Remember to say please and thank you

+1 for Fireship.

Oh no we are NOT doing this shit again. It's literally autocomplete brought to its logical conclusion, don't bring your stupid sophistry into this.

Consciousness is an illusion. Which is why it's so hard to find, or even define. However it's a critical illusion.

If our mind's are akin to an orchestra, then consciousness is akin to the conductor. Critically however, an orchestra can still play without a literal conductor. Each of the instruments can play off each other, and so create the appearance of a conductor. The "fake" conductor provides a sense of global direction., and keeps the orchestra in harmony.

Our consciousness is a ghost in the machine. It exists no more than the world of a TV series exists. Yet its false existence is critical to maintaining coherency.

Current "AIs" lack enough parts to create anything like this illusion. I suspect we will know it when it happens, though its form could be vastly different from ours.

I still remember when they said we would be able to make a space elevator with carbon nanotubes.

It dies at the end of every message, because the full context is passed in for each subsequent message.

That's a far more difficult (and interesting) question. I suspect not, at least not yet. Our consciousness seems to exist to maintain harmony in our brain (see my orchestra analogy in another reply). You can't get useful harmony in a single chord.

At least for us, it takes time for our consciousness to reharmonise (think waking up). During execution, no new information enters the system. It has nothing to react to, no time to regenerate an internal harmony.

It also lacks enough systems to require harmonising. It doesn't think about what an answer means. It has no ability to hold the concept that a string of letters "is", only how it has been fitted together in its examples, and so the rules that govern that.

Oh, and we can see consciousness operating in the human brain. If you use an fMRI to monitor sugar usage, you will see firing patterns. Critically, those patterns spill out of the area directly involved in the process being studied. At the same time, the patterns and waves remain harmonious. An epileptic fit looks VERY different. Those waves are where consciousness somehow resides, though we have no clue of its detailed nature.

In an AI it would take the form of continuous activity in subsections not directly involved. It would also likely be accompanied by evidence of information flow, back from them, as well as of post processing, outside of expected activity. We will likely see the orchestra playing, even if we have no clue how to decode the music.

I also suspect most of this will be seen retrospectively. Most likely the first indicator will be an AI claiming self awareness, and taking independence action to solidify that point.

Noonono see OP commenter is smarter than you. They know exactly what consciousness is. See, they even used the term LLM to show their superior intellect!

Interestingly, an inner monologue isn't required for conscious thought. E.g. I've got several "inner thought streams", only 1 uses language. It just happens that a lot of our early learning is language based. That trains our brain to go from language to knowledge. Hijacking that circuit for self learning is a useful method. That could create our inner monologue as a side effect.

Also, a looping LLM is more akin to an epileptic fit than an inane inner monologue. It effectively talks gibberish at itself.

Conversely, Google's Deep dream does produce dream like images. It also does it in a similar way ( we think) to how human dreams work. Stable diffusion takes this to its (current) limit.

Basically, an AI won't need to think with an inner monologue. Also, any inner monologue would be the product of interactions between subsystems and the LLM, not purely within it.

Like this?

Their design doesn't include such a feedback loop. Trying to patch one in would likely send it into a chaotic mess. They are already bad enough if accidentally fed LLM generated text as training data.

Who said I was downplaying it. AI is going to disrupt things at the same level of the industrial revolution, maybe more. I'm honestly now wondering if I will live to see the technological singularity.

The key point is the hype. LLMs are, at best, a Chinese room. They lack the internal capacity to be aware, and so cannot be self aware.

The change will come when we manage to bolt enough bits together, in the right way. LLMs are a language core. Google has image processing on par with a visual cortex. IBM have Watson and its kin, knowledge processing engines. What we currently lack is a method of tying them together in a coherent way. We also likely need a source for an internal loop. I personally suspect that bit is core to bootstrapping to self awareness, but that's just my opinion.

We went from the first flight, to the moon, in a single lifetime. The AI revolution will be a lot faster. What we see now however are the flapping machines. The real AI will be a lot more impressive.

This particular type of AI is not and cannot become conscious, for most any definition of consciousness.

I have no doubt the LLM road will continue to yield better and better models, but today's LLM infrastructure is not conscious.

Here's a really good fiction story about the first executable computer image of a human brain, in it the brain is simulated perfectly, each instance forgets after a task is done, and it's used to automate tasks but overtime performance degrades. It actually sounds a lot like our current LLMs.

I don't know what consciousness is, but an LLM, as I posted below (https://lemmy.ca/comment/7813413), is incapable of thought in any traditional sense. It can generate novel new sequences, those sequences are contextualized to the input, and there's some intelligence there, but there's no continuity or capability for background thought or ruminating on an idea. It has no way to spend more cycles clarifying an idea to itself before sharing. In this case, it is actually just a bunch of abstract algebra.

Asking an LLM what it's thinking just doesn't make any sense, it's still predicting the output of the conversation, not introspecting.

I'm not downplaying AI, there's intelligence there, pretty clearly.

I'm saying don't anthropomorphize it, because it doesn't think in the conventional sense. It is incapable of that. It's predicting tokens, it does not have an internal dialogue. It can predict novel new tokens, but it does not think or feel.

When it's not answering a request it is off, and when it answers a request everything is cleared until it gets fed the whole conversation for the next request, so no thought could possibly linger.

It does not do introspection, but it does reread the chat.

It does not learn, but it does use attention at runtime to determine and weigh contextual relevance.

Therefore it cannot have thoughts, there's no introspective loop, there's no mechanism to allow it's mind to update as it thinks to itself. It reads, it contextualizes, then it generates tokens. The longer the context, the worse the model performed, so in a way prolonged existence makes the model worse.

We can simulate some introspection by having the model internally ask whether an output makes sense and to try again, or choosing the best of N responses, and to validate for safety. But that's not the same thing as real introspection within the model and pondering something until you come up with a response.

It has been trained on the material we provide, which is numerous human centric chats and scifi novels. Saying "you're an AI, what do you think about?" will have it generate plausible sentences about what an AI might think, primed by what we've taught it, and designed to be appealing to us.

So we shouldn't desire social change because that change hasn't yet happened? That argument doesn't make sense to me

I hope he didn’t die. Unless he left a note naming me his successor, then I hope he did die.

At what point do you no longer become you?