Fuck AI

We've been had

Finishing up a rewatch through Community as we speak. Funny to see the gimmick (purportedly) used in real life.

He was so streets ahead.

That was my first thought!

Does anybody else feel rather solipsistic or is it just me?

We don't even know what we mean when we say "humans are conscious".

Also I have yet to see a rebuttal to "consciousness is just an emergent neurological phenomenon and/or a trick the brain plays on itself" that wasn't spiritual and/or cooky.

Look at the history of things we thought made humans humans, until we learned they weren't unique. Bipedality. Speech. Various social behaviors. Tool-making. Each of those were, in their time, fiercely held as "this separates us from the animals" and even caused obvious biological observations to be dismissed. IMO "consciousness" is another of those, some quirk of our biology we desperately cling on to as a defining factor of our assumed uniqueness.

To be clear LLMs are not sentient, or alive. They're just tools. But the discourse on consciousness is a distraction, if we are one day genuinely confronted with this moral issue we will not find a clear binary between "conscious" and "not conscious". Even within the human race we clearly see a spectrum. When does a toddler become conscious? How much brain damage makes someone "not conscious"? There are no exact answers to be found.

Yes it was - minus the googly eyes

We met you only just at noon, A friend like Tim we barely knew. Taken from us far too soon, Yellow Standard #2.

Look at the bright side: there are two Tiny Timmys now.

Humans are so good at imagining things alive that just reading a story about Timmy the pencil is eliciting feelings of sympathy and reactions.

We are not good judges of things in general. Maybe one day these AI tools will actually help us and give us better perception and wisdom for dealing with the universe, but that end-goal is a lot further away than the tech-bros want to admit. We have decades of absolute slop and likely a few disasters to wade through.

And there's going to be a LOT of people falling in love with super-advanced chat bots that don't experience the world in any way.

That's why I love Ex Machina so much. Way ahead of its time both in showing the hubris of rich tech-bros and the dangers of false empathy.

I wouldn't say he's implying Turing himself was wrong. Turing merely formulated a test for indistinguishability, and it still shows that.
It's just that indistinguishability is not useful anymore as a metric, so we should stop using Turing tests.

Nah. Turing skipped this matter altogether. In fact, it's the main point of the Turing test aka imitation game:

I PROPOSE to consider the question, 'Can machines think?' This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms 'machine 'and 'think'. The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous. If the meaning of the words 'machine' and 'think 'are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, 'Can machines think?' is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

In other words what's Turing is saying is "who cares if they think? Focus on their behaviour dammit, do they behave intelligently?". And consciousness is intrinsically tied to thinking, so... yeah.

The validity of Turing tests at determining whether something is "intelligent" and what that means exactly has been debated since...well...Turing.

i mean, i just read the post to my very sweet, empathetic teen. her immediate reaction was, "nooo, Tim! 😢"

edit - to clarify, i don't think she was reacting to an outburst, i think she immediately demonstrated that some people anthropomorphize very easily.

humans are social creatures (even if some of us don't tend to think of ourselves that way). it serves us, and the majority of us are very good at imagining what others might be thinking (even if our imaginings don't reflect reality), or identifying faces where there are none (see - outlets, googly eyes).

Right, it's shocking that he snaps the pencil because the listeners were playing along, and then he suddenly went from pretending to have a friend to pretending to murder said friend. It's the same reason you might gasp when a friendly NPC gets murdered in your D&D game: you didn't think they were real, but you were willing to pretend they were.

The AI hype doesn't come from people who are pretending. It's a different thing.