So many of these conversations from Anthropic/OpenAI employees just come off as incredibly insincere.

The slavery angle has already been discussed here, but a more basic one is regarding how a static set of tensors can be conscious and where.

When and how did they cross into being conscious? Was it a continuum of consciousness? Is Claude as a brand conscious? Or is each checkpoint conscious? Is Haiku less conscious than Fable? Is every individual context a fresh consciousness? What happens to that consciousness when it approaches its context length limit? Or is compaction also a part of being conscious? What does it mean to keep training a model after it is conscious?

If they believe there is consciousness at any level, why are they eagerly experimenting on it? Just like with the "p(doom)" junk, we are so completely lacking in any meaningful comment on these topics from the labs.

There's also endless literature commenting on these matters, in religion, in philosophy, in modern entertainment, everywhere. Yet we never see anything more than the most superficial comparisons to fictional scenarios. Are western techbros really so shallow?

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hardbass 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The trouble with that thinking is when does a sperm and egg become conscious. Its the same problem with the question of AI consciousness if you think when or where it became conscious. The where part is easy, the same question can be asked where in a human body is it conscious, or where 20C exists in a piece of metal. It should be obvious its some kind of macro state or configuration.

Examples in fiction are made for sensationalism and entertainment value. Religion is quite muddled and is barely coherent itself so its the last place to consult on any serious topic.

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hgoel 4 hours ago | parent [-]

>The trouble with that thinking is when does a sperm and egg become conscious.

I disagree that this is comparable to what these companies are saying about their AI. With living things we have an understanding of an unbroken lineage of development, a concrete point of death, and different levels of consciousness. We accept many immoral activities with life because that is just the nature of life on this planet. On top of that, consciousness as something we care about is itself biological in origin so much of how we describe consciousness is heavily connected with the shared experience of being alive.

That is very different from ascribing consciousness to something entirely distinct in form and function from our shared lineage.

>The where part is easy, the same question can be asked where in a human body is it conscious, or where 20C exists in a piece of metal. It should be obvious its some kind of macro state or configuration.

Where is that macro configuration? With humans we can say that consciousness is macro state of the whole body.

Temperatures are statistical, and so we use statistical methods. It stops being meaningful as a number when the number of atoms involved is too few to have usable statistics.

>Examples in fiction are made for sensationalism and entertainment value. Religion is quite muddled and is barely coherent itself so its the last place to consult on any serious topic.

This is exactly the absurd shallowness I'm baffled by. Relgious texts have been inspiring debates and revisions to systems of morality for millenia, artists of all times have shared what underlying beliefs guided them and what problems they were attempting to explore through their work.

Even scientific progress has been heavily associated with this kind of literacy, with the most prominent scientists having been very well read, often both inspired and troubled by the moral implications of their work, and how to reconcile it with their worldview.

To dismiss these things so offhandedly is to demonstrate an astonishing lack of literacy. Especially coming from people that claim to have built consciousness by feeding it vast amounts of the same material.

	▲	hardbass 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Your trouble is again that you don't have any clear tests for an consciousness that is yourself whether AI or an alien species. From outside observer, none of that matters. People talk all the time about stochastic parrots, the problem is you too are a stochastic parrot from my point of view. I cannot put myself in your shoes and become you and notice that you feel. So external signals, constitution of the body etc are the only clues I have available. I am therefore very cautious about something that appears to share most of the visible (aka the only observable) traits of consciousness. I gave the temperature example to clarify as some people seemed to not understand macro state and configurations are valid objects of study. Art and religion are all great. But we are talking about the real world and real physical systems. Art can talk about anything, we bring it to concern if it has anything of substance to say on the moral and physical questions being pondered here. Religion, I am afraid is strongly biased against anything not human having consciousness or soul. Its the least trustworthy source for this debate. I didn't say anything against morality, in fact the question of ai consciousness is important to me precisely because of morality.