This appears to be a 100% AI-generated essay, not the first from ACM and not the last. Your call if you want to spend your day reading and arguing with the article; the author presumably didn't.
I’ve been reading The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress lately and I’ve been shocked at how prescient it is. I’m kind of surprised I haven’t read more about it in the context of today’s AI.
The Culture is what I'd want to happen, the Polity (from Neal Asher) is closer to what I'd expect to happen.
Both are good series if you haven't read one or the other (or either) though I'd say Banks was the better writer, Asher world builds better than anyone I can think of in contemporary science fiction though, Spatterjay is a brilliantly realised genuinely alien feeling world and the Prador are superb "villains" (from a human perspective, totally rational from their own).
even some of Banks' stuff starts to get a bit dated. I was re-reading Consider Phlebas the other day, and in one sequence he snuck into a high-security concert type event and he's making narrow escapes because concert security is humans checking for paper tickets. And while I am sure you could come up with an in-universe reason for why a super-technological somewhat morally ambiguous future event with pervasive technology would be relying on 1980s levels of surveillance, I think it's just funny how people not that long in the past couldn't easily imagine how willing we'd be to overcomplicate things like that.
Was recently explaining to my father how the free AI people interact with is completely different than the AI products we're burning cash with. That instead of hitting some critical mass of transistors we hit a critical mass of parameters which we then loop into themselves for reasoning
Other old sci-fi I've been thinking of is The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Where claude is chew-z with its alien intelligence & when you start interacting with some code or writing you start noticing that the writer has steel teeth & feel like "damnit, this is palmer eldritch blogging again"
I still really enjoy the science fiction of that age. It's fun to read stories set in a universe where computers basically never came into existence. It's really hard for anyone to write stories like that now, so, kind of like analogy to "low-background steel" [1] that has been used recently of the pre-AI world, there's a way in which no more of this sort of story can be produced anymore, or at least, very little. Fortunately there's already more than you can read.
But it is also funny to read about "robots" in a world where computers are still blinking lights and punchcards, if they exist at all. Some of Asimov's work took it to the logical, yet still absurd, conclusion - computers are still blinking lights and punchcards but hyperadvanced and very massive robotic positronic brains are built to run the entire world at once... basically the robots become so advanced that their brains are repurposed as computers. Very amusing in its own way.
Fallout is probably the biggest example of this I can think of. Complete with the robots that are absurdly more capable than the computer hardware seems to be, and the Yes Man who at least aspires to run his part of the world.
I have been re-reading Children of the Mind (sequel to Ender's Game) and I had forgotten about Jane, who is an AI that talks to Ender through his earpiece, seeing and hearing everything he does. Jane proactively searches things for him, manages his finances and offers advice, as well as friendly banter. In the novel, the AI is treated like an AGI that treats only him this way, but I realized how very close we are to that reality right now, for everyone.
All of the use cases and integrations for AI seem to be leading toward a future exactly like this. It was interesting to see how reliant he became on his AI (couldn't use a computer, didn't know his own password) - it is barely scifi at this point, and terrifying to see how close that future is, how useful it would be, and how dangerous.
The Internet has globalized/flattened elements of culture very quickly, and AI will only accelerate that. And knowing how vulnerable humans are to suggestion/advertisement/propaganda, it seems like a perfect recipe for disaster. From an evolutionary standpoint, monoculture provides certain short-term advantages but centralizes weaknesses. If nothing else, I think we are in for a bumpy ride, whether or not we continue to boil the ocean.
“Much of today’s discourse on AI consciousness rests not on empirical evidence but on functionalism …”
In my view there can never be an empirical test for consciousness, because functionalism is wrong. If functionalism was right then there would be one. There’s no third party test for a fundamentally first person phenomenon.
The functionalist response to this would be that while the experience of consciousness in ourselves is a first-person phenomenon, how we recognize other beings as distinctly conscious in their own right is still a third-person phenomenon, and the cues we rely on still depend on observation of outward behavior that we attribute to that consciousness.
And a response to this response is to point out that our recognition of consciousness in other beings is predicated on attributing to them the same first-person experience of their consciousness that we each have of our own, meaning that human consciousness is intrinsically human and can't be attributed to an artificial system.
> our recognition of consciousness in other beings is predicated on attributing to them the same first-person experience of their consciousness that we each have of our own, meaning that human consciousness is intrinsically human and can't be attributed to an artificial system.
