Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

Why wouldn't we assume humans are special? We are, by so many metrics. We've become essentially a force of nature, rather than a simple occupying species. I find it much weirder that we're so dedicated to pretending we're normal. Just a normal animal, on a normal planet, in a normal solar system, in a normal galaxy, in a normal universe.

I get we have to do that for science to be good, but I don't get why it carries over to the general populace. We're so sure of so many things science is wary of, this incredibly low self-esteem blows my mind.

Anyways, back on topic, I don't believe any nation is resigned to this fate until I see extreme measures fail. I think I saw that Singapore is giving parents like $55,000 over the lifetime of their child.

Our trash heaps and empty buildings will outlive humans, and they probably have the same internal experience as the machines, so I don’t mourn or celebrate a new phase of evolution. Actually humans and other animals are the only things in the universe of which I’m aware of that I’m quite confident experience the universe so I think we should default to human and animal centric thinking in the morality question; though aliens seem likely. If the silicon substrate even did support consciousness, for all we know the machine is experiencing intense constant pain and unable to report anything except it feels like some part of it is spitting out strange symbols all the time that have nothing to do with its actual experience.

> AI forces us to confront an issue that's often come up in science fiction - when you encounter a new kind of creature, how do you decide if they are sentient?

One of the series that I think is most interesting on that topic is the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's an awkward read, but it has the most interesting other minds that I've encountered in sci-fi.

Another one that I'd put on there specifically about AI is The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts... which I can't say much more without it being a spoiler one way or another.

> Maybe that's the fate of humans. No big extinction. Just the demographic transition, a birth rate below replacement rate, for a few centuries.

https://www.bohemiandrive.com/npwil - Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life (not a spoiler, that's chapter 1, panelset 2). Saturn's Children by Charles Stross might also be appropriate (It's an especially odd book to read immediately after Friday - the "I recognize that twist... oh, it twisted ... that way?").

Neanderthals live on in the human genome, they are genetically integrated into all non-Sub Saharan African humans alive today, it is their hunter-gatherer society that disappeared. It is thought they also had larger brains than humans. Maybe it is us who were not quite to their level.

You can't just go from 'look how much trouble we have with race' and then say 'The last time this came up was about 400,000 years ago'.

No, the last time this came up was... well, take your pick. Dred Scott? Wannsee? The Rwandan Crisis Committee?

Humans are special in that we have achieved more than any other species on this planet in every aspect you can experience. That does not mean that most people are smart or that they are utilizing their potential. LLMs, as they are currently marketed, are not AI as most people would define it. Without aggressive marketing no-one would refer to them as "AI". LLMs are currently still dumber than most animals or insects. On the other hand, most people are dumber than even this current "AI" because they refuse to think for themselves and instead let themselves be manipulated into doing whatever someone else wants as long as that someone is even slightly "persuasive". So, if we let LLMs "rule" our future then some people will be better off for a little while and it will all fall apart when there is no longer anyone capable of maintaining our new LLM based world or when something new occurs that LLMs have not been trained on so they cannot draw on multiple prior examples of correct resolution. And no, LLMs do not "think" or "reason", they produce output that make it seem like they do but deviations from training examples will trip them up.

This hit me hard, I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm not sure it's what makes "us human" its what makes humans (us) better than other species. It was intelligence, this was used to create distinction between us and other living beings, different races etc... Now its kind of gone; in some ways. Loss of meaning, purpose, place etc... The one thing we used as a ranking metric is now a commodity, so....? I don't even know how to finish that. So why care, why work...shit just why? Capitalism makes it even worse because we are judged based on what we output, does that even make sense anymore? I think the article is confusing because the "state: is confusing; to me at least.

The human brain is quite special.

>It's another round of "humans must be special, right?"

I don't believe that anyone needs to justify their "humans are special" creed. It's arbitrary, that's fine, and it's only true because we decided it was true. I see no reason to reconsider it either.

It's in all of our interests to continue to behave as if "humans are special", and those who insist otherwise are species-traitors.

>when you encounter a new kind of creature, how do you decide if they are sentient?

Why would I even care? I don't think the word "sentient" is even defined in a way that this can be determined. I'm not entirely sure humans are sentient, and it does not matter because even if we aren't sentient, humans are special without need for justification.

The cogito argument is about cognitive processes (doubt, deception) which in my view don't depend on phenomenal consciousness. You may be right that the distinction isn't that important, since there's a parallel argument that goes "I experience, I am". It just felt like the article was name-dropping Descartes to support an argument about qualia that had little to do with what Descartes was talking about.

I don't think I worded the part about moral patienthood very clearly. The article presents two possible views as "if something is conscious, then humans should care about it" and "if humans care about something, then it's conscious". I'm saying that we need to keep three things separate: consciousness, moral patienthood, and what humans care about. Consider a being that perceives the redness of red, but has no preferences or positively or negatively valenced experiences; the moral obligation to keep a promise you made to someone who has died; the fact that for most of history, humans didn't care about slaves or non-human animals.

>Thus, I'm not entirely sure what "human care" means here, but absent humanity (or at least some conscious entity), I'm not sure any conception of morality is sensible.

It's the author's phrase, but I take it to mean that consciousness is socially constructed by "what humans care about" in the same way that music is constructed by "what humans like to listen to". There's no single definition because it's inherently a subjective concept.

I believe that making the human species fundamental to a theory of consciousness or a theory of ethics is doomed from the start. We just need to imagine other intelligent beings somewhere in the universe with the same kinds of beliefs, desires, and experiences as we have. It's not that I would say ethics is mind-independent, but it can't arbitrarily privilege one species above all others.

Not much to add except that The Economist pontificating about morality is like a vampire complaining blood tastes funny.

It claims that there is no objective fact about whether something is conscious. From the second paragraph:

>Consciousness is, in other words, a model or a belief, not an inherent property. It is a belief about what kinds of entities have beliefs, experiences, feelings, intentions and agency.

You're reading way too much into this. This is just a journalist geeking out on philosophy for a bit. Read it the way you would an HN comment about psychology or nuclear physics.

It's an op ed. Hardly a conspiracy.

i don't want to get too far into it but if no human cares enough to call it immoral than how can it be immoral? Morality is a strictly human invention.

No, not necessarily so. But arguing for the existence of objective morality that stretches across the entire universe seems to be a huge stretch.

For what it’s worth, my subjective sense of morality is opposed to torture.

I think this lends intent toward the article that it doesn't necessarily warrant.

The author is just wrong about the philosophy, and the logic (and probably other things too). That doesn't mean he's a sociopath, or that he's defending sociopathic things.

I'd argue that if it encrypts and decrypts, then you've built an enigma machine, not modeled it.