Consciousness is emergent. A human is not conscious by our definition until the moment they are. How will we be able to identify the singularity when it comes? I feel like this is what the article is really addressing.
> LLMs are word prediction engines
Humans can also do this too, so what are the missing parts for consciousness? Close a few loops on learning pipeline and we might be there.
I feel like it’s quite straightforward - if it’s a living breathing thing it can be conscious, if it is a set of man made mathamatical models that can be switched of, it can be intelligent, but not conscious.
Life can be “switched off” - death is the ultimate off. Some life can be frozen and unfrozen with no ill effects.
And life itself doesn’t mean consciousness. And ultimately what is life? Something that has biological processes and reproduces? Why can’t we replace or recreate these processes with manmade equivalents to get the same results?
I don’t know what you are saying here? That a program running on a GPU in a data center is alive because it can predict what words to say next?
I find it strange that people are quite often unwilling to see animals as conscious yet here we are discussing if an empheral computer programme is. Have a think on why we don’t eat people but eat chickens - chickens are clearly more conscious than any AI, yet still not enough to stop them being considered food.
I don’t think you are having the same conversation as the rest of us here. Think on what the definition of consciousness is and how we will prove that a machine has it or not. I do not think that the current versions of AI are conscious but that doesn’t mean we will never achieve this and face the same questions of how to prove it.
Cannibalism has nothing to do with it as some seemingly conscious humans have shown this behaviour in the past.
Actually my first thought for something like this was places like Orkney that have a surplus of wind powered electricity (there is a connector to the mainland being built) and short flights between the islands - including the shortest scheduled commercial flight in the world:
The only thing I’d push back on is the weird and wacky iPad apps - our brains and fingers need some consistency in UI, doesn’t mean it can be fun though!
How many companies on that list make money by manufacturing a physical product and selling it to customers? How many other consumer goods companies 11x their market cap? How many other consumer goods companies have revenues remotely approaching Apple?
The business you mention are pure service / zero marginal cost businesses, and in that time internet usage has expanded both in reach and depth (it is being used for more things in more places), so their opportunity for profits has grown. Apple turns aluminium and silica into a laptop. They didn't even miss a beat during COVID.
Yay for Tim Cook for scaling this to the absolute behemoth of supply chain and manufacturing that modern Apple is.
As a parent you feel the push and pull of not ignoring your child while also not mollycoddling them. For me let the kid do what they want - if your kid wants to stay home let them, if they want to climb trees and go off on their bike let them. Help them learn what is safe (which rods can they cross), what are their boundaries. Hopefully they get it, maybe they don’t. Don’t restrict access to devices or screens too harshly. Encourage games of any kind. Wear sunscreen.
It’s a bit more complex than that. Octopus do a deal where you can lease a car and get the energy for it for free provided you agree to have it plugged in > x hrs a month. My read on that is that the cost of balancing the grid is greater than the cost of generating power. So grid is expensive, but power is cheap.
They clearly are not conscious, they are just guessing what words should come next.
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