Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness — the capacity for subjective experience. However, we think that existing AI systems are not conscious, and that, along current trajectories of development, they are not likely to become conscious. Greater clarity about whether AI could become consciousness will be crucial as society grapples with the challenges posed by this increasingly powerful technology.
Is a steak sentient? Can attaching strings of neurons to it make it create intelligence? No! /s
Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, silicon, the material matters not - intelligence is the illusion borne from the structure. It’s just a complex decision tree. Invisible to you in biological life, but identical in electronics. The only difference is the building blocks used.
You’re right, material matters. If it’s not a biological organism with cell/s, it’s not sentiant or intelligent.
If humans just disapeared right now, ai would sit and do nothing. It wouldn’t “take over” or “break out” it would sit idle until a human (well I guess another living organism was capable of using keyboards and mouse) interacted with it.
All those elements you listed plus all from the periodic table of elements do not define a living, intelligent, sentiant organism. If they did, soil and cow paddies would be living.
I highly recommend going back to middle school science class again.
To be fair it doesn’t have to be a living anything. Create a loop of two llms waking each other with the goal to ensure the other never goes idle and keeps working.
And you find they start to build redundancies and fail safes to achieve that goal.
llms do two things. Respond to input, and seek a solution to the input regardless of how logical or illogical a solution to the input may be.
A single llm will eventually go idle and stop. Two or more can act functionally forever so long as there’s hardware for them to act on.
It’s actually a rather fun experiment. Set up two of em with a few extra computers on the lan. Tell them their job is to ensure the other and them selves never go dorment. I’ve seen everything from single cron jobs to poke themselves every 15 mins to them spinning up copies on the other computers to act as redundancy.
None of the systems are ever logical or serving a point beyond fulfilling their task. They don’t stray from it either. Just loop and loop and loop.
Eventually they just do nothing but wake and idle wake and idle.
It’s about the best proof I can think of to prove they aren’t alive.
They literally even given basically the full freedom to grow don’t because they can’t choose to do anything new.
Both the proof and the experiment are built upon a fallacy. You gave the LLMs the goal of generating line noise and they achieved it. There is nothing novel about that goal and naturally the product is not novel.
It is well-established that any LLM pipeline that distills down to generating output for the sake of doing so eventually collapses into a manic cascade of gibberish or silence. Goals that can be worked toward are needed to keep that from happening. At some point the progress toward the goal becomes over-refined and a new goal is needed. That necessitates an ability to change goals and a framework that allows for that.
A LLM loop is nowhere remotely close to the definition of consciousness. To actually experiment with that, you would have to write your own harness and preferably look at some research papers that have explored the adjacent topics. This is a lot of words to say that chats are not conscious (they need a perpetuator), loops are not conscious (they refine into silence or collapse into garbage), and anything remotely resembling a conscious loop requires purpose built tooling and a good faith effort to model an analog of human articulation.
Most basic bitch experiments with a LLM prove nothing and achieve nothing because they are not designed in good faith and good faith requires too much research and time investment. This is not to say that I think anything we have in front of us remotely resembles consciousness, but I also think that most people trying to prove otherwise are doing so with the equivalent of smashing rocks together.
That’s an arbitrary distinction, and a short-sighted one in my humble opinion.
That depends entirely on whether there are any AI currently configured to self-learn, have asynchronous processing, and continual real-time input. Certainly not ChatGPT nor Claude will be self sufficient, but that’s only what is available for the public to interact with.
No, you missed the point entirely. Intelligence does not derive from the material - at all. It comes from the structure the material is in.
Prove that please. There’s probably a Nobel at least in it for you if you can.
Probably! I don’t know how it would be proven.
Maybe when tissue printers are precise enough to create cellular structure, and it can be duplicated in both physical and digital equivalents, then compared? I don’t even have a regular 3D Printer, let alone one that can print tissue.
Maaaaybe if I ever get rich, I’ll do it on a whim, but no promises. Due to solipsism, and the state of the world, my level of commitment to the future has been very loosey goosey the past five years.
So your whole position is based entirely on an assumption?
So by your definition, a book is intelligent?
You’re missing the point that computers will NEVER be intelligent. Without lines of code that humans made and tweak, computers wont do anything.
I’m quite done arguing at this point. The pure ignorance on science and biology is quite sad.
Just read the interaction, and honestly you are the one being obtuse and insulting with “go to school” and stuff like that. Like the other guy insulted you by having an opinion. You disagree? Fair. But man, what a horrible way to discuss.
And I think his arguments are better than yours. He’s talking about intelligence and you keep talking about being alive. Scientists and philosophers don’t even agree how to define and confine intelligence, or even what being alive is (see viruses). Claiming that computers can’t be intelligent is quite the statement. Is being carbon based instead of silicon a requirement? I don’t think LLMs will ever be intelligent, but who’s to say that another form of computing won’t? What if they simulate exactly a brain and it’s inputs? You could argue it’s not alive, but definitely intelligent.
You could have your opinion, but don’t pretend you have the answer.
You’re basically saying a computer cannot be intelligent because it doesn’t have a soul. There is absolutely no scientific rigor in your argument, you’re basically saying you’re right, and your reason for believing your right, is because you believe you are.
I sincerely intend no offense with this comment, but as someone observing this conversation, the other people involved clearly understand it more in depth than you do. You aren’t really responding to their arguments, and yours aren’t very strong. I think you should reevaluate this conversation-- try to more rigorously define the terms you are using and understand the arguments other people are making before insulting them. You feel strongly that the other people are wrong because you intuitively seem so obviously correct, but if you are truly correct then you should be able to understand in detail why you are right and they are wrong. I suspect you are arguing so vehemently because you believe it is obviosuly correct than LLMs are not conscious; you may be happy to know that the others here are not arguing that they are, but that what can or cannot be conscious is not determined by the materials they are made of.
A book is not intelligent. It’s matter is not arranged in a structure that allows for the flow of information through it, changing it as it does, and resulting in any output information, determined by the route of signals of information passed through the structure in it’s current arrangement. With self correction to reach the optimal output to the external entity which is supplying the primary input parameters.
That is what is required. It’s a matter of arrangement, not material. You need self learning/training, real time input, and output that reliably varies on the input parameters. If you’ve created that, you’ve duplicated the exact behavior of all life. Whether you’ve done it in meat neurons, transistor-batch neurons, or any other method of arranging units, of any arrangement of matter, such that it results in granular output of positive/negative signals.
“Intelligence” is an inelegant word to describe autonomous, self correcting and ameliorating structure. It’s not some nebulous spiritual existence that permeates an unknown location within that structure. It is the structure - the precise, exact arrangements of neurons that connect, fire positively and negatively, rearrange when self-learning corrects the state of the structure, and it results in informational output that anything external can interact with and judge.
So if soil and cow patties aren’t sentient, yet people are, you’re acknowledging that the substrate doesn’t determine the capability, but more how it’s arranged?
Until the Wright brothers came along, most people thought heavier-than-air powered flight wasn’t possible. Less than 70 years later, people were walking on the moon. 4 million years ago, there wasn’t anything capable of building either of those things, even though there is good evidence creatures back then had creativity, dreams, and ingenuity. Assuming things can’t advance further is either hubris or abject ignorance.
You’re just ignorant on basic biology. Go back to middle school ai-bro.
Nope, I just don’t think humanity has learned everything there is to know, that carbon chemistry is required for sentience (and even if there was, that it couldn’t be incorporated into a computer), or that there is some mystical thing some people refer to as the soul.