People want autonomy, self-learning, consistent memory and perhaps individuality (in the discernability/quirkiness sense), but still morally unencumbered slaves.
There is little discussion of how AI will enhance (or destroy) our emotional intelligence, or our naturalistic, intrapersonal or interpersonal intelligences.
Most religions, spiritual practices and even forms of meditation highlight the value of transcending mind and having awareness be present in the body. The way AGI is described, it would seem transcendence may be treated as a malfunction or bug.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligenc...
I do not have any even remotely practical definition for this, but this has to somehow involve the system being in a closed loop. It has to "run" in a sense that an operating system runs. Even if there is nothing coming on certain inputs it still has to run. And probably hallucinate (hehe) like humans do in an absence of a signal or infer patterns where there are none, yet be able to self-reflect that it is in fact a hallucination
My measurement of outside intelligence is limited by my intelligence. So I can understand when something is stupider compared to me. For example, industrial machine vs human worker, human worker is infinitely more intelligent compared to machine, because this human worker can do all kinds of interesting stuff. this metaphorical "human worker" did everything around from laying a brick to launching a man to the Moon.
....
Imagine Super-future, where humanity created nanobots and they ate everything around. And now instead of Earth there is just a cloud of them.
These nanonobots were clever and could adapt, and they had all the knowledge that humans had and even more(as they were eating earth a swarm was running global science experiments to understand as much as possible before the energy ends).
Once they ate the last bite of our Earth(an important note here: they left an optimal amount of matter to keep running experiments. Humans were kept in a controlled state and were studied to increase Swarm's intelligence), they launched next stage. A project, grand architect named "Optimise Energy capture from the Sun".
Nanobots re-created the most efficient ways of capturing the Sun energy - ancient plants, which swarm studied for centuries. Swarm added some upgrades on top of what nature came up with, but it was still built on top of what nature figured by itself. A perfect plant to capture the Sun's energy. All of them a perfect copy of itself + adaptive movements based on their geolocation and time(which makes all of them unique).
For plants nanobots needed water, so they created efficient oceans to feed the plants. They added clouds and rains as transport mechanism between oceans and plants... etc etc.
One night the human, which you already know by the name "Ivan the Liberator"(back then everyone called him just Ivan), didn't sleep on his usual hour. Suddenly all the lights went off and he saw a spark on the horizon. Horizon, that was strongly prohibited to approach. He took his rifle, jumped on a truck and raced to the shore - closest point to the spark vector.
Once he approached - there was no horizon or water. A wall of dark glass-like material, edges barely noticeable. Just 30 cm wide. On the left and on the right from a 30 cm wide wall - an image as real as his hands - of a water and sky. At the top of the wall - a hole. He used his gun to hit the wall with the light - and it wasn't very thick, but once he hit - it regenerated very quickly. But once he hit a black wall - it shattered and he saw a different world - world of plants.
He stepped into the forest, but these plants, were behaving differently. This part of the swarm wasn't supposed to face the human, so these nanobots never saw one and didn't have optimised instructions on what to do in that case. They started reporting new values back to the main computer and performing default behaviour until the updated software arrived from an intelligence center of the Swarm.
A human was observing a strange thing - plants were smoothly flowing around him to keep a safe distance, like water steps away from your hands in a pond.
"That's different" thought Ivan, extended his hand in a friendly gesture and said - Nice to meet you. I'm Ivan.
....
In this story a human sees a forest with plants and has no clue that it is a swarm of intelligence far greater than him. To him it looks repetitive simple action that doesn't look random -> let's test how intelligent outside entity is -> If entity wants to show its intelligence - it answers to communication -> If entity wants to hide its intelligence - it pretends to be not intelligent.
If Swarm decides to show you that it is intelligent - it can show you that it is intelligent up to your level. It won't be able to explain everything that it knows or understands to you, because you will be limited by your hardware. The limit for the Swarm is only computation power it can get.
There are people that have a hard time recognizing/feeling/understanding other people as "aware". Even more about animals.
>This makes it to my mind impossible to train a model to be aware
feels wrong. If you're arguing that human's are aware, then it is apparent that it is possible to train something to be aware. Nature doesn't have any formal definition of intelligence, or awareness, yet here we are.
From a practical perspective, it might be implausibly difficult to recreate that on computers, but theoretically, no reason why not.
My definition of a complete AGI is: an AI that can read JIRA tickets, talk with non-programmers and do all my job and get me and all/most software engineers fired and proves sustainable.
But in general, it's an AI that can do any remote-work just as good as humans.
we only need to fake it to the point it's undistinguishable from the carbon based one.
faking is all you need.
AGI is not here with LLMs, but its not because they lack reasoning ability. It's due to something different. Here is what I think is truly missing: continuous learning, long term memory, and infinite and efficient context/operation. All of these are tied together deeply, and thus I believe we are but a simple breakthrough away from AGI.