That reduces the question to a game of definitions though. If you only define consciousness for humans, then of course only humans will be conscious. But you have not learned anything about reality from that.
This kind of reasoning will also show its limits once you add animals to the picture.
(On the other hand, LLMs are exceptionally good at emulating exactly those cues we use to judge consciousness without necessarily being conscious - this is what caused the whole discussion in the first place.)
this would require us to still be baffled by consciousness after knowing everything about neurophysiology that might be relevant - until then, the keys to unlocking its secrets could still be hidden in our wetware behind a veil of ignorance
It will still be baffling that there is consciousness.
Maybe if you start messing with parts of my brain so I can become familiar with the third person correlates of consciousness (which in my usage refers entirely to the first person part) then I could learn something, but I could never learn why or how the first person exists. It just does.
If we perfectly reduce the brain to some scientific model, and I don’t doubt we will, we’ll be able to predict what I will say, but not understand why I’m observing it being said.
I’m pretty sure people’s perspective will change when they understand the process in detail, and that the “I” isn’t a singular thing, but an interplay of parts, where some observe the processing of others. For me it’s already non-baffling now.
Can you learn anything about 'why 8?' or 'how 7?'.
If you pose an incoherent question, the answer is 'that's not a valid question', rather than 'oh wow, how baffling'. The baffling is coming from forming what seem to be valid questions that aren't.
Another example of it is that famous who cuts the barber's hair (Russell's paradox):
The barber is the "one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves". The question is, does the barber shave himself?
Here's an LLM explaining it:
the philosophical/logical lesson is: sometimes a description that sounds grammatically fine does not actually describe a possible thing. The contradiction is in the premise, not in our failure to find the right barber.
---
For clarity, consciousness is like free will - if you invent a thing that doesn't exist and proceed to ask questions about it, the problem is you having invented a thing, not that you are then having difficulty answering questions about it.
I recall reading that some thought that simple electrical signals could not fully explain our nervous system and there may be some quantum effects in the mix.
This is the question of qualia - and it's surprisingly intractable. Realize that in this context, I can't be sure that you are conscious, either. Arguments here will crash into solipsism in the end: you guys can never prove you're not just one of my dreams.
I think that was the ultimate point of the Turing test. We can't know for certain - so the best we can do is just ask.
Any argument that would lead us to discard 99.9999999% of the phenomenon under debate, no matter how reasonable, is certainly not useful.
That's why I hold with the philosophical stance of "consciousness is the thing that makes humans talk about consciousness."
Might as well ask, "what if reality doesn't exist?" The point of thought is to analyze reality. If your thinking leads you to discard the subject of the matter, well, feel free to do that but I don't see why anyone else should take it seriously.
The question is: What makes you trust your own perception that doesn’t make you trust others’ reports? Objectively speaking, how could there possibly something that convinces you of your own perception while nothing can convince you of another’s reporting? Maybe we shouldn’t trust our “qualia” (or perception of qualia — or perception of perception of qualia …) to constitute reliable information.
People seriously undervalue the importance of "usefulness" in ontology. If I assume that the thing that others report is the same thing that I perceive, which given that they have a very similar slab of meat inside their skull as I do seems very plausible, then I can use my self-perception to learn about the interiority of 8 billion other people. I can even compare it to their reports to learn things about myself that would be hard to tell by observation!
If I assume that my perception, for some reason, is only informative about myself, then I'm not even learning something about brains! I have to assume that I'm accessing an information stream that is only tangentially related to any sort of shared reality, and has certainly no bearing on other parts of it even if I assume it has bearing on "my" part of it for which, strictly speaking, I also don't have direct evidence.
If there are two possible universes, one universe "A" where thought is valuable and useful, and one universe "B" where thought is solipsistic and extremely isolated, and also there is not just no evidence about which you are in but also philosophical arguments that there cannot ever be evidence about which you are in, I don't see why you should give universe "B" any serious thought. What are you standing to gain?
The idea that we are in danger of erroneously ascribing consciousness to AI sounds wild to me. Humans always assume whatever is convenient about other beings' (lack of) subjective experience as long as we have power over those beings. In this case the latter might no longer hold, but then it won't matter one bit what we think.
> Consciousness, in Chalmers’ usage, is subjective experience: there is something it is like to be a conscious system. Still, nothing in the Transformer architecture or in next-word prediction shows that such an inner point of view exists. Self-reports (“I am sentient”) and fluent dialogue are weak evidence, since these models are trained on vast corpora saturated with human first-person statements. This type of verbal report works for people because it is anchored in shared biology and behavior, however, for machines, it is an echo of training data.
