Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn't know it(www.theguardian.com)
14 pointsby alefalfa3 hours ago9 comments
  • wolvesechoes2 hours ago
    Man that got famous by confidently making claims on stuff he has zero idea about (religion and philosophy) is still making claims on stuff he has zero idea about.

    Dawkins should stick to pop-biology, and we should be more demanding before granting someone a title of public intellectual.

    • bad_usernamean hour ago
      I never particularly revered Dawkins, but he always ranked reasonably high in educated circles, and his books were very popular.

      But my goodness, the buckets of crap that get poured on him nowadays, in stark contrast with even 10 years ago. Parent comment is an exhibit.

      I am 99% convinced that it's because Dawkins ended up on some "anti hate" group target list, after he said things in 2021 that the trans movement found offensive.

  • aezartan hour ago
    I think it's a good idea to experiment with and discover the limitations of small, untuned models before exposing yourself to the modern very powerful ones. It gives you a better sense of their nature as token predictors and not real sentience.

    In the same way, seeing an incompetent stage magician fumble before you see a very talented one perform flawlessly will help you understand that it's all sleight of hand. If you jump right to a professional performance, you might think it's real magic.

  • 60secs2 hours ago
    This is just the Chinese room argument applied to the Chomsky vs Norvig debate, maybe with a dash of the hard problem of consciousness. Whether consciousness is inherent in particular structures or whether a statistical modeling can achieve it. Does the experience of experience deserve special pleading or would the simulation suffice? https://norvig.com/chomsky.html
  • chancitag3 hours ago
    It's interesting to see the Turing test flipped and pointed back at ourselves. Can the computer trick you into believing it is alive all while you know it's a computer?

    Re: Re: Ex Machina movie.

    • ben_w3 hours ago
      > Can the computer trick you into believing it is alive all while you know it's a computer?

      Do you think being alive is necessarily, rather than merely historically, required for consciousness?

      I don't buy into any strong claim about consciousness at the present time, because humanity doesn't seem to have any test that an outside observer can apply; this means that at the moment only a consciousness itself can know that it is conscious, while everyone else has to assume or not based on mere correspondences such as "alive" (which excludes computers) or "talks to me" (which recorded messages have done since the wax cylinder), leaving us to argue about if PETA are liberators or nuts well before "Attention Is All You Need" was a sparkle in Google's eye.

  • al_borland3 hours ago
    AI can often make a good first impression, especially in a casual conversation taken at face value. It seems like that’s all this was.
  • johnbarron3 hours ago
    Man who spent his life explaining mimicry in nature gets fooled by mimicry in Python
  • xvxvx3 hours ago
    I remember when I first heard the term ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ and was intrigued as to who the members were. Then I saw Joe Rogan listed. Never laughed so hard in my life.

    Dawkins is an IDW-tier ‘intellectual’. He’s what an intelligent person looks like to an imbecile.

    Now he’s positive that an AI chatbot is ‘conscious’ whereas here is what he said about animals…

    “It’s very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.”

    Animals: ‘Likely… Probably’.

    AI chatbot that liked his unpublished book: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are’.

    Amazing.

  • megamike3 hours ago
    I dont know about that
  • soupspacesan hour ago
    [dead]