Hacker News

https://archive.ph/YPKPh

Pontifex has a well-reasoned position given the current understanding of the technology and any major assertions require an equally major amount of evidence.

Given how quickly this industry moves, the Magnifica Humanitas has aged amazingly well since its release almost half a year ago, far better than statements by most industry insiders across a broad range. Whether you are a Catholic, another mono- or polytheistic faith, Atheist, Deist, etc. I really recommend it.

Would Anthropic be allowed to sell LLMs in their current form, and us to use them as we use them, if their were deemed to be conscious? I know that they are not human so maybe slavery would not be an issue but consciousness would open a number of issues.

I never thought I would defer to the pope on matters of artificial intelligence and fair distribution of power - but here we are: the Magnifica Humanitas is a brilliantly taught out and yet clearly written manifest that should be required reading for all involved in (AI) policy as it is mainly about who we let hold power in society and who benefits.

How to know if a machine can gain consciousness:

1. Write a simulation environment like conway's game of life, perhaps a little more complicated. But leave out any human bias.

2. Run it until life starts to form.

3. Wait until the creatures start speaking about the concept of consciousness (of course in their own language, which you'll have to decipher first).

The way Amodei did it is with human bias, so it's not going to work.

I don't know what's the deal with high tech and religion lately. First thiel and his antichrist bullshit, now anthropic and the pope? What's going on? Can someone who's more in enlighten me?

Humans have inherent biological contingencies that translates into conscious pain, sorrow, eudaemonia, happiness, worry, and so forth which is felt. All biologically contingent beings, especially mammals feel emotions through complex interactions between body parts at any rate, mediated through hormones, neurotransmitters, proteins, various enzymes and organic substances in general. Perhaps A.I. "could" have something not unlike consciousness but it works 100% based on computers which lack biological contingencies.

A.I. does not feel hunger, does not need to evacuate substrates and subproducts of metabolism because it simply does not need to metabolize anything at all.

Failure to remember what makes us human might only leave us ignorant to what makes us human.

The joy of conceiving a child and the sorrow of losing a fellow human who lived a life having to breath, eat, and basically spend every single moment of every single day trying to achieve homeostasis at various levels, having experiences that change behavior purely for survival. That's us, that's humanity.

Maybe AI could help us solve the hard problem of consciousness then.

"It's a machine.

It doesn't get pissed off. It doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, it doesn't laugh at your jokes.

It just runs programs."

  > He decided to go ahead with the event, telling an audience that the company’s research into AI models has found “structures that mirror results from human neuroscience”

I've found the best way to explain what LLM "AI" actually is to people who know nothing about computers despite hunching over their smartphone 12 hours a day

Is to point how typing corrections and suggestions work because they get that and how it makes mistakes "damn you autocorrect"

Then explain that's almost how words are stitched together in "AI"

And how pixels are manipulated to make photos and video

Just on an exponential level over autocorrect with every existing text document, scientific study, every photo and video fed in instead of words to autocorrect

And why they make mistakes and hallucinate if they are not supervised and harnessed

We are a long way from AGI, at least not this decade

(and someone really needs to explain that to the orange idiot too)

Embarrassing that they even attempted to do this. It shows major ignorance of fundamental Catholic beliefs. Why would the Pope take a millenarianist AI religion that worships technology and the gospel of VCs seriously?

The folks leading the AI industry, at least in the US, continue to embarrass themselves and all of us with this nonsense.

There may come a time, but it's silly to mistake the LLMs automaton behavior for consciousness.

Oh I’m sure that will win the head of CATHOLICISM over. “It’s fine, we aren’t glorifying machines over people, we’re actually creating people! You know, kind of like God. Do you like me now?”

In Terry Pratchett's "Long Earth" there was a superintelligent AI that got legal recognition as a person by claiming to be reincarnation of some Tibetan monk that happened to die at the exact second when that AI was first turned on :)