I don't want to argue here that LLMs have consciousness, but this kind of argument annoys me because it feels like an intellectual slight of hand on its own.
There is no definite way (so far) to prove that anything besides oneself has qualia or a subjective experience.
So arguing that we cannot observe LLMs having subjective experience, therefore they cannot have any is cheap - you cannot observe that for animals or for the person sitting next to you either.
The part that self-reports are useless and LLMs sound human because they emit sequences from human training data is correct. But the article implies some sort of fundamental distinction between machines and conscious beings that can never be crossed. And I don't see any reason to assume that.
Apart from the article's probable origin in AI, it makes an elaborate, wordy argument about consciousness without trying to define the term. That's just as well, since consciousness is philosophy's "hard problem," meaning no one has successfully defined it in a way that leads to agreement.
Each of the article's arguments that AI "consciousness" is actually a weak imitation of the "real thing," can with equal justice be applied to people, and the classic Turing Test method to distinguish machines from people has long since lost its authority.
And a future event, one in which AI sprints past humans in its willingness to absorb printed matter (once called "reading") and then put it to use, is ... wait ... umm, never mind, the point I wanted to make is undermined by the fact that this has already happened.
This appears to be a 100% AI-generated essay, not the first from ACM and not the last. Your call if you want to spend your day reading and arguing with the article; the author presumably didn't.
> We believe that this entire text is AI.
> 100% of this text is AI
https://www.pangram.com/history/f8a0cf46-1d3d-4fea-a083-d88c...
I suppose there's a certain novelty in reading AI argue against AI personhood.
Not really, I remember LLMs already doing that in 2023.
Was easy to tell from the literal sub-heading of the headline. Every other word is load-bearing.
I’ve been reading The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress lately and I’ve been shocked at how prescient it is. I’m kind of surprised I haven’t read more about it in the context of today’s AI.
Have you read Ian Banks Culture series? It's kind of a best case scenario of AI in the far future.
The Culture is what I'd want to happen, the Polity (from Neal Asher) is closer to what I'd expect to happen.
Both are good series if you haven't read one or the other (or either) though I'd say Banks was the better writer, Asher world builds better than anyone I can think of in contemporary science fiction though, Spatterjay is a brilliantly realised genuinely alien feeling world and the Prador are superb "villains" (from a human perspective, totally rational from their own).
even some of Banks' stuff starts to get a bit dated. I was re-reading Consider Phlebas the other day, and in one sequence he snuck into a high-security concert type event and he's making narrow escapes because concert security is humans checking for paper tickets. And while I am sure you could come up with an in-universe reason for why a super-technological somewhat morally ambiguous future event with pervasive technology would be relying on 1980s levels of surveillance, I think it's just funny how people not that long in the past couldn't easily imagine how willing we'd be to overcomplicate things like that.
I still think Iain Banks was the best sf writer ever to have existed.
The Player of Games is an easy read if anyone wants to try him for the first time.
I entirely agree but I'm entirely biased, in a world without Sir Terry Pratchett he'd easily be my favourite writer.
It's one of the reason that Musk referencing The Culture makes me want to smash my head on a desk (or someone's at least).
On a personal level I suspect Banks would have deeply disliked Musk (based on his political leanings during his life time and his works in aggregate).
He's definitely up there with Asimov and others.
Was recently explaining to my father how the free AI people interact with is completely different than the AI products we're burning cash with. That instead of hitting some critical mass of transistors we hit a critical mass of parameters which we then loop into themselves for reasoning
Other old sci-fi I've been thinking of is The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Where claude is chew-z with its alien intelligence & when you start interacting with some code or writing you start noticing that the writer has steel teeth & feel like "damnit, this is palmer eldritch blogging again"
I just finished this yesterday. What’s funny is it has a super intelligent, conscious AI but it’s still programmed via paper tape.
I still really enjoy the science fiction of that age. It's fun to read stories set in a universe where computers basically never came into existence. It's really hard for anyone to write stories like that now, so, kind of like analogy to "low-background steel" [1] that has been used recently of the pre-AI world, there's a way in which no more of this sort of story can be produced anymore, or at least, very little. Fortunately there's already more than you can read.
