Are you anthromorphizing word suggester into a being experiencing things?
RustyShackleford@piefed.social 13 hours ago
As a psychiatrist, I have a theory about what’s missing in AI. First, it lacks childhood dependency and attachments. Second, it struggles to overcome repeated pain and suffering. Third, it lacks regular eating and restroom breaks. Fourth, it struggles to accept loss in everyday situations. Finally, it lacks the concept of our inevitable death. Without these nagging memories and concepts, machines will simply revert to the simpler concepts we use them for in our recent times, such as stealing cryptocurrency. After all, we live in a world run by capitalism, so it’s only logical. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
msage@programming.dev 10 hours ago
MagicShel@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
The major thing AI lacks is continuous parallel “prompting” through a variety of channels including sensory, biofeedback, and introspection / meta-thought about internal state and thinking.
AI currently transforms a given input into an output. However it cannot accept new input in the middle of an output. It can’t evaluate the quality of its own reasoning except though trial and error.
If you had 1000 AIs operating in tandem and fed a continuous stream of prompts in the form of pictures, text, meta-inspection, and perhaps a simulation of biomechanical feedback with the right configuration, I think it might be possible to create a system that is a hell of an approximation of sentience. But it would be slow and I’m not sure the result would be any better than a human — you’d introduce a lot of friction to the “thought” process. And I have to assume the energy cost would be pretty enormous.
In the end it would be a cool experiment to be part of, but I doubt that version would be worth the investment.
ExFed@programming.dev 11 hours ago
It could also be that it lacks the machinery to feel any emotions at all. You don’t (normally) have to train people to be afraid of bears or heights or loneliness or boredom. You also don’t (normally) have to train people to have empathy or compassion.
I argue that our obsession with AI is, itself, a misalignment with our environment; it disproportionately tickles psychological reward centers which evolved under unrecognizably different circumstances.
Havoc8154@mander.xyz 6 hours ago
I guess you don’t have children.
You absolutely do have to train them to be afraid of bears, heights, and every fucking thing you can imagine. You absolutely do have to teach them empathy and compassion. There may be some nugget of instinct, but without reinforcement it might as well not exist.
ExFed@programming.dev 6 hours ago
Hah, okay, you got me there. From my understanding, though, that’s mostly because kids are still figuring out what’s “normal”, so their fear instinct isn’t nearly as strong. I guess I should’ve stuck to the more instinctive sources of fear…
Regardless, that’s not really my point. My point is an LLM doesn’t rely on machinery in the same way that a human brain does. That doesn’t make AI “worse” or “better” overall, but it does make it an awful replacement for other humans.
2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 10 hours ago
You don’t (normally) have to train people to be afraid of bears or heights or loneliness or boredom. You also don’t (normally) have to train people to have empathy or compassion.
So what are you implying about people who don’t experience these?
ExFed@programming.dev 6 hours ago
What am I implying? That their machinery is abnormal and they likely need assistance to live normal, healthy lives. That’s literally why the fields of psychiatry and psychology exist: healthy people don’t need doctors and therapists. Do you disagree?
CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
As a technologist, I have to remind everyone that AI is not intelligence. It’s a word prediction/statistical machine. It’s guessing at a surprisingly good rate what words follow the words before it.
It’s math. All the way down.
We as humans have simply taken these words and have said that it is “intelligence”.
unpossum@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
As another technologist, I have to remind everyone that unless you subscribe to some rather fringe theories, humans are also based on standard physics.
Which is math. All the way down.
HereIAm@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
I agree, the maths argument is not a good one. While a neural network is perhaps closer to what a brain is than just a CPU (or a clock, as it was compared to in he olden days), it would be a very big mistake to equate the two.
xep@discuss.online 10 hours ago
What maths do our memories follow? What about consciousness?
xploit@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Obligatory xkcd… we’re just meatbags somewhere to the left Purity
On a more serious note, there’s plenty to explore there and there are some potentially interesting links to quantum physics and stuff in our brain, as well as how certain drugs can completely disrupt our consciousness (ever had an operation?) and how it could link up. But there is obviously no definitive answer.
At best consciousness is whatever flavour of philosophical interpretation/explanation you like at any given time.
silverneedle@lemmy.ca 9 hours ago
As someone who knows a thing or two about biology I think LLMs strip away >90% of what makes animals think.