Will AI ever = conciousness or sentience?

[The Grand Nudger]

What use could a self aware being be to you? if you made an intelligence which was self aware, why would it not be selfish?

What a strange charge, so human, to levy against something decidedly not human. Don't you think? Nevertheless, human beings are selfish, they're still "useful to me".

So the drive would be to create a thing that you could control, and as such it would be a tool, unless it was self aware in which case, it would not see the situation necessary from your point of view.

The most common thread in Sci Fi of this sub-genre, yes. In my personal opinion, if I knew a way to create AI that was my equal or superior (not just a tool) I can't imagine how I could avoid doing it..if only to show that I could. On a similar note we "create children" who we hope will develop into our superiors (some of us put alot of effort into making this so), we have no reasonable expectations of control over these children (beyond a point..granted) and they often fail to see situations from our point of view. Yet we still do it (hell, some of us seem to enjoy it).

In which case

In which case we have a problem, yes. However, if Bender wants to rule, there will be some bodies he'll have to step over to get to that throne. The situation would be the same for a human being (or group of human beings) looking to "rule". Isaac Asimov handled this with his notion of "prime directives" (notions which he smuggled into all of his stories unintentionally at first, btw...there were tons of stories about murderous robots at the time and maybe he just wanted his to be different)

[Napoléon]

Even so, I am not impressed that we are very close at all to understanding how conscious beings work.

Yeah we're really not. We might be able to create machines that can simulate consciousness but that in no way means we are close to creating machines with consciousness.

If it ever happens that we do achieve such a feat, it will be hundreds of years in the future.

[The Grand Nudger]

I still don't get it, how can we say on the one hand that we don't understand consciousness but on the other that a simulation is not consciousness? What else are we referring to but the effect? Let me rephrase, in what way does the simulation differ from "the genuine article"? I'm not asking anybody to be right, or put forward some nobel worthy shit. I'd just like to hear more opinions (and disagreements) of what makes their consciousness "genuine", or different somehow from AI.

[Napoléon]

I still don't get it, how can we say on the one hand that we don't understand consciousness but on the other that a simulation is not consciousness? What else are we referring to but the effect?

I said in a previous post it's about how you define sentience/consciousness.

Personally not understanding how consciousness works is not the same as not knowing how to identify consciousness.

[Whateverist]

Interstellar navigators Jon. More down to home, pilots and operators that never sleep, never tire, never need to be fed. Educators that persist indefinitely, absorbing and cataloging knowledge and relaying it with the experience of centuries on the job. Soldiers not constrained by our biological restrictions, whose experience and expertise can be transferred or duplicated beyond the frame that carries them if that frame is damaged or lost. Just to name a few things.

As a side note, we seem to think that wisdom comes with age in our cases. If AI were similar to ourselves but immortal...we'd be out of the wisdom business...wouldn't we?

Now why would we want to spoil it by giving them self awareness. I'm all for creating a race of hardworking service bots so that we can live off the fat of their effort. But wouldn't it be a bad idea to give them the capacity for resentment? (Of course, I don't think that would actually be possible to give them anyway though I'm sure we could put together a very good pissed-off simulation program.)

[The Grand Nudger]

Yeah, I can see that, making something different by defining it as such. If I use my own consciousness as the measuring stick then I can definitively say that a dogs consciousness isn't "genuine"..it's unlike my own. Does that make a dog AI (or in a similar class of things as AI)? But perhaps more strangely, if my consciousness was the bar for the genuine article....would those who have their consciousness somehow impaired (relative to myself) be "less genuine" than I. Would those with damage to their consciousness then be somehow similar to dogs..or AI? As we bring the lens further in...would those "less intelligent" - as a part of that consciousness- than myself have a "less genuine" sort of consciousness?

Granted, the two aren't the same thing- but we'd have to be able to identify a consciousness before we could examine how it works. Bit of a viscious circle, because then we have to ask -how do we identify consciousness. By reference to how it works? Or the effect "it" produces? If two things produce a similar effect through different means does it really make sense to consider one of them genuine and the other artificial?

[Whateverist]

Yeah, I can see that, making something different by defining it as such. If I use my own consciousness as the measuring stick then I can definitively say that a dogs consciousness isn't "genuine"..it's unlike my own. Does that make a dog AI (or in a similar class of things as AI)? But perhaps more strangely, if my consciousness was the bar for the genuine article....would those who have their consciousness somehow impaired (relative to myself) be "less genuine" than I. Would those with damage to their consciousness then be somehow similar to dogs..or AI? As we bring the lens further in...would those "less intelligent" - as a part of that consciousness- than myself have a "less genuine" sort of consciousness?

Granted, the two aren't the same thing- but we'd have to be able to identify a consciousness before we could examine how it works. Bit of a viscious circle, because then we have to ask -how do we identify consciousness. By reference to how it works? Or the effect "it" produces? If two things produce a similar effect through different means does it really make sense to consider one of them genuine and the other artificial?

Well an early Disney "automaton" parrot could sound and move like a real parrot. How do I know it doesn't experience what a real parrot experiences? Cause they weren't designed for that. Now the rock I unthinkingly skip over the pond may be terrified for all I know. But I don't think so and find no reason to think so. If some one were to hollow out a rock and imbed a speaker so it could scream bloody murder while it skimmed the pond, I still would not think it actually had any experience going on inside that corresponded to what was coming out of its speaker.

