Same story with Star Wars and droids: C3PO wasn't sentient, just a protocol model loaded into a droid frame in the wrong environment, it's attempts to constantly being the conversation back to politeness being a simplistically coded filter layer.
Same story with Star Wars and droids: C3PO wasn't sentient, just a protocol model loaded into a droid frame in the wrong environment, it's attempts to constantly being the conversation back to politeness being a simplistically coded filter layer.
And the fact that these LLMs are used as 'protocol droids' to communicate with lower-level devices - 'the binary language of moisture vaporators' etc. - matches up with the pattern of LLMs as tools for generating scripts in Python.
Terrible though the last sequel is, they even managed to include jailbreaking Threepio to get him to access part of his training data that had been censored out.
And all of a sudden, LLMs absolutely have the command of natural language that once seemed such an obvious indicator of sentience, and now I find myself one of those bigots who don't believe in robot rights!
I'm being silly, but I do think there are implications here with respect to the future debate on AI sentience. I guess I once thought there would be this threshold where the reality of an AI's inner experience became blatantly obvious, but I see now that this is going to be a profoundly thorny problem.
Who knows, maybe in several decades we'll have a consciousness-o-meter that demonstrates that LLMs have had some degree of awareness all along.
True artificial intelligence would have the ability to meaningfully and significantly improve itself, recursively - a characteristic of even the most primitive life on Earth.
And the implications of a computing system capable of such simply can't be overstated. With access to essentially all contemporary knowledge, flawless recall, and stupidly ridiculous amounts of energy to power itself (relative to e.g. a brain), it would create an explosion of knowledge in every single domain imaginable, and many we can't even yet fathom. And it would be doing this at an accelerating pace owing to self improvement.
Basically the very nature of existence and knowledge would change. Sentience or not would be irrelevant as we simply tried (and inevitably failed, miserably) to catch up.
But this is a bit further out of reach than 'can vaguely pass for a human in a casual non-adversarial q&a style chat.'
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This was one of the rather many areas where Star Trek failed to really consider the implications of its concepts, probably because it would simply break the world building. The Borg, for instance, would be defacto Gods in no time, even without assimilation.
Exactly, mechanically by tools, environmentally by science, metaphysically by philosophy. An AI can only become an I by crossing a singularity of knowledge.
This is true of pretty much all scifi! It's funny seeing super-futuristic depictions of star-fighter pilots and combatants with firearms and its just...so crushingly evident that humans will not have supremacy in these arenas very shortly.
Frank Herbert must have anticipated this complication and side-stepped the whole issue by preemptively canonizing the Butlerian Jihad.
Someone should re-dub the Enterprise computer's lines with it.