While this is probably to early, the question of AI rights is one we have to answer in the foreseeable future. I hope we as humanity will do it right and I am a little scared this dismissive attitude will carry over.
This seems like a fundamentally different question to me. Belief in a god explicitly depends on the unseen. You can't really even evaluate the personhood or lack thereof, there's nothing tangible to test.
If a god showed in in-person to whoever asked, easy peasy, then it'd be a different story.
The inconsistency gotchas in this thread are hilarious. “What if you replace religion with race or gender?” “What if you replace AI with god?” If your answers change then you have no principles.
And? This just proves you lack a fundamental principle for or against discrimination. That’s fine, you do not need one. But you can’t refute a categorical opposition to discrimination by listing more subcategories of discrimination.
it is easier to cast aside uncomfortable questions when you are able to group them into a monolith, relegating them to bad faith arguments and gotchas.
Is there any proof anything is anything but a mechanistic model and actually has consciousness?
Is there any definition of consciousness which even brings it into the realm of things for which there could in principal be evidence distinguishing it's presence from its absence?
The usual argument about intelligence usually retreats into it being a property entirely separate from the observable universe and yet still has it as something for which people demand “evidence” of it existing anywhere they don't assume without evidence that it exists before being willing to accept things equivalent in observable qualities to be actually similar.
Well, it can be an emergent property. To be honest, if your belief is heavily science-based, then there is not much else to believe regarding our very own consciouscness -- it is an emergent property of billions of interconnected neurons.
Though on the other hand, even the biggest AI systems are lightyears behind biological networks when we look at interconnectedness.
I wouldn’t call it science-based, it’s just materialism. There’s no science in believing that something that can be completely described
by a set of logical rules, or mathematical formulae, or something similar, suddenly gains new features that cannot even be defined with math or logic. It’s pure belief, without too many arguments for it.
> suddenly gains new features that cannot even be defined with math or logic
It at most can not be defined due to its complexity. Also, emergent properties are everywhere, like you can assign properties to a fire you can’t assign to the chemical process of burning. For all we know, consciousness may just as well be an arbitrary threshold of complexity.
But I stand corrected that the correct term is indeed materialism.
Do you mean that because of its complexity, we are not able to define it due to practical reasons (i.e. no powerful enough computer exists)? If so, that’s something completely different. Consciousness cannot be defined with math or logic even in principle. Certain aspects of consciousness can’t be defined either, like qualia (for example, the sensation of a color). Many materialists would even say that consciousness doesn’t exist because of that, and it’s all just a delusion (to which I ask: who/what is this delusion experienced by?).
Complex statistical models can be conscious. The reason AIs aren’t conscious is they’re not embodied beings and don’t have any need to develop it to stay alive.
So how being embodied helps consciousness emerge? If it’s just the statistical model that underpins the consciousness, then it doesn’t matter if it’s embodied or not. It doesn’t matter to the algorithm what hardware it runs on.
This seems irreverent to me. If you created an evolutionary algorithm, where these very complex statistical models competed for survival, I don’t see how that would help one of them become conscious.
I agree with that. By "AIs" I mean currently existing ML models we're calling AIs. That's not how we create them.
If we did make them that way, they wouldn't do large-language-model stuff though - what's that got to do with survival? Humans went millions of years without bothering to read that much too.
Given how vibrant the academic/philosophical discussions of AI and consciousness have been for decades now, it's anti-intellectual to pretend there are any obvious answers.
We're headed towards a dilemma where most scientists claim categorically that a given AI/robot is non-conscious, but most layment think it is. If robots start behaving and talking like in Detroit: Become Human, won't people react with sympathy? Who cares if the behavior is purely imitative and non-conscious, how could we tell the difference?
> Given how vibrant the academic/philosophical discussions of AI and consciousness have been for decades now, it's anti-intellectual to pretend there are any obvious answers.
As a general principle, sure. Right now, though? AI's are still a looooong way away.
> If robots start behaving and talking like in Detroit: Become Human, won't people react with sympathy?
As I understand it, those are far, far more advanced than the chatbots we have.