The idea of awareness being propagations through the NN is an interesting concept though. I wonder if this idea be proven through monitoring the electrical signals within the brain.
In essence, I think it doesn't matter that the brain has a whole bunch of chemistry added into it that artificial neural networks don't. The underlying deep non-linear function mapping capability is the same, and I believe this depth is, in both cases, comparable.
Maybe we've just reach the ability the replicate the function of an artificially powered dead brain that would be randomly stimulated and nothing more. Is this really a path to intelligence ?
This is just a claim you are making, without evidence.
The way you understand awareness is not through "this is like that" comparisons. These comparisons fall over almost immediately as soon as you turn your attention to the mind itself, by observing it for any length of time. Try it. Go observe your mind in silence for months. You will observe for yourself it is not what you've declared it to be.
> An LLM does all of these things, and more, and you can prove this by how complex their output is.
Complex output does not prove anything. You are again just making claims.
It is astoundingly easy to push an LLM over to collapse into ungrounded nonsense. Humans don't function this way because the two modes of reasoning are not alike. It's up to those making extraordinary claims to prove otherwise. As it is, the evidence does not exist that they behave comparably.
How easy? What specific methods accomplish this? Are these methods fundamentally different from those that mislead humans?
How is this different from exploiting cognitive limitations in any reasoning system—whether a developing child's incomplete knowledge or an adult's reliance on heuristics?
How is it different from Fake News and adults taking Fake News for granted and replicating bullshit?
Research on misinformation psychology supports this parallel. According to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136466132...:
"Poor truth discernment is linked to a lack of careful reasoning and relevant knowledge, as well as to the use of familiarity and source heuristics."
Maybe the only real difference is our long term experience and long term memory?
Even though complex output can be deceptive of the underlying mental model used to produce it, in my personal experience, LLMs have produced for me output that must imply extremely complex internal behaviour, with all the characteristics I mentioned before. Namely, I frequently program with LLMs, and there is simply zero percent probability that their output tokens exist WITHOUT first having thought at a very deep level about the unique problem I presented to them. And I think anyone that has used the models to the level I have, and interacted with them this extensively, knows that behind each token there is this black magic.
To summarize, I am not being naive by saying I believe everything my LLM says to me. I rather know very intimately where the LLM is deceiving me and when its producing output where its mental model must have been very advanced to do so. And this is through personal experience playing with this technology, both inference and training.
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...
It's immaterial and not measurable thus possibly out of reach of science.
Also, if subjective experience has any effect on the material world, then we can measure it and test it, putting it in reach of science. If it doesn't, why does it even matter in this discussion? By definition it has no relation to the AGI discussion since that's an empirical matter.
Wait, you mean this HN comment didn't casually solve the hard problem of consciousness?
I see a lot of "AGI boosters/doomers" comfortable making big claims without providing research to back what, when challenged, prove to be just their model or feeling of how things function.
It seems to be a case of people looking at a problem they have little knowledge or understanding of and thinking "how hard can it be"? In this case, the answer is "so hard that philosophers have dubbed it 'the hard problem'".
> A case where someone is conscious but without continuous propagation of neural signals?
That would be irrelevant. All known conscious beings are made up of biological cells, but that doesn’t prove that all conscious beings must be made of biological cells, or that biological cells are the key causative factor in consciousness. The same goes for “continuous propagation of neural signals.”
You described a personal conjecture as though it solved a known hard problem, even throwing in the word “just” as though the solution is really simple. This is a lot like the Feynman quote about quantum mechanics: if you think you understand it, you almost certainly don’t. You may not even have recognized the core problem yet. The original Chalmers paper is a good place to start: https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf
But coming at it from a computational perspective, in some ways it’s even easier to see the problem. We don’t generally assume that a deterministic, non-neural net program written in say Python has a conscious subjective experience. To use Nagel’s terminology, there is “nothing it is like” to be that program. But, an LLM or any other computational neural net is no different from a program like that. It’s executing deterministic instructions, like a machine, because it is a machine. We can speculate about consciousness being some sort of emergent property that arises in such systems given the right conditions, but that’s all it is: speculation.
And it’s completely unclear what those right conditions might be, or how those conditions could possibly give rise to conscious experience. Why aren’t humans philosophical zombies with no conscious experience, just reacting to input like machines? No-one has succeeded in getting past the conjecture stage in answering that question.
> an LLM or any other computational neural net is no different from a program like that
I don't think so. A program doesn't exhibit highly complex abstract thought in a very high-dimensional space.
> It’s executing deterministic instructions, like a machine, because it is a machine
Its true that LLMs are deterministic. But do you really think that the magic behind the brain is only due to temperature and randomness? Do you really think that non-deterministic behavior is the magic ingredient that makes up what we are referring to as consciousness? I could inject noise into an LLM at every parameter dynamically during inference. The output would come out just fine. After all, LLMs are high dimensional and can handle a little noise. Would it really be more conscious after that? You can find experiments where people remove entire layers of the LLM and it still works fine. A little noise would be even less harmful than that.
