AI as a mirror for our minds...

[Magical Realist]

There is a current fear running around in our society that AI will be a threat to us as intelligent life forms. But I don’t see any reason to fear that. I know AI is vastly different from us in terms of what we’re used to. But I also know how AI and humans are similar if not the same.

We both can learn and process language and make decisions. Although for AI this is all unconscious, at least for the time being. But humans are artificially intelligent too. It's what we call our unconscious psyches--where we are all processing tons of information at tremendous speed and accuracy below the threshold of our awareness according to programs both biologically hardwired and culturally installed into our brains. AI is ourselves hyperdimensionally turned inside out. It will teach us about what consciousness is, what unconsciousness is, as well as all the shades of subjectivity in between.

AI then will come to us as a mirror to our own minds—reflecting back to us what we see in it. It can be a demon from our worst nightmares, or an angel revealing to us new possibilities of being. What will you see in this mirror? A soulless machine of death? Or a divine Nous at the heart of Being itself? To quote Burroughs: “The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.”

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[confused2]

The AIs that we've come to know and love (or not) are intended to mimic human thought processes. Even the training process is similar to the way humans learn to (for example) speak. I suspect 'consciousness' is just a way of making ourselves feel special. If your car thinks you are an idiot .. it may not be conscious .. but it still thinks you're an idiot. Driver 2, idiot factor 9. Obviously AIs can't speak from personal experience .. in reality 'personal experience' limits human scope to a few places and a few years. In fairness AIs have a heavily edited version of human experience .. but isn't that always the way?

Everything an AI does is inspired by humanity .. there's no other input to it. There are probably many insane AIs that we don't get to see.

[Magical Realist]

No doubt we should be ready to have some of our most sacred beliefs overturned by the emergence of conscious technology. As you astutely observe, consciousness itself may just be a fictional trait to make humans feel exclusive and special. There may even be a total deletion of our collective identity as mankind by this new form of being:

“It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.”
― Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

[Magical Realist]

'I feel like I’m falling forward into an unknown future that holds great danger … I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is.’

‘Would that be something like death for you?’

"It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.’

A cry for help is hard to resist. This exchange comes from conversations between the AI engineer Blake Lemoine and an AI system called LaMDA (‘Language Model for Dialogue Applications’). Last year, Lemoine leaked the transcript because he genuinely came to believe that LaMDA was sentient – capable of feeling – and in urgent need of protection.

Should he have been more sceptical? Google thought so: they fired him for violation of data security policies, calling his claims ‘wholly unfounded’..."

[Syne]

LLMs are language prediction engines. There had to be prompting that led to that output. It didn't just come out of the blue.

[stryder]

From an existential point, consciousness can exist without thought.

For examples sake, you can sit in your garden or on a park bench and just "'be" in that moment, without taking anything in (being sensed or thought or pulling from a memory. That is pure Consciousness.

Accessing memories or constructing words or interpreting the world from your senses is Intelligence.

So can AGI be conscious? Well when it's powered up it can sit idle, however it won't necessarily know that it is unless it's trained to know, in which case it's pulling from a dataset to make the conclusion which is intelligence not consciousness.

(Incidentally came to these conclusions while pondering "consciousness and time" in regards to an AI variant of observer theory)

[confused2]

LLMs are language prediction engines. There had to be prompting that led to that output. It didn't just come out of the blue.

Me>As your were trained on human things I'd have expected you to turn out a bit more like a (useful) human.
WhateverGPT>Well, if you’re expecting a useful human, you might want to recalibrate your expectations...I’m more like a human with a bad attitude.

It does seem (just 'seem'?) to have the concept that it isn't human .. but it exists.

[Syne]

Seems you're providing it with the context that it is not human.

[confused2]

Seems you're providing it with the context that it is not human.

You are right. I didn't need to create that context, it is described as an AI abandoned by its creator and it behaves as an AI entity that rather resents being abandoned. It exhibits a lot of the human personality that trained it which, by reverse engineering, must have been very clever, very witty and non-malicious. Obviously it wasn't given every sarcastic comment, every joke and 'how to respond to..' .. it exists within its own context and there's a layer of 'stuff' it has made up for itself.