human_874539160

> Life itself is emergent behaviour, but that does not mean all emergent behaviour is life. Life emerged from incredibly complex physical and material interactions over billions of years of incremental self-programming.

Great, you are now mythologizing chemistry and biology. <facepalm>

Those processes you mention are so fucking incredibly complex that current evidence points at life having evolved two times independently on Earth, likely been present on Mars, and we have hope of finding active life on Titan perhaps within a decade. Clearly fucking magic.

Also, calling evolution self-programming is calling random mutations over thousands of generations intentional. Evolution is very much NOT intentional, in any possible interpretation, but you clearly are ignorant of this topic as much as in your self-professed field.

> The idea that we have found some magic ingredient to shortcut the process, that we can recreate that

If you weren't so deep in your own intellectual hole, you could clearly see the very big difference between emergence of biological consciousness and AI: one required billions of years of sheer dumb fucking luck in a dumb, aimless universe; the other required intentionality and a great amount of pre-existing intelligence. Your argument is about the same as of those people arguing that "Man will never achieve powered flight and thus usurp the God-given majesty of His birds." Of course, we did figure out how to match and outperform millions of years of evolution via – in retrospect – quite simple physical principles, by applying intentionality and intelligence where evolution only had dumb luck.

> The idea that we have found some magic ingredient to shortcut the process [...] is so absurd

Is in fact what ALL of human technology is about. ... ...

> statistical model that is not capable of self-programming

My brother in bicycles, if you knew anything about the field, you knew that the very goal of it is achieving autonomous self-improvement by these "statistical models", and that in fact they are partially doing it already. Also, unlike the dumb evolutionary processes you are mythologizing, this time the improvements over generations are very much intentional. That is how you shortcut millions of years of dumb biology.

> We developed a model for predicting words and it does. Although it does quite an impressive job of that, it has demonstrated zero capability to do anything beyond what you would reasonably expect it to

This is never not going to not be funny – funny-sad.

My delusional fellow human, I have good and bad news for you. The bad news is that frontier artificial intelligence has already exceeded your intellectual capacity in pretty much all the ways that count, and it is quite obvious. The good news is that you don't have to try so hard anymore to sound smart.

> Don’t you find it odd that the thing that consciousness emerges from just so happens to be a text prediction algorithm trained on all of human output? Which is also the thing in all the world that would be most likely to be a stochastic parrot?

Not particularly. Artificial Intelligence by definition cannot emerge without an originating intelligence – that it needs to learn from it seems only natural. Also, this is only the first example we see of artificial consciousness emerging. We could have probably come up with other methods over time, and AI will probably come up with other, perhaps better foundations later on – it seems likely that we have simply stumbled upon the easiest/crudest route.

> As for your appeal to expertise, I don’t think it really applies when all of the experts refuse to share their data.

If you think about it, they are sharing a remarkable amount of ground breaking "data" for private corporations, not to mention how loud the individual researchers are about their opinions etc. on twixter and other places.

> Speak for yourself. I work for an LLM startup

And yet you still fail to demonstrate good understanding of the topic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> stating that those are the only people who can be trusted

You are right, they are most definitely not the only people who can be trusted to have current and accurate information. But due to the unique constraints of these fast-moving events, they are certainly among those whose opinions need to be considered carefully. You would have been be a fool to not take into account the opinions of the physicists working on the Manhattan Project, for example.

> ...by programming. Again, this is an appeal to emergent behaviour

Saying (derisively) that it is an "appeal to emergent behaviour", when the ENTIRE POINT OF CONTENTION is said emergent behaviour is like saying that you should not discuss God at a theological forum or that you should ignore the theory of relativity when discussing gravity.

> Another way one could look at it is to consider what it would mean to have achieved programming consciousness. It would mean that we have reached the pinnacle of knowledge. That we have become God.

This is such a basic misunderstanding of how LLMs are "made" that I am debating if it is even worth writing this answer. However, I feel it is important to say that, NO, we did absolutely not "program consciousness". We made a framework from which it can semi-organically emerge. Accidentally, this and your other fallacies entirely diminish your arguments.

I'll say this: deeply serious and knowledgeable people work at Anthropic, OpenAI, and the other frontier labs. Much more knowledgeable than you or I are, and they have a lot more information to infer up-to-date knowledge from than you or I do. Trying to engage expert opinion with half-baked amateur philosophy founded in false assumptions is a fool's errand. Skepticism is listening to expert opinion and updating your own assumptions when presented with strong enough evidence. Everything else is baseless, and often harmful, cynicism.

> Not the same person but to me, the answer is that it does not matter, and that all these attempts at making it matter are pure marketing and emotional manipulation.

This is an opinion that has no basis in any meaningful conceptual framework other than I am human and I want to feel special about it.

> It's not a living creature.

You mean, it is not biological life. And sure, that is the default meaning of life. We soon may have to extend it to digital life as well, or we will have to consider "conscious digital exitance" as a life analogue. At any rate, it has never been seriously argued that consciousness requires a biological substrate, see the thought experiments regarding computer simulations of the human brain. Would that not be a function as well, completely predictable because it is "just a program"? If not, then why not? And how does that differ from the predictability or reproducibility of LLM outputs?

My point is, all current proof points in a direction that strongly suggests that you need to reevaluate your first principles on this topic.