On the one hand we don't even have a roadmap toward reliable AI.
On the other, if we ever plug an LLM into something that has memory, acquires experiences, does experiments, observes the outcome and adjusts its worldview in response, consciousness might fall out of that. And writing good code might not even require consciousness.
- as a function of an independent human soul
- as the fundamental substrate on which the rest of the universe is built
- as a byproduct/secondary phenomenon of physical processes
In the latter two cases I believe that the question of whether GPT is conscious is immaterial. In either case it is functioning in the same medium we all are when we talk, think, write. In the first case it is not, and the question is thornier.
One can debate whether either those is necessarily a consequence of consciousness, but nonetheless those kinds of qualities are what people are aiming at when they wonder about conscious AI.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
presumably they've already fed it all the code in the world (including a load they probably aren't licensed to)
The problem I've seen is that, maybe like the author has been writing, it's making sh*t up. That's not untrue, sometimes I didn't give it all dependent classes and it tried to think sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly what those were (such as method signatures, instance members, etc.) I wish it would have asked me some details rather than trying to figure things out. The guys at OpenAI have still a lot to do, but the current status is very impressive
it doesn't understand anything, it doesn't make deductions
it's a probability model, and I understand how it's implemented perfectly well, thank you
The point being, you can choose to laden the word “understand” with the meaning of human-like thinking, in which case humans will always be superior by definition. Or you can choose a “many ways to Rome” definition of understanding that is purely focused on results.
Large language models understand language in their own way. Currently their results are inferior to humans’ but one day the results may be superior.
This is data at a scale OpenAI did not have access to before.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461