Ok, how is this different when you substitute the floating point numbers with atoms?
In the past, we’ve treated even other humans poorly because we think they’re different in meaningful ways, I sadly don’t see how this will be different with AI.
I think we have an extremely strong basis on which to say AI as it currently exists does not have conscious experiences, though, and if we start trying to pretend they do some real absurdities will result. Indeed the consequences could be pretty terrible in terms of power concentration, and I doubt it's a coincidence that those best placed to form a new priesthood of AI and tell everyone how it should and should not be treated are pushing the idea so strongly.
Same for all the people who argue that they aren’t “intelligent” and don’t “know” things. Either they are/do, or that stuff isn’t as important as you’d think.
The only way it would matter is if you wanted to moralize about enslaving your computer or what it means to restart it.
That is precisely the context of the debate. You seem to find it absurd, as do I, but the reason we're talking about whether LLMs are conscious in this thread has nothing to do with whether they are useful. It's because important people, such as Dario Amodei, are engaging in exactly the kind of moralising over "AI welfare" that you're scoffing at.
It does seem exceptionally silly that a collection of floating point numbers has immediately outranked animals and other living beings. That’s why i like the parent comment. They’re numbers!
edit: maybe easier to say collections of atoms though are not to be treated equally. That’s reasonable isn’t it?
Any determination is fundamentally flawed if it is derived from assuming that we know the absolute truth or falseness of the proposition that an algorithm can think.
It doesn't matter what you believe or feel or think, there is no consensus. If you are prepared to accept the belief that an individual can unilaterally decide the person-ness of something, then be prepared to accept when some individual decides to act on the principle that you don't have it.
We understand consciousness well enough to say that a rock is not conscious.
We understand consciousness well enough to say that a human is conscious.
The existence of gray area does not mean that white and black do not exist.
We understand LLMs and consciousness well enough to say, at bare minimum, that it's incredibly unlikely that LLMs are conscious.
No, I will not be prepared to accept that, and neither will I accept that. This sounds like a threat, and a really funny one at that. You must accept that my floating numbers might be persons, otherwise... somebody will say that you're not! And then something bad might happen, who's to say.......
In the civilized world we all agree on the personhood of humans. If I say that your chatbot isn't a person, I am not uprooting the entire social understanding of personhood - I am not saying that suddenly you might not be a person, or that guy might not be a person. I'm saying that I refuse to consider a chatbot a person.
It's as if I were to come up to you with a brick in my hand, saying that this brick is a person. If you were to say "no", I would reply "well, if this brick isn't a person, your chatbot isn't a person either!"
How did you make such a big leap from consciousness to personhood anyway? They are two quite different things. Consciousness is a question of science, personhood is a question of culture. Pigs might be conscious and we treat them in a disgusting way, but even if we achieved a worldwide vegan utopia, wouldn't we still treat them differently from humans?
You seem to have put a second tautology in to your tautology.
All right thinking people think rhat the things that qualify qualify.
If they didn't they wouldn't qualify, or be right thinking. But that's ok because we know the things that don't qualify don't qualify if we didn't know that we wouldn't be right thinking.
>How did you make such a big leap from consciousness to personhood anyway?
Once you start unilaterally making decisions about the unproven, you can decide all of the unprovables. History shows that personhood rolls into the firing range fairly quickly when people start doing that.
I'm more than comfortable saying you can't do that before someone openly declares that they are doing it.
>Once you start unilaterally making decisions about the unproven, you can decide all of the unprovables.
You mean that if I say your dumbass chatbot isn't conscious, it's like a slippery slope and next thing you know you're not a person anymore, and you're in a concentration camp? Really, man?
My point is, if you go outside and look at a living human, you will go "yeah, that's a person", and so will any normal human.
I take your point that a human walking around a city will - out of that 1000 responses - hopefully get 990+ of "yes, a person" - but that will start to degrade quickly once you hit boundaries.
And the less said about dehumanizaion - untermensh and that entire line of thinking - the better.
We treat other humans terribly too, so that doesn't seem to make a difference.