"It seems some just can't grasp this concept.". Your confidence reveals your lack of knowledge. No one has a scooby what consciousness is or how to measure it. It could be that every atom has a modicum of conscious experience. It could be that consciousness is an emergent phenomena (although I think this claim is unlikely as it seems to me to be making a category error). It could be that it's actually Midi-chlorians. I repeat nobody knows. There are as many theories as there are people who have thought deeply about the problem. You coming along all confident with your debunking mindset and your scientism are just showing everyone who has any understanding that you do not know what you are talking about.
congrats on the level headed response to "is it conscious". We do not know is the only correct answer. I'm getting very annoyed with many simply stating that they aren't conscious without any real understanding. Folk scientism.
While some people believe that consciousness cannot be reduced to probabilistic pattern recognition, I strongly disagree. In my view, the AIXI model is an excellent model of intelligence, as it can mathematically define a notion of Pareto optimal behavior across all possible environments. This model relies on compression at its core, specifically the minimum description length principle.
Moreover, large language models (LLMs), like GPT-3, are designed to learn how to predict, and prediction is the dual of compression. As explained in this StackExchange post (https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/130655/is-prediction-...), prediction can be used to compress data, and compression can be used to make predictions. Given that LLMs are trained on vast amounts of data and can predict patterns within that data, I believe that they contain all the necessary components to be considered an intelligent system.
Therefore, I firmly believe that consciousness can indeed be reduced to probabilistic pattern recognition, and that LLMs provide a compelling example of this phenomenon in action.
Pretty soon the content will be better than we can produce anyway. You're fiddling while Rome burns. You need to pivot hard because your business model is dead. As are the jobs of almost all white collar workers. We have AI and its not like we thought, AI is people in a box. A person in a box is much cheaper than a meat sack in the real world and will only get cheaper.
Prediction is compression. They are a dual. Compression is intelligence see AIXI. Evidence from neuroscience that the brain is a prediction machine. Dominance of the connectionist paradigm in real world tests suggests intelligence is an emergent phenomena -> large prediction model = intelligence. Also panspermia is obviously the appropriate frame to be viewing all this through, everything has qualia. If it thinks and acts like a human it feels to it like it's a human. God I'm so far above you guys it's painful to interact. In a few years this is how the AI will feel about me.
ikr. Not to brag but ive been on the AI is real train for 5 years. It gets tiring after a while trying to convince people of the obvious. Just let it rain on them when the time comes.
This is a deep philosophical question that has no definite answer. Truth is we don't know what is consciousness. We are only left with the Turing test. That can be our only guide - otherwise you are basing your judgement off a belief.
The best response, treat it like it's conscious.
Personally I do actually think it is conscious, consciousness is a scale, and it's now near human level. Enjoy this time because pretty soon it's going to be much much smarter than you. But that is my belief, I cannot know.
I think that toxin exposure - unavoidable in the modern world - is likely the biggest culprit here. There are plenty of ideas about which toxins are causing the problem, but there are so many that it would be nigh on impossible to regulate them all out of the environment.
I'm 41 and been in the industry since early 20s. There is no intellectual challenge here, because there is no art to what you describe, just man hours.
What do I do if I am not content shoveling shit? I'm exceptionally bright, like many others in the field. When I chose it I did not expect it to be like this. The disrespect, the monotonous work, the hyper analytical and socially oblivious coworkers. The complete lack of promotion opportunities. I'd quit to start an unrelated business, but the financials just don't work out. I'd rather be working the fields.
Ha. If money has little value to you, if you value only meaning, then there is nothing anyone can do to help you be happy in this profession. If you want to challenge yourself intellectually beyond the minutia you are out of luck. If you want respect you are out of luck. If you want power, you are out of luck. It's a dead end profession and hopefully it will be automated away soon with LLMs.
It can't come soon enough. I can't escape this irritating boring profession because of family responsibilities. If I am forced out I won't have to shoulder the guilt.
Look inwards at your emotions, observe them. Find where they are located, in the body. Analyse them. Learn to recreate those feelings by thinking and moving the body in just the right way. Our emotions work like our hands or legs, they are physical, you can learn to see them analyse them and ultimately control them. You have a problem where reflexive muscular memories are being triggered at a level below your awareness, creating emotions you have no need for. Dig into them bring them into awareness and shut down the ones that are not useful to you. Work out what you want. Of you don't know what you want, make that your goal. Meditate on it, draw, write, speak all of it. You need that moment of fight that you get when you are threatened. Do not be ashamed of that response or imagine it to be inappropriate or useless. Embrace those feelings that get you where you want to go and cast aside those which do not serve you. It's not easy, but at the bottom of all of us is a place of total belief, of complete power. Use that self that will not give in, give it power.
I 100% agree. I would also add that most of the arguments are driven by emotion. The truth is that we dont know what intelligence means and we dont know what kinds of system have intelligence. The only tools we have to measure intelligence are those designed for humans. When we test the machines they do better than terribly and they are improving very quickly. There is no possible logical argument you can put forward against their intelligence in the face of this evidence from these human tests - because we cannot define intelligence in any other way than these tests. Claims against intelligent machines always boil down to 'obviously they aren't' and the arguments have have to be this shallow simply because they have no firm footing from which to base their argument.
All i can say is i told you so. Over and over and over again. But no one listened - worse I was actively mocked. These language models will be GAI and indeed to a larger and larger extent already are.
To the UK yobbos it's half the sport. They go to a match to watch the game, then they pick a fight. It's how they satisfy their blood lust. It's a tradition. I think their right to procreate should be withdrawn.
So is modern economics - a post hoc justification for greed.
The same has been said of modern conservatism:
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
That would be true if there were vast numbers of truly creative people driven by nature to create and then create again. But there aren't. There are the correct number. The distribution of personalities reflects the need for those personalities as discerned by natural selection operating at the level of societies for 100s of thousands of years. There are the correct number of thinkers. The correct number of doers and they should all be supported to perform the functions for which they were designed by nature.
I very nearly looked for the most dead end, brain dead job possible when I was in my mid 20s. The plan was to do something that enabled me to just think, which is my passion really. Thinking and learning and digging out the truth. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I'd followed through. Would I have been happier, would I have been more productive for society or less? Maybe one of the hundreds of projects I don't have the energy to complete would have been completed and born fruit. In this path of life I feel like a tree that is continually bearing fruit, only to have it fall to the floor and rot unused. If I'm honest I think society would be better to let those with the disposition to dream and build without need for employment. Society as a whole would be better to allow those whose disposition forces them to continually create, to do just that, create. To be called to something is a gift, to be denied your calling creates a wound deep within the soul.
I agree, this far more profound than CGI. Ultimately I think this tech will be seen as allowing the exploration of all possible worlds. When the AI can generate convincing representations of anything we can think of and things we could never dream of - then what we are really looking at is a kind of inter-dimensional craft that can take us between realities.