged -- strongly reflected in some of the comments here, for what it's worth -- that is basically a sort of messianic cult. It preaches:
- greed is good, etc. (Wall St, Gordon Gekko etc.)
- disrupt, automate humans out of the loop, etc: these are good things, desirable goals in and of themselves, the ends justify the means, etc.
- truth is negotiable and not really important; cf. "the reality based community" (https://archive.ph/pvkxE etc.)
- thus they honestly don't know and can't care if LLMs are smart, because LLMs manifest the dogma: the machine will evolve and replace us, etc.
Well, it's not my article, so I have no particular position on this, but it seems to me that her assessment largely agreed with my own, so perhaps I am merely parroting her views through mine.
To me, the article seemed to express her position pretty well. YMMV. But maybe that's because I agree with it, and you presumably do not.
It seems to me that the field lacks a solid definition of what consciousness is. Merely defining it seems to be the core of "the hard problem".
https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/
If the field accepts that it can't describe or define what consciousness is then any competent practitioner in that field will go out of their way to avoid saying that an entity, or class of entities -- such as LLM bots -- do not possess it.
To do anything else would be to lay themselves open to attack. It would be a career-threatening move.
Not being able to say "this type of software is not conscious" makes it necessary to beat around the bush somewhat in trying to say what amounts to "this type of software cannot think".
I don't know what you perceive as "woolly" here, but it could be due to that.
Being woolly isn't the best that can be done if others are making actual arguments, the kind that aren't in the article.
Can you give some specific examples of what you consider wooliness in the article?
For the article itself, phrases like "a naïve and toxic view" and "a debased version of what we are" are statements that need to be strongly backed up.
"For me, thinking is a specific and rather unique set of experiences we have." yes, okay, but what experiences?
What do you mean by "concepts"?
She talks about behaviorist reactions, but fails to back that up at all. Why does she think e.g. mechanistic interp. is behaviorist?
"there’s nothing on the other side participating in this communication." I think this is currently correct, for some definition of "nothing", but give an argument.
"new moral claims in the world" give a good physics-based account of this process in humans.
But this efficiency, Vallor continues, “is never defined with any reference to any higher value, which always slays me. Because I could be the most efficient at burning down every house on the planet, and no one would say, ‘Yay Shannon, you are the most efficient pyromaniac we have ever seen! Good on you!’” -- ever heard of E/ACC?
"Vallor tells me she once tried to explain to an AGI leader that there’s no mathematical solution to the problem of justice." -- not currently, but this is peak woolly. Maybe she doesn't know it, but a mathematical solution would need to contain incredibly horrible things. If you stay away from the math, you can avoid thinking about that sort of thing.
Mainly though, it's what the article does not contain. That's tricky to enumerate. I can try if you want.
I do not find the argument that the Hard Problem is a problem convincing. I don't think it's hard or even really a problem; it's people arguing about Peano derivations when discussing how many angels are dancing on the heads of how many pins.
It's irrelevant and it's not just missing the point, it's actively spreading smoke clouds around the area of the point so that nobody can see it any more.
For me, Douglas Adams nailed philosophy:
« It is often said that a disproportionate obsession with purely academic or abstract matters indicates a retreat from the problems of real life. However, most of the people engaged in such matters say that this attitude is based on three things: ignorance, stupidity, and nothing else. Philosophers, for example, argue that they are very much concerned with the problems posed by real life. Like, for instance, “what do we mean by real?”, and “how can we reach an empirical definition of life?”, and so on. »
I recognise that some people find these issues significant and important. I do not. If that's what interests you, I have nothing more to contribute.
That's not the most usual position.