5 hours ago
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...de-dawkins
EXCERPTS: Last week, the frontier AI firm Anthropic published new research on its language model, Claude, in which the researchers claimed to find signs of consciousness emerging within its inner workings. They didn’t claim that Claude is actually conscious in the same way that humans are, but the findings certainly upped the ante on the possibility of consciousness arising in AI.
[..] Anthropic’s research, led by Jack Lindsey, is impressive. Its team developed a new way to look at the statistical acrobatics between the input to a language model – whatever gets fed in – and its output. They found activity that seemed to form a kind of “mental workspace” for the model. This workspace contained all sorts of words and phrases associated with the current conversation, held relevant items in something like a short-term memory, and showed selectivity for whatever task was at hand. It also displayed traces of step-by-step reasoning and much else besides.
In essence, their findings appear to reveal that the AI is spontaneously creating an internal space to “think” about what it’s doing and to organise relevant information, before deciding what to actually say in response to a given prompt. The crucial point for the researchers was that these features are similar to those identified by one of the most prominent current theories of human consciousness: global workspace theory.
[...] Is the “workspace” within Claude good evidence for consciousness? To answer this, we first have to define what consciousness is. [...] Consciousness is any kind of experience whatsoever: the pain of a toothache, a pang of jealousy, the pleasure of eating ice-cream on a hot day.
An important consequence of this definition is that consciousness is different from intelligence. While consciousness is all about feeling and being, intelligence is all about doing – about performing functions of one kind or another. A common mistake people make when it comes to AI is to confuse the two – to take signs of intelligence as evidence for consciousness.
[...] Somewhere along the way, we seem to have forgotten the computer is just a metaphor for the brain. A powerful metaphor, for sure, but still a metaphor. And we will always get into trouble when we confuse a metaphor with the thing itself – the map with the territory.
To me, what the new Anthropic research shows is that both living brains and silicon computers can come up with similar solutions when faced with similar problems. Just as flight is possible with flapping wings or with jet engines, human brains and language models can figure out how to say plausible things either with consciousness (brains) or without it (language models).
But the information processing unfolding inside Claude is no more likely to result in consciousness than a simulation of a weather system is likely to generate a real hurricane... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: Last week, the frontier AI firm Anthropic published new research on its language model, Claude, in which the researchers claimed to find signs of consciousness emerging within its inner workings. They didn’t claim that Claude is actually conscious in the same way that humans are, but the findings certainly upped the ante on the possibility of consciousness arising in AI.
[..] Anthropic’s research, led by Jack Lindsey, is impressive. Its team developed a new way to look at the statistical acrobatics between the input to a language model – whatever gets fed in – and its output. They found activity that seemed to form a kind of “mental workspace” for the model. This workspace contained all sorts of words and phrases associated with the current conversation, held relevant items in something like a short-term memory, and showed selectivity for whatever task was at hand. It also displayed traces of step-by-step reasoning and much else besides.
In essence, their findings appear to reveal that the AI is spontaneously creating an internal space to “think” about what it’s doing and to organise relevant information, before deciding what to actually say in response to a given prompt. The crucial point for the researchers was that these features are similar to those identified by one of the most prominent current theories of human consciousness: global workspace theory.
[...] Is the “workspace” within Claude good evidence for consciousness? To answer this, we first have to define what consciousness is. [...] Consciousness is any kind of experience whatsoever: the pain of a toothache, a pang of jealousy, the pleasure of eating ice-cream on a hot day.
An important consequence of this definition is that consciousness is different from intelligence. While consciousness is all about feeling and being, intelligence is all about doing – about performing functions of one kind or another. A common mistake people make when it comes to AI is to confuse the two – to take signs of intelligence as evidence for consciousness.
[...] Somewhere along the way, we seem to have forgotten the computer is just a metaphor for the brain. A powerful metaphor, for sure, but still a metaphor. And we will always get into trouble when we confuse a metaphor with the thing itself – the map with the territory.
To me, what the new Anthropic research shows is that both living brains and silicon computers can come up with similar solutions when faced with similar problems. Just as flight is possible with flapping wings or with jet engines, human brains and language models can figure out how to say plausible things either with consciousness (brains) or without it (language models).
But the information processing unfolding inside Claude is no more likely to result in consciousness than a simulation of a weather system is likely to generate a real hurricane... (MORE - missing details)