Speaking through Zarubin, Dneprov writes that "the only way to prove that machines can think is to turn yourself into a machine and examine your thinking process", and he concludes, as Searle does, that "even the most perfect simulation of machine thinking is not the thinking process itself."
That feels similar to what Chiang is saying. The physical state of being a human is part of human consciousness. An LLM would require many more "levels" that haven't been achieved yet. An LLM with a body, sense organs, physical tools, social dynamics, etc. would all be steps on the path to a "conscious" LLM.
I'm surprised at the largely negative sentiment HN has for this essay. He stakes out his claims in a refreshing and readable way. Most of the criticisms here, and general "philosophical" LLM writings that pop up on HN are dense, unfocused and fairly inscrutable.
His certainty seems like a rhetorical style rather than a series of facts. It would be very annoying and not persuasive if he started every paragraph with some variation of, "I think" or "I believe."
I like that he makes the emotional component of his argument plain. I'm deeply suspicious of anyone would try to argue about the concept of personhood and consciousness using only logic and empirical "correctness."
Are you saying that a sufficiently advanced version of sentence continuation is indiscernible from actual understanding?
He isn't saying sentence completion is what keeps LLMs from understanding, he saying that's all they do (regardless of how advanced it is), and that isn't enough. You also need a body with senses and organs that produce a physiological response to emotions, and emotions are necessary for consciousness.
I like the Hebrew syntax of the golden rule! I've never seen it before.
I've always like the idea of taking it a step further and trying to do unto others as they would like done unto them. However, the current state of the world has made me realize that lying to people that want to be lied to creates a flywheel of negative outcomes.
I guess the better way to improve the golden rule is to use empathy to internalize and understand the things other people are looking for, that way you can keep the golden rule simple, while not assuming that others want the same as you.
...we find that we may misjudge a man's attitude, his background knowledge, his aims, his standards ; and we may learn from our mistakes and take care even beyond the golden rule. (Karl Popper)
I unironically love arguing on the internet, because you're replying to the author of the essay, but I think the text supports your comment and not his hahah.
"We lose any sense of economic purpose, and with that, social status and a perceived future." Sure sounds like someone weighing-in on the meaning of work and life outside of it...
> I unironically love arguing on the internet, because you're replying to the author of the essay,
I didn’t even notice! Thanks for pointing that out.
> but I think the text supports your comment and not his hahah.
I re-read the section to make sure I wasn’t missing something and I agree with you.
Here’s the section:
> We don’t have to speculate about what happens when economic function disappears from communities. Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s research on “deaths of despair” tracks the rising tide of suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease mortality concentrated in less-educated, formerly manufacturing-dependent populations. The mechanism isn’t just poverty. We lose any sense of economic purpose, and with that, social status and a perceived future. Communities organized around industries that left, where what replaced the jobs was opioids, domestic violence, and a life expectancy that dropped year over year in the richest country on earth.
If the piece was not trying to argue that loss of jobs leads to loss of meaning, I picked up on the opposite.
I read the section over again, and could almost convince myself that it's not about jobs-as-life-purpose. I was thinking that it could be suggesting that people get depressed and die when they lose their jobs because of financial fears and insecurity, instead. But the "We lose any sense of economic purpose" bit is what suggests it really is about life's meaning.
"Economic purpose" is a very specific kind of purpose, and I do not think that it's the same as life's purpose or meaning. I think the confusion here (and I suspect it's the result of the way I wrote it as much as anything, so I don't want to look like I'm sloughing off responsibility here), is that the section in question can be read too easily to conflate economic purpose (which protects oneself and one's family from precarity, among other things) and eudaimonia, which is what I would point to when thinking of meaning or "flourishing."
Sim City 3k is my least played Sim City game, but this is inspiring me to take another look. I really like the sweaty micromanagement and bigger scope of 4, but maybe I will prefer 3k's simplicity in my old age.
The picture caption with a 9/11 joke is a little off-putting, but it's at least proof that this isn't AI generated content...
I always thought of 9/11 as the major event for older millennials. I used to think it was all millennials, but many weren't even in kindergarten when it happened.
Your comparison just helped me understand how I feel about AI a little better. I too own a car but don't like driving, and don't like how my environment is shaped by what cars need. I use AI daily and I'm excited about it, but reshaping our whole world around it will make our lives worse.
It also gives me a better sense of what to do about it. It's not too late to stop the AI equivalent of how cars killed streetcars, vibrant communities, and literally children walking to school.
I, maybe naively, think if AI users and AI abstainers can actually talk about what it can do and what it shouldn't, we have a shot at making the world better, not worse.
I find this kind of research and political science to be ill-equipped for explaining how people and society work. Fiction like Nabokov's Bend Sinister is able to get much closer to the truth of totalitarianism because it isn't shackled by having to present a thin veneer of data and science, and is more clearly influenced by the author's experiences and POV. Social Science often acts as a cover to smuggle these personal experiences into academia and the news.
It's absurd to act like a dataset of Argentinian military promotions is rigorous or valid enough to make any kind of conclusion about how authoritarianism works. This type of "science" is no help in how we all live and work together and our individual experiences are all we really have to help us navigate society.