But it is also funny to read about "robots" in a world where computers are still blinking lights and punchcards, if they exist at all. Some of Asimov's work took it to the logical, yet still absurd, conclusion - computers are still blinking lights and punchcards but hyperadvanced and very massive robotic positronic brains are built to run the entire world at once... basically the robots become so advanced that their brains are repurposed as computers. Very amusing in its own way.
Fallout is probably the biggest example of this I can think of. Complete with the robots that are absurdly more capable than the computer hardware seems to be, and the Yes Man who at least aspires to run his part of the world.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
I have been re-reading Children of the Mind (sequel to Ender's Game) and I had forgotten about Jane, who is an AI that talks to Ender through his earpiece, seeing and hearing everything he does. Jane proactively searches things for him, manages his finances and offers advice, as well as friendly banter. In the novel, the AI is treated like an AGI that treats only him this way, but I realized how very close we are to that reality right now, for everyone.
All of the use cases and integrations for AI seem to be leading toward a future exactly like this. It was interesting to see how reliant he became on his AI (couldn't use a computer, didn't know his own password) - it is barely scifi at this point, and terrifying to see how close that future is, how useful it would be, and how dangerous.
The Internet has globalized/flattened elements of culture very quickly, and AI will only accelerate that. And knowing how vulnerable humans are to suggestion/advertisement/propaganda, it seems like a perfect recipe for disaster. From an evolutionary standpoint, monoculture provides certain short-term advantages but centralizes weaknesses. If nothing else, I think we are in for a bumpy ride, whether or not we continue to boil the ocean.
“Much of today’s discourse on AI consciousness rests not on empirical evidence but on functionalism …”
In my view there can never be an empirical test for consciousness, because functionalism is wrong. If functionalism was right then there would be one. There’s no third party test for a fundamentally first person phenomenon.
The functionalist response to this would be that while the experience of consciousness in ourselves is a first-person phenomenon, how we recognize other beings as distinctly conscious in their own right is still a third-person phenomenon, and the cues we rely on still depend on observation of outward behavior that we attribute to that consciousness.
And a response to this response is to point out that our recognition of consciousness in other beings is predicated on attributing to them the same first-person experience of their consciousness that we each have of our own, meaning that human consciousness is intrinsically human and can't be attributed to an artificial system.
> our recognition of consciousness in other beings is predicated on attributing to them the same first-person experience of their consciousness that we each have of our own, meaning that human consciousness is intrinsically human and can't be attributed to an artificial system.
That reduces the question to a game of definitions though. If you only define consciousness for humans, then of course only humans will be conscious. But you have not learned anything about reality from that.
This kind of reasoning will also show its limits once you add animals to the picture.
(On the other hand, LLMs are exceptionally good at emulating exactly those cues we use to judge consciousness without necessarily being conscious - this is what caused the whole discussion in the first place.)
this would require us to still be baffled by consciousness after knowing everything about neurophysiology that might be relevant - until then, the keys to unlocking its secrets could still be hidden in our wetware behind a veil of ignorance
It will still be baffling that there is consciousness.
Maybe if you start messing with parts of my brain so I can become familiar with the third person correlates of consciousness (which in my usage refers entirely to the first person part) then I could learn something, but I could never learn why or how the first person exists. It just does.
If we perfectly reduce the brain to some scientific model, and I don’t doubt we will, we’ll be able to predict what I will say, but not understand why I’m observing it being said.
I’m pretty sure people’s perspective will change when they understand the process in detail, and that the “I” isn’t a singular thing, but an interplay of parts, where some observe the processing of others. For me it’s already non-baffling now.
In any case, there is a wide variety of views here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#...
Can you learn anything about 'why 8?' or 'how 7?'.
If you pose an incoherent question, the answer is 'that's not a valid question', rather than 'oh wow, how baffling'. The baffling is coming from forming what seem to be valid questions that aren't.
Another example of it is that famous who cuts the barber's hair (Russell's paradox):
The barber is the "one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves". The question is, does the barber shave himself?
Here's an LLM explaining it:
the philosophical/logical lesson is: sometimes a description that sounds grammatically fine does not actually describe a possible thing. The contradiction is in the premise, not in our failure to find the right barber.
---
For clarity, consciousness is like free will - if you invent a thing that doesn't exist and proceed to ask questions about it, the problem is you having invented a thing, not that you are then having difficulty answering questions about it.
