Isn’t there a proposal that consciousness is a quantifiable gradient, which means that everything capable of performing logic (even basic AND, OR, NOT gates) has at least a tiny bit of consciousness? It’s called phi-star IIRC, very interesting to think about
I’m not familiar but I would think at the bare minimum you would need to have some kind of self regulating feedback loop
I think it’s just fundamentally flawed to try and create something that “thinks” via a starting point of language.
Language is not the starting point of thought. There are very simple creatures that clearly experience, think and even problem solve at a level beyond that of existing llm “AI”.
The starting point for creating artificial intelligence therefore shouldn’t be “let’s make a talking human” but rather more simple artificial intelligence with the ability to problem solve without training data.
Machine learning via evolution algorithms has always been a more promising pathway to real artificial intelligence. LLMs have always been and can only ever be a facsimile.
The people who think LLM’s are sentient tend to be managers… and managers are a facsimile of sentience. Ergo a manager is an LLM
This is what you get when nobody actually reads or understands Turing but bases all their ideas on what they think he said.
AI will be a bunch of different tech working together. LLMs probably will be a part of it. It’s not dumb technology despite what everyone says. It’s not even new technology.
And it is useful. Being able to use natural language to talk to computers is pretty revolutionary and sci-fi. But it’s not AI and it can’t do everything people are trying to sell it as being able to do.
And like… all intelligence had “training data” before solving any issues. The only living being without any “training data” are newborns. And they can’t solve anything by themselves. You have to “train” them for years and years showing the right way of doing things until they finally get it.
AoE II is sentient!!!
sure feels like it sometimes. lol
I can make simple logic circuits (a 1-bit perceptron) using the map editor in AoE2. An LLM is made of logic circuits, therefore if AI is sentient, so is AoE2.
Uhh no?
But no one claims the goats of AoEII are neurons in a thinking machine or that the complicated tracks of NAND gates players build in Minecraft show emergent intelligence.
Yeah because it’s a 1-bit perceptron. They probably would claim that if you somehow built chatGPT in the game! Wow guys look no one claims my NAND gate is conscious AI isn’t that hypocritical?
The idea that computational logic circuitry is substrate independent isn’t some groundbreaking idea. Am I missing something here? The argument seems sophomoric.
I understand the base idea. A lot of people see LLMs as “something special” when they’re really just very large scale systems that are easy to understand like this. The ELIZA effect is incredibly strong with them and that leads people to make weird calculus about these machines.
If I spill milk on the floor, wait for it to grow mold, then spray chemicals on it and see that the mold moved away, that’s also just as much a show of sentience (actually moreso, since that action was entirely and independently arrived at by the mold colony without my direct input beyond spraying the chemicals) as an LLM resolving a statistical model.
Only difference is that the LLM does it in alphabet soup, and requires the energy output of a small city while the mold colony accomplishes the same thing with trash.
Yeah but the claim of the AI people has been that large neural networks might be sentient not that all neural networks are sentient.
The AoE paper might still be useful as most people have never heard about perceptrons before but it doesn’t really engage with claims of the AI boosters.
Yeah but the claim of the AI people has been that large neural networks might be sentient
Those claims are just pure nonsense though. Revealing the mechanism should be enough to show that this architecture isn’t capable of sentience. Especially because it’s been given a large portion of the world’s compute and power and still nothing. A sewer rat is more complex than the largest GPT model, and it can sustain itself on trash.
Sentience is only something that people hallucinate with LLMs because it’s doing its thing with human language. Something that is absolutely not a marker of sentience, otherwise we’d consider libraries sentient.
I think the argument is simple because the general reporting on AI hasn’t even met that bar. It’s little more than breathless repetition of advertising copy. There are basic questions that aren’t getting asked. It’s a computer program. Why should this program be treated as potentially sentient when others aren’t? Because its complicated, complex? Ok (seems convenient, but ok) …except you can very easily make a complicated, complex program in the same way only train it to spit out absolute useless noise, and neither the program or the hardware have a preference for one or the other.
Much as I agree AI is massively over-anthropomorphized, and also generally just shitter than people think, I agree the fundamental premise of this argument sucks. Their argument is essentially “If it can be represented as 1s and 0s, then it can’t be sentient because biology fundamentally relies on flesh magicks”.
Well… no, not as far as we know. We’ve yet to find a reason why you couldn’t perfectly represent a human brain digitally. And if you can do that, then you can represent a human brain in AoE2.
Paywalled
Ty!
