Pontifex has a well-reasoned position given the current understanding of the technology and any major assertions require an equally major amount of evidence.
Given how quickly this industry moves, the Magnifica Humanitas has aged amazingly well since its release almost half a year ago, far better than statements by most industry insiders across a broad range. Whether you are a Catholic, another mono- or polytheistic faith, Atheist, Deist, etc. I really recommend it.
Catholic church in some sense is massive international company that only promotes internally. So at top you most likely end up with quite similar people who end up as executives in private companies.
Very few who can get the global media to report what they say (and even Popes can only do it intermittently) both have the ability and the desire to use it.
More likely, they do not believe this if pressed.
We (as in many major legislators and most humans) have recognised animals to be conscious beings, deserving of certain protections. Anyone who asserts LLMs to rise to the same must be accepting of similar protections being applied to such models.
https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial...
Definitions of consciousness are not immune to economic factors. Metaphysics has always been downstream of economics. See slavery, corporate personhood, women's legal identity, child labor, moral and legal status of animals, embryos and fetuses, indigenous land rights, intellectual property, environmental entities, and data and digital identity.
Given how we treat each other - we still enslave other people - and sentient animal species I have absolutely no doubt about it. We'd find a way to justify it.
The script we use here isn't new. Its been used repeatedly throughout history. It's still used everyday in reference to animal agriculture, modern slavery, how we treat addicts, etc.
That idea is now ungoogleable
1. Write a simulation environment like conway's game of life, perhaps a little more complicated. But leave out any human bias.
2. Run it until life starts to form.
3. Wait until the creatures start speaking about the concept of consciousness (of course in their own language, which you'll have to decipher first).
The way Amodei did it is with human bias, so it's not going to work.
It doesn't get pissed off. It doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, it doesn't laugh at your jokes.
It just runs programs."
> He decided to go ahead with the event, telling an audience that the company’s research into AI models has found “structures that mirror results from human neuroscience”
A.I. does not feel hunger, does not need to evacuate substrates and subproducts of metabolism because it simply does not need to metabolize anything at all.
Failure to remember what makes us human might only leave us ignorant to what makes us human.
The joy of conceiving a child and the sorrow of losing a fellow human who lived a life having to breath, eat, and basically spend every single moment of every single day trying to achieve homeostasis at various levels, having experiences that change behavior purely for survival. That's us, that's humanity.
There may come a time, but it's silly to mistake the LLMs automaton behavior for consciousness.
There have obviously been smart people involved in making this stuff happen, but more and more I'm convinced most of these new AI billionaires were just in the right place at the right time. They raised money better and faster than anyone else, played faster and looser with copyright violations, and that's pretty much how we got here.
The computers are doing math. It's not even complicated math, there's just a lot of it. It's amazing that the math results in what it does, but you would think the guys running the machines that turn electricity into software would understand it enough to not think there's a real live boy in there.
Is to point how typing corrections and suggestions work because they get that and how it makes mistakes "damn you autocorrect"
Then explain that's almost how words are stitched together in "AI"
And how pixels are manipulated to make photos and video
Just on an exponential level over autocorrect with every existing text document, scientific study, every photo and video fed in instead of words to autocorrect
And why they make mistakes and hallucinate if they are not supervised and harnessed
We are a long way from AGI, at least not this decade
(and someone really needs to explain that to the orange idiot too)