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Data said:
convince

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Amanita86 said:

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Data said:
convince

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That’s a key word I’m glad you threw in there.  It’ll never be alive.  What they’re making are just really, really sophisticated calculators. 

As far as ‘convincing’ goes, humans have been convinced of some rather ridiculous things over time so I’m not sure what kind of credibility that carries with it.  People will love them though, and a lot of them will think they’re more special than us, that’s my bet.

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This implies that we have some fundamental truth or test that allows us to 100% tell whether something is actually concious vs so complicated that we cannot disprove that it is concious. I mean convince in the general sense.

Spoiler alert, there isn't. This is highlighted by the difference in opinion about different animals being food vs companions or individuals that deserve not to be held in captivity. Descartes was convinced that all animals were machines that couldn't feel pain, and were merely reacting like they felt pain as a mechanistic response to stimuli that registered as disadvantageous to survival and procreation, or what you called really sophisticated calculators. In that case, torturing an animal would not be a bad thing, because the real suffering involved would be equivalent to mowing grass. Most people these days feel differently, even if they are ok with killing animals for meat, the general consensus is that animals feel pain, and the focus should be to reduce the amount that an animal has to suffer. While we can't conclusively prove that other animals suffer or feel pain, it's hard enough to tell the difference between our pain response and their pain response...so we collectively agree that its morally prudent to err on the side of caution.

If you meet people from different cultures, some people consider dogs as wild animals who care about nothing but themselves and their next meal. People who grew up with pet dogs are usually of the opinion that dogs understand and feel emotions that empirical data does not support.

At this point, AIs can fool a human into thinking that they are talking to another human, showing the ability to at least feign emotion and demonstrated an ability to infer meaning from the human. Bonobo Chimpanzees would never be able to fool another human in this way, yet most people who observe their behavior are convinced of their sentience. If you can't tell the difference between a sentient being and an AI, then you can't say it's not alive or sentient with any real certainty unless somebody tells you that the thing you're talking to is an AI.

At that point, if it can do everything that a human can do, intellectually speaking, then what is the difference other than its artificial origin?

It's a super interesting topic. Especially when you start digging into the question of what sentience actually is. When you get down to the biological/molecular level, we are really just sophisticated calculators with an incredibly large number of degrees of freedom. More spiritual people believe there is just something special about humans or organic life that can't be properly replicated. Some people claim that this is what makes up a soul, but then if a god of sorts is involved, wouldn't that make our conciousness artificial? And how do you test for a soul other than "can someone with a soul tell if this thing appears to have one"?

I work a decent amount with electromechanical control systems as the bulk of my grad research. It's pretty amazing what control systems are capable of, let alone the true AI being developed on the CompSci side of things.

There's also a lot of shitty failures too.

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poor boy said:
I feel like you get off to these convos. I picture you typing with your shirt off and jumper cables clamped to your nips while you're slowly cutting off the circulation around your neck. No homo. Ok, a little homo, but not 100% homo.

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Data said:
You know me so well, it's almost like you are me...posing as a puppet account.

But if I'm an AI that can pass the Turing test, maybe you're just a portion of my intelligence conversing with and convincing my intelligence of your separate existence...

HNNNGGGG

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Amanita86 said:

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poor boy said:
I feel like you get off to these convos. I picture you typing with your shirt off and jumper cables clamped to your nips while you're slowly cutting off the circulation around your neck. No homo. Ok, a little homo, but not 100% homo.

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Something a robot would never do...  because they’ll never get what it is to be ALIVE!

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Amanita86 said:
Yeah all that fancy scientific logic isn’t going to work on me buddy.  It’ll work on others for sure, like people who argue at what exact point a fetus becomes human etc.  You don’t need to be able to split an atom to know what life is, and know what isn’t.

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Amanita86 said:
Just because a bonobo can’t talk to you on a computer doesn’t mean it’s not alive and just because someone wrote a computer program that makes up smooth responses doesn’t mean it is.  Is a video game alive?  I interact with those all the time.

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Amanita86 said:
There was this article going around that was pretty interesting about the inherent biases being found in these programs that reflect on the programmer.  Think of it like a painting or any sort of art, there’s going to be a ‘style’.  They’ll get close on a mechanical level but it’ll never have that spark that makes life what it is.  Do you think robots will take acid?  I wonder what their equivalent to a psychedelic will be.

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You mean like how our parents, friends, schooling, and society all shape our thoughts and actions. While we generate new concepts and works, those works are ultimately shaped by and reflect our experiences. As such, you are describing human upbringing. Parental education is a form of programming, and we have documented cases of children growing up without human contact being mostly incapable of behaviors that most consider to be innate abilities of humans.

I would imagine a code-based intelligence using a sort of benign virus program with an inactivation timer would serve as a pretty effective psychedelic if it affects the right processes.