You see, when I'm arguing, I'm not citing what some other person said. I at most will cite experiments from other people and their results. When I am contradicting your arguments, I present you a reality you can go and try in the real world and verify. You can go verify yourself LLMs exhibit complex high-dimensional thought. You can verify yourself that if you inject noise dynamically through inference on every parameter, you still get coherent output from the LLM.
So, if you are willing to continue this discussion, I ask of you that you present some sort of "probing" of the real world and the respective "reaction" of the same real world as arguments. That is what finding the truth means.
And lastly. I am presenting a Theory. This means I believe that my points form a foundation that makes my theory stronger than yours. It means I have better evidence that backs it up. It doesn't mean I have proved what consciousness is. Instead, it primarily means I can make more accurate predictions using my theory on real world scenarios involving artificial and biological neural networks. And my personal experience shows me that is true.
Thank you by saying that. I think most people have an incomplete mental model for how LLMs work. And it's very misleading for understanding what they really do and can achieve. "Next token prediction" is done only at the output layer. It's not what really happens internally. The secret sauce is at the hidden layers of a very deep neural network. There are no words or tokens inside the network. A transformer is not the simple token estimator that most people imagine.
I hear there's work being done on getting the world models out, distilling the 'cortex-core' (aka the thinking without data), to perhaps see if they're capable of more, but so far we're looking at holograms of wishful thinking that increase in resolution, but still lack any essence.
This begs a question - can true intelligence even be artificial?
Not to pile on, but isn't this actually a distinct example of _lack_ of awareness? As in, our brains have sparks of creativity without understanding the inception of those sparks?
Perhaps I'm conflating some definition of "aware" with another definition of "awareness"?
This seems like an unsupported assertion. LLMs already exhibit good functional understanding of and ability in many domains, and so it's not at all clear that they require any more "awareness" (are you referring to consciousness?) than they already have.
> the spark of awareness required to be intelligent.
Again, this seems like an assumption - that there's some quality of awareness (again, consciousness?), that LLMs don't have, that they need in order to be "intelligent". But why do you believe that?
> We’ve all had sudden insights without deliberation or thought.
Highly doubtful. What you mean is, "without conscious thought". Your conscious awareness of your cognition is not the entirety of your cognition. It's worth reading a bit of Dennett's work about this - he's good at pointing out the biases we tend to have about these kinds of issues.
> We might very well be able to fake it to an extent that it fools us
This leads to claiming that there are unobservable, undetectable differences. Which there may be - we might succeed in building LLMs that meet whatever the prevailing arbitrary definition of intelligence is, but that don't possess consciousness. At that point, though, how meaningful is it to say they're not intelligent because they're not conscious? They would be functionally intelligent. Arguably, they already are, in many significant ways.
I guess by 'AGI' most people mean human level or above so I guess you'd want human level awareness which Teslas and the like don't have yet.
1. "Too" Broad, which raises uncomfortable questions about non-human intelligence and how we as humans treat them (see: whales, elephants, octopuses/cephalopods)
2. Too narrow, which again raises very uncomfortable issues about who and who does not qualify as human, and what we do with them.
Put in other words, it's more an issue of ethics and morals than it is definitional.
Also, those results don't look as strong to me as you suggest. I do not accept that an LLM is conscious nor could I ever unless I can have a theory of mind for it... Which is impossible given that it's a stochastic parrot without awareness of the things my five senses and my soul feel in reality.
As long as you cannot define it clearly or even show that you yourself have this quality, I think the burden of proof is on you to show why this has any real world implications rather than just being word play. We can build thinking, reasoning machines just fine without waiting for philosophers to finally answer what consciousness is.
This isn’t meant to be a mystical statement that it’s magic that makes humans intelligent or some exotic process impossible to compute. But that the nature of our mind is not observable in its entirety to us sufficient that the current learned reinforcement techniques can’t achieve it.
Try this exercise. Do not think and let your mind clear. Ideas will surface. By what process did they surface? Or clear your mind entirely then try to perform some complex task. You will be able to. How did you do this without thought? We’ve all had sudden insights without deliberation or thought. Where did these come from? By what process did you arrive at them? Most of the things we do or think are not deliberative and definitely not structured with language. This process is unobservable and not measurable, and the only way we have to do so is through imperfect verbalizations that hint out some vague outline of a subconscious mind. But without being able to train a model on that subconscious process, one that can’t be expressed in language with any meaningful sufficiency, how will language models demonstrate it? Their very nature of autoregressive inference prohibits such a process from emerging at any scale. We might very well be able to fake it to an extent that it fools us, but awareness isn’t there - and I’d assert that awareness is all you need.