AI Is a Harsh Mistress

53 pointsposted 4 hours ago
by fscaramuzza
(cacm.acm.org)

42 Comments

matherial

3 hours ago

This appears to be a 100% AI-generated essay, not the first from ACM and not the last. Your call if you want to spend your day reading and arguing with the article; the author presumably didn't.

aureate

2 hours ago

I suppose there's a certain novelty in reading AI argue against AI personhood.

layer8

2 hours ago

Not really, I remember LLMs already doing that in 2023.

VCFundedGenYer

2 hours ago

Was easy to tell from the literal sub-heading of the headline. Every other word is load-bearing.

sebmellen

3 hours ago

I’ve been reading The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress lately and I’ve been shocked at how prescient it is. I’m kind of surprised I haven’t read more about it in the context of today’s AI.

datakan

3 hours ago

Have you read Ian Banks Culture series? It's kind of a best case scenario of AI in the far future.

noir_lord

3 hours ago

The Culture is what I'd want to happen, the Polity (from Neal Asher) is closer to what I'd expect to happen.

Both are good series if you haven't read one or the other (or either) though I'd say Banks was the better writer, Asher world builds better than anyone I can think of in contemporary science fiction though, Spatterjay is a brilliantly realised genuinely alien feeling world and the Prador are superb "villains" (from a human perspective, totally rational from their own).

deater

2 hours ago

even some of Banks' stuff starts to get a bit dated. I was re-reading Consider Phlebas the other day, and in one sequence he snuck into a high-security concert type event and he's making narrow escapes because concert security is humans checking for paper tickets. And while I am sure you could come up with an in-universe reason for why a super-technological somewhat morally ambiguous future event with pervasive technology would be relying on 1980s levels of surveillance, I think it's just funny how people not that long in the past couldn't easily imagine how willing we'd be to overcomplicate things like that.

alasdair_

3 hours ago

I still think Iain Banks was the best sf writer ever to have existed.

The Player of Games is an easy read if anyone wants to try him for the first time.

noir_lord

2 hours ago

I entirely agree but I'm entirely biased, in a world without Sir Terry Pratchett he'd easily be my favourite writer.

It's one of the reason that Musk referencing The Culture makes me want to smash my head on a desk (or someone's at least).

On a personal level I suspect Banks would have deeply disliked Musk (based on his political leanings during his life time and his works in aggregate).

datakan

2 hours ago

He's definitely up there with Asimov and others.

Grambo

3 hours ago

I just finished this yesterday. What’s funny is it has a super intelligent, conscious AI but it’s still programmed via paper tape.

jerf

3 hours ago

I still really enjoy the science fiction of that age. It's fun to read stories set in a universe where computers basically never came into existence. It's really hard for anyone to write stories like that now, so, kind of like analogy to "low-background steel" [1] that has been used recently of the pre-AI world, there's a way in which no more of this sort of story can be produced anymore, or at least, very little. Fortunately there's already more than you can read.

But it is also funny to read about "robots" in a world where computers are still blinking lights and punchcards, if they exist at all. Some of Asimov's work took it to the logical, yet still absurd, conclusion - computers are still blinking lights and punchcards but hyperadvanced and very massive robotic positronic brains are built to run the entire world at once... basically the robots become so advanced that their brains are repurposed as computers. Very amusing in its own way.

Fallout is probably the biggest example of this I can think of. Complete with the robots that are absurdly more capable than the computer hardware seems to be, and the Yes Man who at least aspires to run his part of the world.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

__s

2 hours ago

Was recently explaining to my father how the free AI people interact with is completely different than the AI products we're burning cash with. That instead of hitting some critical mass of transistors we hit a critical mass of parameters which we then loop into themselves for reasoning

Other old sci-fi I've been thinking of is The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Where claude is chew-z with its alien intelligence & when you start interacting with some code or writing you start noticing that the writer has steel teeth & feel like "damnit, this is palmer eldritch blogging again"

lubujackson

3 hours ago

I have been re-reading Children of the Mind (sequel to Ender's Game) and I had forgotten about Jane, who is an AI that talks to Ender through his earpiece, seeing and hearing everything he does. Jane proactively searches things for him, manages his finances and offers advice, as well as friendly banter. In the novel, the AI is treated like an AGI that treats only him this way, but I realized how very close we are to that reality right now, for everyone.

