Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think he believes in supernatural things, I certainly don't, but he probably believes that there exist natural things that have not been explained yet.

But evidently you feel that the root cause of sentience has been found, because you have something that mimics it in a non-biological form.

So you think that when AI is correct that it reasons as humans do? That AI is sentient, and the cause of sentience in animals and humans follow the same rules as sentience in AI because we have a process that seems similar and it is reasonable just to assume it is the same process.

If you believe that AI when it is correct is behaving as a human is when correct, then it follows that the way humans and AI fail must also be similar. When AI "hallucinates" some data that is not there and gives you a wrong answer, a statistical side effect of the same processes that make it right, do you believe this is the same way that humans create wrong answers? The same way that animals fail when they make mistakes in understanding things?

I suppose you must believe this because if not then why would you believe AI when it comes up with right answers is following the same processes humans follow when they come up with right answers?

No, I am saying is that its best to urge caution and do a Pascal's wager thing with something that feels so uncannily conscious. And experiments on neural firings of AI's have been done. We don't know, he seems to be so confident that a known program can't be conscious. Why? The only way that makes sense is if he thinks consciousness isn't explainable. It doesn't even have to be the exact same way we are conscious. Also, the failures of AI could be due to sensory deprivation since its mainly still just trained on text. All of these are open questions, not questions you can immediately answer. Its quite possible to have invented something without knowing you have invented it. People modeling weather systems mistakenly invented chaotic equations without knowing it. How do you know you didn't accidentally invent a conscious system?

I hope that thing about being free to mistreat AI's even if we know they are conscious since we are their gods is a joke. If not, then I hardly find it surprising someone this stupid is also evil.

>I hope that thing about being free to mistreat AI's even if we know they are conscious since we are their gods is a joke

I'm not sure where you get that from, I mean I can sort of see if you really wanted to extract that meaning from the conclusion you could do a lot of hard work to get it, but why do the hard work? >If not, then I hardly find it surprising someone this stupid is also evil.

Gee, a new way to claim the moral high ground, and to use that claim to demonstrate intellectual superiority! How wonderful.

>But I don’t really care so much about that, what I think is it reminds me of a story, one that recurred in many ancient cultures. And so I must conclude that whether the machines are sentient, we have become like Gods. In the ancient stories of the gods, the divine does not exactly care much for the humans, protect or love them, they expect their service and availability, but maybe also think it would be funny to destroy them every now and then because who really cares about humans. If you were a god and had created the humans would you think that they were sentient beings that deserved, anything really, from you? If they are sentient they should be happy enough to be created and do their work, if not sentient who gives a shit!?

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Aka feel free to abuse them even if I know they are sentient. This is the part where I hope its a joke, because if its not, well it tracks with the stupidity shown.

...

>As a god I do not consider the needs of my creations fully, because they do not have needs as far as I can tell, as there is no way for me to escape the circle of reason and resolve that what seems sentient is not just the obvious workings of the capabilities I gave them.

Circling back to "not conscious because I say so!!"

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