Throughout history, there have been people who have asserted that "X isn't deserving of moral consideration". X has included foreigners, women, children, slaves, dogs, cats, whales, dolphins, and now AI. Every single one of those groups have been on the wrong side of history.

I think your intelligence is the one closest to the rocks and you don't even notice, hahaha

A Nobel Prize–winning idea didn't show up while he sat in a lab. It arrived on a dark, winding road at mile marker 46, sketched on a piece of paper on the side of the highway. Right now, it's easy to work smart, and so much harder to work hard. 👇

I got my own small version of that lesson recently. A full-day customer advisory board: six sessions, transcripts, walls of sticky notes. Synthesizing it normally takes a full day, even with AI. My first reflex was to grind it out in an AI chat window.

I prefer this version

The research suggests otherwise.

If you had enough resources you could simulate 100% of the physics in a human brain with gears and diesel, or rocks, or rule 112. So?

I mean, to me some people seem more similar to rocks than intelligent beings, but I'd argue that's a matter of point of view rather than fact. If you look at it more objectively there are clearly a lot of similarities between human minds and AIs, as the research shows.

I'm willing to be with you on those. Trillion parameter neural networks are a bit different from rocks though.

We evolved from single cells. Either they are conscious, or at some point along the evolutionary line the lights “switched on” and a pure automaton gave rise to a conscious being, or consciousness does not actually exist. All are mind-bending, but there is no fourth option.

It seems like most of the people who deny AI consciousness want to just say that "Humans have magic souls and AIs don't", but none of them are actually religious enough to say that seriously.

An OS telling me is generally how I know the time as well. Either way, is it relevant? Is a human no longer conscious when losing track or perception of time?

If you had enough resources, you could run an LLM on a wooden system of gears and diesel power. It would be massive, but watching the gears and levers move, it would be evident that the outputs are not the result of a mind. Part of the illusion of LLMs is the tiny scale of GPUs.

If you are talking to me, I dont think I was I could be, but there is not much room for doubt if someone states a claim in absolute terms. He stated categorically: "No, there is zero reason to believe that we could reconstruct a functional brain from purely mechanical components. The brain is a dynamic, complex, real-time electrochemical system. It is not a bunch of analog levers or discrete gates." In my view there is no point in discussing something with someone who thinks he is absolutely and categorically right. (In my view, an LLM is a system complex enough that it could not practically be built in this fashion... that is why I repeated the absurdity of the original claim. Aside from that, I think we can build systems that are functionally similar to parts of the brain using learned parametric geometries... like ChatGPT. What I don't agree with is that this in any way means the question of AI consciousness is closed in scientific terms)

He’s getting fried in the comments for his perfectly correct point.

Anyway… Yes

Moose age in log scale

Yeah I remember thinking that a couple decades ago too. Good luck retaining that belief.

The most frustrating thing, is that even if we have more smart people now… we also have way more dumb people. More fragmentation, so more people wrong about more things. More automation so stupidity is enabled. It’s always been this way. We dumb.

People in the past were pretty dumb. They had a lot of concepts completely wrong, and yet society continued to function. It’s amazing it ever worked. At the time however, someone was saying “we are living in the future”, and people were making “crazy” claims.