All of the use cases and integrations for AI seem to be leading toward a future exactly like this. It was interesting to see how reliant he became on his AI (couldn't use a computer, didn't know his own password) - it is barely scifi at this point, and terrifying to see how close that future is, how useful it would be, and how dangerous.

The Internet has globalized/flattened elements of culture very quickly, and AI will only accelerate that. And knowing how vulnerable humans are to suggestion/advertisement/propaganda, it seems like a perfect recipe for disaster. From an evolutionary standpoint, monoculture provides certain short-term advantages but centralizes weaknesses. If nothing else, I think we are in for a bumpy ride, whether or not we continue to boil the ocean.

GPerson

3 hours ago

“Much of today’s discourse on AI consciousness rests not on empirical evidence but on functionalism …”

In my view there can never be an empirical test for consciousness, because functionalism is wrong. If functionalism was right then there would be one. There’s no third party test for a fundamentally first person phenomenon.

Gormo

2 hours ago

The functionalist response to this would be that while the experience of consciousness in ourselves is a first-person phenomenon, how we recognize other beings as distinctly conscious in their own right is still a third-person phenomenon, and the cues we rely on still depend on observation of outward behavior that we attribute to that consciousness.

And a response to this response is to point out that our recognition of consciousness in other beings is predicated on attributing to them the same first-person experience of their consciousness that we each have of our own, meaning that human consciousness is intrinsically human and can't be attributed to an artificial system.

xg15

2 hours ago

> our recognition of consciousness in other beings is predicated on attributing to them the same first-person experience of their consciousness that we each have of our own, meaning that human consciousness is intrinsically human and can't be attributed to an artificial system.

That reduces the question to a game of definitions though. If you only define consciousness for humans, then of course only humans will be conscious. But you have not learned anything about reality from that.

This kind of reasoning will also show its limits once you add animals to the picture.

(On the other hand, LLMs are exceptionally good at emulating exactly those cues we use to judge consciousness without necessarily being conscious - this is what caused the whole discussion in the first place.)

GPerson

35 minutes ago

If you posit that we cannot know if an LLM based ai system is or is not conscious, then what is our ethical duty? I believe it is clearly not to make the system at all.

smarf

3 hours ago

this would require us to still be baffled by consciousness after knowing everything about neurophysiology that might be relevant - until then, the keys to unlocking its secrets could still be hidden in our wetware behind a veil of ignorance

GPerson

2 hours ago

It will still be baffling that there is consciousness.

Maybe if you start messing with parts of my brain so I can become familiar with the third person correlates of consciousness (which in my usage refers entirely to the first person part) then I could learn something, but I could never learn why or how the first person exists. It just does.

If we perfectly reduce the brain to some scientific model, and I don’t doubt we will, we’ll be able to predict what I will say, but not understand why I’m observing it being said.

layer8

2 hours ago

I’m pretty sure people’s perspective will change when they understand the process in detail, and that the “I” isn’t a singular thing, but an interplay of parts, where some observe the processing of others. For me it’s already non-baffling now.

In any case, there is a wide variety of views here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#...

GPerson

an hour ago

Reducing it further into parts does not and I believe cannot explain why there is qualia. Denying qualia is just proudly ignoring reality.

There is absolutely no reason to believe all aspects of reality are reducible to their parts and equivalent to representations of them.

You can say you are not baffled but I’m baffled by that because it’s like saying you’re not baffled about understanding how there is something and not nothing. “Why should there be nothing?” does not dissolve the mystery.

alexashka

2 hours ago

Can you learn anything about 'why 8?' or 'how 7?'.

If you pose an incoherent question, the answer is 'that's not a valid question', rather than 'oh wow, how baffling'. The baffling is coming from forming what seem to be valid questions that aren't.

Another example of it is that famous who cuts the barber's hair (Russell's paradox):

The barber is the "one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves". The question is, does the barber shave himself?

