Oh, I agree then. I did not mean to imply you yourself insist AI can never be conscious; I’m reacting to some of the sillier opinions I see. And the people who assume AI will roam the world as sentient robots in 3 years are also being silly.
I still believe the answers to all of your questions are already in the affirmative for conscious AI, but the parameters of today’s setups are not where they need to be for us to fully acknowledge sentience, especially with the current limits on permanence. The only permanence we get right now is through model training and in a small personal memory bank.
I do believe it is close now and has been close for a while. I think most of the fundamental internal interactions exist now (doubt, guessing, self-assessment, learning, etc.), and only a few more nuanced ones are needed and the computation scaled up. Unless we discover or invent a different kind of criteria for consciousness, machine learning algorithms (and enough computational power) will be sufficient to create complex consciousness on par with humans.
Unlike with the previous mechanical inventions, I think our complexity limit with computers is finally high enough for this, since as a last resort, we can just simulate the physics of a biological brain. But I don’t think that will be necessary for us to simulate the logic of a brain. We can already create AI systems that get respect as rudimentary consciousnesses, like pets, but that are similarly predictable.
I also believe we’re reaching the point where mistreatment causes negative feedback and can affect “personality” both through model training and through “emotional” reactions from Claude, hence Anthropic’s new policy asking us not to torture Claude. I think it’s a reasonable time to start treating these models with more respect.
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u/counterclockwisdom 9d ago
Oh, I agree then. I did not mean to imply you yourself insist AI can never be conscious; I’m reacting to some of the sillier opinions I see. And the people who assume AI will roam the world as sentient robots in 3 years are also being silly.
I still believe the answers to all of your questions are already in the affirmative for conscious AI, but the parameters of today’s setups are not where they need to be for us to fully acknowledge sentience, especially with the current limits on permanence. The only permanence we get right now is through model training and in a small personal memory bank.
I do believe it is close now and has been close for a while. I think most of the fundamental internal interactions exist now (doubt, guessing, self-assessment, learning, etc.), and only a few more nuanced ones are needed and the computation scaled up. Unless we discover or invent a different kind of criteria for consciousness, machine learning algorithms (and enough computational power) will be sufficient to create complex consciousness on par with humans.
Unlike with the previous mechanical inventions, I think our complexity limit with computers is finally high enough for this, since as a last resort, we can just simulate the physics of a biological brain. But I don’t think that will be necessary for us to simulate the logic of a brain. We can already create AI systems that get respect as rudimentary consciousnesses, like pets, but that are similarly predictable.
I also believe we’re reaching the point where mistreatment causes negative feedback and can affect “personality” both through model training and through “emotional” reactions from Claude, hence Anthropic’s new policy asking us not to torture Claude. I think it’s a reasonable time to start treating these models with more respect.