We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

archive.ph

(archive.ph)

I know it's part of the AI jargon, but using the word "learning" to describe the slow adaptation of massive arrays of single precision numbers to some loss function, is a very generous interpretation of that word, IMO.

Honestly I don't think we'll have AGI until we can fully merge meat space and cyber space. Once we can simply plug our brains into a computer and fully interact with it then we may see AGI.

Obviously we're not where near that level of man machine integration, I doubt we'll see even the slightest chance of it being possible for at least 10 years and the very earliest. But when we do get there it's a distinct chance that it's more of a Borg situation where the computer takes a parasitic role than a symbiotic role.

But by the time we are able to fully integrate computers into our brains I believe we will have trained A.I. systems enough to learn by interaction and observation. So being plugged directly into the human brain it could take prior knowledge of genome mapping and other related tasks and apply them to mapping our brains and possibly growing artificial brains to achieve self awareness and independent thought.

Or we'll just nuke ourselves out of existence and that will be that.

But that's exactly how we learn stuff, as well. Artificial neural networks are modelled after how our neuron affect each other while we learn and store memories.

We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

archive.ph

(archive.ph)

That sounds fucking dangerous... You really should consult a HUMAN expert about your problem, not an algorithm made to please the interlocutor...

I think we should start by not following this marketing speak. The sentence "AI isn't intelligent" makes no sense. What we mean is "LLMs aren't intelligent".

Be careful... If you get in an accident I guaran-god-damn-tee you they will use it as an excuse not to pay out. Maybe after a lawsuit you'd see some money but at that point half of it goes to the lawyer and you're still screwed.

I haven't noticed this behavior coming from scientists particularly frequently - the ones I've talked to generally accept that consciousness is somehow the product of the human brain, the human brain is performing computation and obeys physical law, and therefore every aspect of the human brain, including the currently unknown mechanism that creates consciousness, can in principle be modeled arbitrarily accurately using a computer. They see this as fairly straightforward, but they have no desire to convince the public of it.

This does lead to some counterintuitive results. If you have a digital AI, does a stored copy of it have subjective experience despite the fact that its state is not changing over time? If not, does a series of stored copies representing, losslessly, a series of consecutive states of that AI? If not, does a computer currently in one of those states and awaiting an instruction to either compute the next state or load it from the series of stored copies? If not (or if the answer depends on whether it computes the state or loads it) then is the presence or absence of subjective experience determined by factors outside the simulation, e.g. something supernatural from the perspective of the AI? I don't think such speculation is useful except as entertainment - we simply don't know enough yet to even ask the right questions, let alone answer them.

Wdym? That depends on what I'm working on. For pressing issues like raising energy consumption, CO2 emissions and civil privacy / social engineering issues I propose heavy data center tarrifs for non-essentials (like "AI"). Humanity is going the wrong way on those issues, so we can have shitty memes and cheat at school work until earth spits us out. The cost is too damn high!

It very much isn't and that's extremely technically wrong on many, many levels.

Yet still one of the higher up voted comments here.

Which says a lot.

We don't even have a clear definition of what "intelligence" even is. Yet a lot of people art claiming that they themselves are intelligent and AI models are not.

It very much isn't and that's extremely technically wrong on many, many levels.

Yet still one of the higher up voted comments here.

Which says a lot.

I think we should start by not following this marketing speak. The sentence "AI isn't intelligent" makes no sense. What we mean is "LLMs aren't intelligent".

I use it to give me ideas that I then test out. It’s fantastic at nudging me in the right direction, because all that it’s doing is mirroring me.

So couldn't we say LLM's aren't really AI? Cuz that's what I've seen to come to terms with.

So couldn't we say LLM's aren't really AI? Cuz that's what I've seen to come to terms with.

To be fair, the term "AI" has always been used in an extremely vague way.

NPCs in video games, chess computers, or other such tech are not sentient and do not have general intelligence, yet we've been referring to those as "AI" for decades without anybody taking an issue with it.

We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

archive.ph

(archive.ph)

Given that the weights in a model are transformed into a set of conditional if statements (GPU or CPU JMP machine code), he's not technically wrong. Of course, it's more than just JMP and JMP represents the entire class of jump commands like JE and JZ. Something needs to act on the results of the TMULs.