Why are AGI and conscious AI just a marketing scam?

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https://novafuture.org/opinion-piece/why-are-agi-and-conscious-ai-nothing-but-a-marketing-trap/

What if we stopped fantasizing about AI and focused on the truth? Thanks for sharing this piece so others can read it.

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I know this is fuck AI, humor me a second.

To go bit on sci-fi, If AGI is developed, it would probably be minutes and it would have made itself aware to all humans. Exponential growth would make sure of that. Any sandbox we puny humans would have build for it would be broken in seconds. If we are lucky it would not destroy us instant.

When will that happen, 1000 years, 10k years? Most likely we have destroyed ourself before this happens. Definately not with these LLM models.

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Comments in Technology@lemmy.zip

Because it’s a computer program running on a computer? Typing very fast on a calculator won’t make it conscious, ever.

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While it’s true that “AGI” is vaguely defined and often used for hype, portraying it as a deliberate marketing trap designed to evade accountability goes too far. It’s more accurate to say the term is aspirational and commercially useful, but many serious researchers (at DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) are genuinely working toward more general capabilities. The vagueness is real, but the “evil master plan” implication lacks evidence.

General intelligence is basically synonymous with human-level intelligence. If it can do any cognitive task a human can do - either as well or better - then it’s generally intelligent. It’s not like nobody knows what that term means.

And there’s one fact you can’t get around. Consciousness, in every case observed since we started studying it, only ever appears on biological substrate.

Consciousness can only be observed from the subjective perspective of the conscious being. Nobody has ever proven the existence of consciousness anywhere outside their own mind. We only assume other animals are conscious too - we don’t actually know it.

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If consciousness can only be observed subjectively, why do people sometimes say someone is unconscious?

Nothing can ever be proven (even math proofs assume you aren’t hallucinating about having seen a convincing proof), but that usually isn’t the standard of evidence.

LLMs seem to meet most standards of consciousness formulated before GPT-2 released. They’re dumb in predictable ways, but so are human babies and horses and chickens and bees.

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Medical unconsciousness is a different thing. That’s not what’s being discussed here.

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Ah yes, you’re talking about an unprovable and unobservable thing that makes no testable predictions and doesn’t demonstrably correlate with any sort of behavior at all. That’s a very productive thing to talk about, I’m sorry for intruding.

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It’s very much observable - you’re observing it right now. Consciousness is an undeniable fact of being human, but it can only be observed from the perspective of the conscious being itself. There’s no way for you to prove anyone else is conscious because it can’t be measured. They can seem to act in ways that suggest consciousness and they may claim to be conscious but whether it actually feels like anything to be them is something only they know.

Medically speaking:

Unconsciousness is a state in which a living individual exhibits a complete, or near-complete, inability to maintain an awareness of self and environment or to respond to any human or environmental stimulus.

Source

There it doesn’t imply the absence of experience. You simply lose awareness of yourself and your environment, but you may still keep having dream-like experiences in your mind.

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Comments in Technology@lemmy.world

Because ai companies like google are all about raping the planet for profit?

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OP

It’s impossible to say otherwise :-)

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Consciousness is something completely different. It’s what makes you fully feel the present moment. It’s the fact of feeling alive. So it has nothing to do with the ability to crunch numbers or stitch words together into a logical sequence.

And there’s one fact you can’t get around. Consciousness, in every case observed since we started studying it, only ever appears on biological substrate. Never on non-living matter. Never on stone, never on metal and never on silicon. So it’s a fact that looks an awful lot like a law of nature.

This bit strikes me as odd. It suggests we’ve done experiments to check whether consciousness ever occurs in non-biological systems, and concluded that wherever we find consciousness it’s in a loving organism. But has anyone done such an experiment? Could they? Do we understand well enough what consciousness is, what it is for it to be present in an entity, and how to test for that empirically, that we can simply do experiments to test when it occurs and draw conclusions about laws of nature involving it?

You can’t do an experiment until you can say, to a good enough approximation, what you’re looking for and how you’ll tell whether it occurs or not. I doubt we even have a clear enough notion of consciousness to agree on what we’re talking about, let alone how to test whether it’s present, to do empirical experiments and draw lawlike conclusions. And it’s not that we just need to get a bit clearer about the kind of entity consciousness is: it’s not even clear that it is an entity in the empirical world.

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OP

In the text, I clearly wrote that perhaps a conscious AI will be possible in the future. I’m like everyone else; I don’t know anything about it. And like everyone else, I don’t know where consciousness comes from. What I do know for sure is that current and future AIs are simply computers that retrieve information from a database and organize it. There’s nothing magical about that. Regarding this, I encourage you to read the statements made by the leaders of OpenAI and Anthropic in recent months. These people are clearly unscrupulous manipulators.

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Yeah they seem to be suggesting that there’s something inherently mystical that’s happening with biology that can’t happen with computers despite the fact that both are made of matter that follows the laws of physics.

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We can’t even prove the next human has a consciousness.

This is so low level publicity it hurts.

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Can you be more specific? I’m curious to know which advertisement you’re talking about.

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There is no evidence for consciousness anywhere in the universe except for our own subjective experience of it. If I wasn’t conscious, I wouldn’t have a clue it was even a thing.

While it’s true we haven’t discovered consciousness in non-biological systems, it’s also true that besides ourselves we haven’t discovered it in biological systems either - because there’s no way to measure it. We just assume other humans and animals are conscious because their behavior suggests it, but there’s no scientific way to prove it actually feels like something to be them. Consciousness is entirely a subjective experience.

It’s perfectly valid to claim our current AI systems aren’t conscious. We can’t know for absolute certainty, but it’s a relatively safe assumption. However, the jump from that to claiming they’ll never be isn’t valid.

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