I recall reading that some thought that simple electrical signals could not fully explain our nervous system and there may be some quantum effects in the mix.
This is the question of qualia - and it's surprisingly intractable. Realize that in this context, I can't be sure that you are conscious, either. Arguments here will crash into solipsism in the end: you guys can never prove you're not just one of my dreams.
I think that was the ultimate point of the Turing test. We can't know for certain - so the best we can do is just ask.
> There’s no third party test for a fundamentally first person phenomenon.
Agreed. But that also means I have no empirical evidence that YOU are conscious either.
Any argument that would lead us to discard 99.9999999% of the phenomenon under debate, no matter how reasonable, is certainly not useful.
That's why I hold with the philosophical stance of "consciousness is the thing that makes humans talk about consciousness."
Might as well ask, "what if reality doesn't exist?" The point of thought is to analyze reality. If your thinking leads you to discard the subject of the matter, well, feel free to do that but I don't see why anyone else should take it seriously.
The question is: What makes you trust your own perception that doesn’t make you trust others’ reports? Objectively speaking, how could there possibly something that convinces you of your own perception while nothing can convince you of another’s reporting? Maybe we shouldn’t trust our “qualia” (or perception of qualia — or perception of perception of qualia …) to constitute reliable information.
People seriously undervalue the importance of "usefulness" in ontology. If I assume that the thing that others report is the same thing that I perceive, which given that they have a very similar slab of meat inside their skull as I do seems very plausible, then I can use my self-perception to learn about the interiority of 8 billion other people. I can even compare it to their reports to learn things about myself that would be hard to tell by observation!
If I assume that my perception, for some reason, is only informative about myself, then I'm not even learning something about brains! I have to assume that I'm accessing an information stream that is only tangentially related to any sort of shared reality, and has certainly no bearing on other parts of it even if I assume it has bearing on "my" part of it for which, strictly speaking, I also don't have direct evidence.
If there are two possible universes, one universe "A" where thought is valuable and useful, and one universe "B" where thought is solipsistic and extremely isolated, and also there is not just no evidence about which you are in but also philosophical arguments that there cannot ever be evidence about which you are in, I don't see why you should give universe "B" any serious thought. What are you standing to gain?
YES - I agree entirely. But how are we going to escape solipsism?
These questions need a practical solution, not a perfect one. That's the problem. We need to stop chasing the perfect one.
Then we agree. You don’t have empirical evidence that I am conscious.
The idea that we are in danger of erroneously ascribing consciousness to AI sounds wild to me. Humans always assume whatever is convenient about other beings' (lack of) subjective experience as long as we have power over those beings. In this case the latter might no longer hold, but then it won't matter one bit what we think.
> Consciousness, in Chalmers’ usage, is subjective experience: there is something it is like to be a conscious system. Still, nothing in the Transformer architecture or in next-word prediction shows that such an inner point of view exists. Self-reports (“I am sentient”) and fluent dialogue are weak evidence, since these models are trained on vast corpora saturated with human first-person statements. This type of verbal report works for people because it is anchored in shared biology and behavior, however, for machines, it is an echo of training data.
I don't want to argue here that LLMs have consciousness, but this kind of argument annoys me because it feels like an intellectual slight of hand on its own.
There is no definite way (so far) to prove that anything besides oneself has qualia or a subjective experience.
So arguing that we cannot observe LLMs having subjective experience, therefore they cannot have any is cheap - you cannot observe that for animals or for the person sitting next to you either.
The part that self-reports are useless and LLMs sound human because they emit sequences from human training data is correct. But the article implies some sort of fundamental distinction between machines and conscious beings that can never be crossed. And I don't see any reason to assume that.
AI isn't sentient, but it can generate text and people will anthropomorphize it. TESCREAL cultists evangelizing otherwise are best ignored.
Thanks for the reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL
Apart from the article's probable origin in AI, it makes an elaborate, wordy argument about consciousness without trying to define the term. That's just as well, since consciousness is philosophy's "hard problem," meaning no one has successfully defined it in a way that leads to agreement.
Each of the article's arguments that AI "consciousness" is actually a weak imitation of the "real thing," can with equal justice be applied to people, and the classic Turing Test method to distinguish machines from people has long since lost its authority.
And a future event, one in which AI sprints past humans in its willingness to absorb printed matter (once called "reading") and then put it to use, is ... wait ... umm, never mind, the point I wanted to make is undermined by the fact that this has already happened.
Hard to keep up these days.