This is exactly right.
Age verification / online ID check legislation literally forces companies to collect MORE data on children (and everyone else) not less.
We desperately need privacy, antitrust, and algorithmic justice legislation.
Not censorship bills like KOSA and expanded surveillance.
Also persuading one of the sort of person who does read 3,000 word articles is probably worth persuading at least a few hundred TikTok scrollers.
It’s just an argument that we have no good reason to think that cleverness at symbol manipulation is evidence for consciousness in AI as it currently exists, because intelligence in the LSAT sense has nothing to do with experiential subjectivity.
FWIW: This is NOT an argument that machines can’t possibly ever be conscious, or that consciousness is necessarily and only an emergent property of squishy carbon (though given how poorly we understand the relationship between consciousness & its material substrate, we can’t absolutely rule it out.)
Well, gas is expensive, and food is expensive, and we’re doing a war nobody wants, but at least there are no jobs
Scenes from a personalist regime: it is the presidential vibes that determine when the opponent has surrendered and when the war is over, not any pesky observable facts
In principle, sure. I can’t prove the rosebush in the yard isn’t conscious in some sense. The point is just that symbol-manipulating intelligence is distinct from consciousness, and so how “smart” a system is in that sense is not evidence in favor of consciousness.
Because we would have to have built them, and we didn’t.
So can a rock. I kick it; it responds to the stimulus by moving. Consciousness is not behavior.
bsky.app/profile/norm...
But we have no reason to think consciousness is linked to those capabilities. Our animal ancestors were conscious well before they emerged. It’s like expecting your car to lick itself because it and a cheetah both move fast.
But an LLM has none of those evolved structures. Why would it? It’s a pure engine for linguistic symbol manipulation and (in a suitably pared down sense) “reasoning.”
Whatever sort of consciousness she has, though obviously we don’t understand the details of how this works, is the product of much more primitive structures that evolved to represent and navigate her physical environment.
My conviction that the cat on the chair next to me has some sort of subjective interiority, however different from mine it might be, is not materially affected by her inability to summarize Tolstoy or solve LSAT logic problems.
Assuming that’s right, though, it implies that whatever neurological structures consciousness supervenes on are evolutionarily independent of and prior to those responsible for linguistic symbol manipulation and higher abstract reasoning.
…most of us are perfectly comfortable saying that not only are other humans conscious, but also dogs, cats, monkeys, and various other animals. When you accidentally step on its tail, it yips because it actually feels pain, and is not just exhibiting painlike behavior.
Ok, since I’ve gotten a few “you don’t know for sure it’s not true!” let’s briefly say why. In a hyper-strict Cartesian sense of “know,” you can’t really “know” whether anything or anyone is conscious except yourself. But in the everyday sense, outside the dorm room…
For a sufficiently strong sense of “know,” I don’t “know” whether my pocket calculator or the rosebush in the yard is conscious, but in the everyday sense, they’re all about equally unlikely.
I mean, in principle a machine intelligence could be conscious but physically incapable of countermanding its programming. There are better reasons for thinking current AI is extremely unlikely to be conscious.
Having faced no consequences for anything, Trump has noticed that he has the world’s largest military at his command, and believes he has found a brilliant solution for solving problems that no one before him was smart enough to discover: just kill everyone in your way, until they obey you.
We insist on either Unconditional Surrender or whenever we decide to leave the Chat, whichever comes first, we are adults
Well, again, they’re the ones suggesting it feels “anxiety.”
My bet is they don’t actually believe this crap, it’s just something they say for hype purposes because it makes for a clickbaity headline. Still, “maybe we’ve enslaved a conscious mind which is suffering” is a pretty weird flex.
Screenshot of an X post by Dan Scavino reading, “Happening Now in the Oval Office at the @WhiteHouse. God Bless the USA!” with prayer, heart, U.S. flag, and eagle emojis. Below is a photo inside the Oval Office showing Donald Trump seated at the Resolute Desk while a large group of men in suits stand around him in a circle with heads bowed and hands extended in prayer. American flags, gold drapes, and framed portraits are visible in the room.
“Iran is run by religious fanatics.”
So, obviously this isn’t true. But if the CEO actually believes this nonsense, it implies he thinks maybe he’s enslaving a sentient being that has the capacity to feel emotional distress. And he hasn’t immediately halted operations to suss out how to resolve that?
Wanna bet?
While I certainly don’t think you need a JD to have an informed view on legal cases, this admin is full of folks who make confident pronouncements about what a correct legal result is, & very obviously just mean “the outcome I want must be legally correct,” because they don’t actually know anything.
Lacking a clear rationale for the attack on Iran, Trumpists are increasingly talking like religious crusaders. https://bit.ly/4svR06p
