The thing that’s stopping anything like that is that the AI we have today is not intelligence in any sense of the word, despite the marketing and “journalism” hype to the contrary.
ChatGPT is predictive text on steroids.
Type a word on your mobile phone, then keep tapping the next predicted word and you’ll have some sense of what is happening behind the scenes.
The difference between your phone keyboard and ChatGPT? Many billions of dollars and unimaginable amounts of computing power.
It looks real, but there is nothing intelligent about the selection of the next word. It just has much more context to guess the next word and has many more texts to sample from than you or I.
There is no understanding of the text at all, no true or false, right or wrong, none of that.
AI today is Assumed Intelligence
Arthur C Clarke says it best:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
I don’t expect this to be solved in my lifetime, and I believe that the current methods of"intelligence " are too energy intensive to be scalable.
That’s not to say that machine learning algorithms are useless, there are significant positive and productive tools around, ChatGPT and its Large Language Model siblings not withstanding.
Source: I have 40+ years experience in ICT and have an understanding of how this works behind the scenes.
Nah, “consciousness” is just a buzzword with no concrete meaning. The path to AGI has no relevance to it at all. Even if we develop a machine just as intelligent as human beings, maybe even moreso, that can solve any arbitrary problem just as efficiently, mystics will still be arguing over whether or not it has “consciousness.”
Edit: You can downvote if you want, but I notice none of you have any actual response to it, because you ultimately know it is correct. Keep downvoting, but not a single one of you will actually reply and tell us me how we could concretely distinguish between something that is “conscious” and something that isn’t.
Even if we construct a robot that fully can replicate all behaviors of a human, you will still be there debating over whether or not is “conscious” because you have not actually given it a concrete meaning so that we can identify if something actually has it or not. It’s just a placeholder for vague mysticism, like “spirit” or “soul.”
I recall a talk from Daniel Dennett where he discussed an old popular movement called the “vitalists.” The vitalists used “life” in a very vague meaningless way as well, they would insist that even if understand how living things work mechanically and could reproduce it, it would still not be considered “alive” because we don’t understand the “vital spark” that actually makes it “alive.” It would just be an imitation of a living thing without the vital spark.
The vitalists refused to ever concretely define what the vital spark even was, it was just a placeholder for something vague and mysterious. As we understood more about how life works, vitalists where taken less and less serious, until eventually becoming largely fringe. People who talk about “consciousness” are also going to become fringe as we continue to understand neuroscience and intelligence, if scientific progress continues, that is. Although this will be a very long-term process, maybe taking centuries.
we need to figure out what consciousness is and how to synthesize it
We don’t know what it is. We don’t know how it works. That is why
“consciousness” is just a buzzword with no concrete meaning
You’re completely correct. But you’ve gone on a very long rant to largely agree with the person you’re arguing against. Consciousness is poorly defined and a “buzzword” largely because we don’t have a fucking clue where it comes from, how it operates, and how it grows. When or if we ever define that properly, then we have a launching off point to compare from and have some hope of being able to engineer a proper consciousness in an artificial being. But until we know how it works, we’ll only ever do that by accident, and even that is astronomically unlikely.
The thing that’s stopping anything like that is that the AI we have today is not intelligence in any sense of the word, despite the marketing and “journalism” hype to the contrary.
ChatGPT is predictive text on steroids.
Type a word on your mobile phone, then keep tapping the next predicted word and you’ll have some sense of what is happening behind the scenes.
The difference between your phone keyboard and ChatGPT? Many billions of dollars and unimaginable amounts of computing power.
It looks real, but there is nothing intelligent about the selection of the next word. It just has much more context to guess the next word and has many more texts to sample from than you or I.
There is no understanding of the text at all, no true or false, right or wrong, none of that.
AI today is Assumed Intelligence
Arthur C Clarke says it best:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
I don’t expect this to be solved in my lifetime, and I believe that the current methods of"intelligence " are too energy intensive to be scalable.
That’s not to say that machine learning algorithms are useless, there are significant positive and productive tools around, ChatGPT and its Large Language Model siblings not withstanding.
Source: I have 40+ years experience in ICT and have an understanding of how this works behind the scenes.
I think you’re right. AGI and certainly ASI are behind one large hurdle: we need to figure out what consciousness is and how we can synthesize it.
As Qui-Gon Jinn said to Jar Jar Binks: the ability to speak does not make you intelligent.
Nah, “consciousness” is just a buzzword with no concrete meaning. The path to AGI has no relevance to it at all. Even if we develop a machine just as intelligent as human beings, maybe even moreso, that can solve any arbitrary problem just as efficiently, mystics will still be arguing over whether or not it has “consciousness.”
Edit: You can downvote if you want, but I notice none of you have any actual response to it, because you ultimately know it is correct. Keep downvoting, but not a single one of you will actually reply and tell us me how we could concretely distinguish between something that is “conscious” and something that isn’t.
Even if we construct a robot that fully can replicate all behaviors of a human, you will still be there debating over whether or not is “conscious” because you have not actually given it a concrete meaning so that we can identify if something actually has it or not. It’s just a placeholder for vague mysticism, like “spirit” or “soul.”
I recall a talk from Daniel Dennett where he discussed an old popular movement called the “vitalists.” The vitalists used “life” in a very vague meaningless way as well, they would insist that even if understand how living things work mechanically and could reproduce it, it would still not be considered “alive” because we don’t understand the “vital spark” that actually makes it “alive.” It would just be an imitation of a living thing without the vital spark.
The vitalists refused to ever concretely define what the vital spark even was, it was just a placeholder for something vague and mysterious. As we understood more about how life works, vitalists where taken less and less serious, until eventually becoming largely fringe. People who talk about “consciousness” are also going to become fringe as we continue to understand neuroscience and intelligence, if scientific progress continues, that is. Although this will be a very long-term process, maybe taking centuries.
We don’t know what it is. We don’t know how it works. That is why
You’re completely correct. But you’ve gone on a very long rant to largely agree with the person you’re arguing against. Consciousness is poorly defined and a “buzzword” largely because we don’t have a fucking clue where it comes from, how it operates, and how it grows. When or if we ever define that properly, then we have a launching off point to compare from and have some hope of being able to engineer a proper consciousness in an artificial being. But until we know how it works, we’ll only ever do that by accident, and even that is astronomically unlikely.