A dog has its consciousness as do other real blood and guts critters, or so I suppose. A mussel clinging to a rock no doubt has some experience of its environment .. and ever so much more than any robot or computer program is ever likely to have. Why? Because, so far at least, consciousness has only ever been found in association with neurons. (I have no knock down argument for thinking consciousness will never be found in any other environment than brain tissue .. but that seems to me to be how things stand.)

[The Grand Nudger]

Is our understanding of how nuerons work so much different from our understanding of how logic gates work?

[Whateverist]

I still don't get it, how can we say on the one hand that we don't understand consciousness but on the other that a simulation is not consciousness? What else are we referring to but the effect? Let me rephrase, in what way does the simulation differ from "the genuine article"? I'm not asking anybody to be right, or put forward some nobel worthy shit. I'd just like to hear more opinions (and disagreements) of what makes their consciousness "genuine", or different somehow from AI.

First, thanks for helping me think this through. I need the challenge since what I think seems to me both obvious and hard to articulate.

What else are we referring to but the effect?

First and foremost I think we are referring to an immediate, subjective experience of being a being. We're in the world responding to shit. We find that stuff matters to us. So we might ask, how come? Reflection might reveal an element of upbringing, or, a moving play or book or relationship which may have had an impact on what matters to us. But it might also just strike us as stemming from normal mammalian drives or we might just not have any damned idea at all.

So what I think of as consciousness or sentience includes all of these things. We have an experience of what it feels like for a thing to matter. We recognize that it is our self, a particular being, which is having this reaction. It isn't the room I'm in which is hungry or feeling threatened, it's me ... this upright naked ape. We can reflect on how earlier experiences have shaped our response and sometimes, I think, that reflection can change our future experience of what matters.

I can imagine a program that would simulate these outwardly visible effects but I can't imagine why I should think that the effects correspond to the actual experience.

You might wonder if this leaves me a solipsist toward other people or animals but I would answer not at all. There is every reason to suppose your insides feel and work the way mine do. There is no reason I can imagine why I should think a machine or program which I understand has been constructed to mimic our outward appearance of being conscious actually is so.

- Doubtful in Berkeley.

[The Grand Nudger]

First, thanks for helping me think this through. I need the challenge since what I think seems to me both obvious and hard to articulate.

What else are we referring to but the effect?

First and foremost I think we are referring to an immediate, subjective experience of being a being. We're in the world responding to shit. We find that stuff matters to us. So we might ask, how come? Reflection might reveal an element of upbringing, or, a moving play or book or relationship which may have had an impact on what matters to us. But it might also just strike us as stemming from normal mammalian drives or we might just not have any damned idea at all.

So what I think of as consciousness or sentience includes all of these things. We have an experience of what it feels like for a thing to matter. We recognize that it is our self, a particular being, which is having this reaction. It isn't the room I'm in which is hungry or feeling threatened, it's me ... this upright naked ape. We can reflect on how earlier experiences have shaped our response and sometimes, I think, that reflection can change our future experience of what matters.

I can imagine a program that would simulate these outwardly visible effects but I can't imagine why I should think that the effects correspond to the actual experience.

You might wonder if this leaves me a solipsist toward other people or animals but I would answer not at all. There is every reason to suppose your insides feel and work the way mine do. There is no reason I can imagine why I should think a machine or program which I understand has been constructed to mimic our outward appearance of being conscious actually is so.

- Doubtful in Berkeley.

Bolding is mine. Ital mine. What reason would that be? What if you didn't understand it?

@ bolded- I think I've been remiss in explaining the challenge. Like you, I wouldn't imagine AI to "think like we do", to experience things "as we do"....but I don't think that this would disqualify AI from being self aware, or intelligent, from being genuine. In the same way that other creatures may experience "consciousness" differently than we do, a machine may be capable of experiencing something (perhaps even by a similar means logic gates to nuerons) indistinguishable from consciousness, at which point it's difficult to see why we would withhold the term.


@ ital- The constant theme seems to be tricks, mimicry, but why do we imagine this, suppose we created AI not because we intended to do so, but by accident - we wouldn't understand it as a trick then...it wouldn't be any attempt to mimic ourselves. Why couldn't this occur? Our own awareness wasn't brought about "on purpose" and all of the same forces are acting on machines -in principle- that led to our own awareness. If you refer to tricks then it's understandable to conclude that a trick is not genuine. Try to distance yourself from the notion of a trick to begin with.

Let me offer something about "tricks" (the idea of a convincing simulation). We call it a "trick" because we know how it works. We know it isn't the real deal. Similar to mimicry, we call it such by reference to what we already consider "the genuine article". Notice that the premise and the conclusion are identical. It matters very little what we plug in between the two. But let me ask you this, if we ever figured out "how we work".....would it then seem like more of a trick than "the genuine article"? Probably not, But why not?

@ Both. Why assume that consciousness is somehow measured by our own as a "thing", and similarly why ignore those similarities our consciousness (and the structure we feel is at least somehow involved) has with things that are not ourselves? Why not consider "human consciousness" a -type- of consciousness that leverages principles which can be, though aren't always, leveraged by other things? Why assume that ours is the real deal and not a "trick" to begin with - wouldn't it be better to establish this than simply declare it..especially if we're trying to compare two proposed models of how something might be "conscious"? It bears mention in this, that I'm not trying to devalue your experience of consciousness by likening it to a "trick"...if it were a "trick" it would be a very valuable one, on that I think we both agree- just trying to pry this idea of what is or isn't trickery away from what is or isn't human, or like us. Trying to make this something other than bare bias towards what you and I possess and call "consciousness"

(I could argue against my own choice of words in this post all day long by the way...just hoping to have conveyed the general theme)