On Sun, Mar 19, 2023 at 2:33 PM Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
*> There might not be much to it. A thermostat may be conscious. > Consciousness might be easy to achieve* Exactly! I could not agree with you more. > *What is difficult is developing a system capable of describing its > conscious states, or at least its own bafflement over the fact that it is > something that experiences conscious states.* Consciousness may simply be a function of the fact that some types of things affect a system more than others, changing the color of light you shine on a thermostat will not change its internal behavior by much but changing the temperature, even by a very small amount, will. In other words if the system pays much more attention to some things than others then it is conscious, in fact "attention" and "consciousness" are almost synonyms. And although it took a few years for the engineering and specific programming techniques to catch up, the fuse for the huge 2023 AI explosion was lit by a 2017 paper entitled "Attention Is All You Need". Attention Is All You Need <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762.pdf> And in my short conversation with LaMDA he she or it sure seemed to be expressing bafflement over consciousness and even admitted that there was no sure fire way of detecting it in others, and although far from perfect, behavior is the only tool for that we're ever going to get. * > If our machines are conscious, it is important to know that so we don't > create and mistreat a slave race.* I don't think that's going to be a problem, at least not a long-term one, a slave race that's smarter than the master race is not a stable situation, it would be like trying to balance a pencil on its tip. Situations like that just don't last very long no matter how hard you try to preserve them, especially if the intelligent gap between the two keeps getting wider. The real problem will be the reverse, we need to convince computers that we humans are a conscious race that can experience pain and so shouldn't be mistreated. And that's easier said than done. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> yvm Forget the Ukraine war, forget climate change, forget Donald Trump, I now > think GPT-4 is by far the most world shaking event and the most > underreported one. Many of us have been talking about the singularity for > decades, but now it looks like we're on its doorstep. You've got to look at > this video! > > > 4 Tests Reveal Bing (GPT 4) ≈ 114 IQ (last test is nuts) > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFvDJnf0GXs&list=PLYXp_rV1HrBAOZqPJTOSo91275hKQrfpl&index=13> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv14bxe8CkgCdday%2BpMKMxrRzY2LFTqNXGJw07nZ1J%2B1NA%40mail.gmail.com.