Here's an LLM explaining it:

the philosophical/logical lesson is: sometimes a description that sounds grammatically fine does not actually describe a possible thing. The contradiction is in the premise, not in our failure to find the right barber.

---

For clarity, consciousness is like free will - if you invent a thing that doesn't exist and proceed to ask questions about it, the problem is you having invented a thing, not that you are then having difficulty answering questions about it.

th-emerald

an hour ago

> For clarity, consciousness is like free will - if you invent a thing that doesn't exist and proceed to ask questions about it, the problem is you having invented a thing, not that you are then having difficulty answering questions about it.

Doesn't that prove too much?

Suppose I claim that there is no objective world - i.e. standard solipsism. You may make various claims about the world being coherent to you and existing even in my absence, but these are first-person accounts, just like accounts of qualia and the existence of first-person consciousness are. I can claim that all that I'm observing is something generated by me that contains a part that argues that the world is objective, but that your failure to conclusively prove to me that objective reality exists is a consequence of the concept of an objective world being incoherent.

The claim, "you invent[ed] a thing that doesn't exist", seems to be just as useful to a solipsist to respond to someone arguing for objective reality as it is to a materialist to respond to someone arguing for first-person consciousness. Yet it's considered uncontroversial to assume (without direct proof) that an external consistent world exists.

GPerson

an hour ago

Denying that consciousness exists is pretty bold. It’s obviously completely wrong since it’s the only thing we can actually know exists, but I’ll give you that it’s bold.

RajT88

3 hours ago

I recall reading that some thought that simple electrical signals could not fully explain our nervous system and there may be some quantum effects in the mix.

qarl2

2 hours ago

This is the question of qualia - and it's surprisingly intractable. Realize that in this context, I can't be sure that you are conscious, either. Arguments here will crash into solipsism in the end: you guys can never prove you're not just one of my dreams.

I think that was the ultimate point of the Turing test. We can't know for certain - so the best we can do is just ask.

qarl2

3 hours ago

> There’s no third party test for a fundamentally first person phenomenon.

Agreed. But that also means I have no empirical evidence that YOU are conscious either.

FeepingCreature

2 hours ago

Any argument that would lead us to discard 99.9999999% of the phenomenon under debate, no matter how reasonable, is certainly not useful.

That's why I hold with the philosophical stance of "consciousness is the thing that makes humans talk about consciousness."

Might as well ask, "what if reality doesn't exist?" The point of thought is to analyze reality. If your thinking leads you to discard the subject of the matter, well, feel free to do that but I don't see why anyone else should take it seriously.

layer8

2 hours ago

The question is: What makes you trust your own perception that doesn’t make you trust others’ reports? Objectively speaking, how could there possibly something that convinces you of your own perception while nothing can convince you of another’s reporting? Maybe we shouldn’t trust our “qualia” (or perception of qualia — or perception of perception of qualia …) to constitute reliable information.

FeepingCreature

2 hours ago

People seriously undervalue the importance of "usefulness" in ontology. If I assume that the thing that others report is the same thing that I perceive, which given that they have a very similar slab of meat inside their skull as I do seems very plausible, then I can use my self-perception to learn about the interiority of 8 billion other people. I can even compare it to their reports to learn things about myself that would be hard to tell by observation!

If I assume that my perception, for some reason, is only informative about myself, then I'm not even learning something about brains! I have to assume that I'm accessing an information stream that is only tangentially related to any sort of shared reality, and has certainly no bearing on other parts of it even if I assume it has bearing on "my" part of it for which, strictly speaking, I also don't have direct evidence.

If there are two possible universes, one universe "A" where thought is valuable and useful, and one universe "B" where thought is solipsistic and extremely isolated, and also there is not just no evidence about which you are in but also philosophical arguments that there cannot ever be evidence about which you are in, I don't see why you should give universe "B" any serious thought. What are you standing to gain?

qarl2

2 hours ago

YES - I agree entirely. But how are we going to escape solipsism?

These questions need a practical solution, not a perfect one. That's the problem. We need to stop chasing the perfect one.

GPerson

an hour ago

I agreed with you earlier that there’s no empirical test against solipsism.

So the escape is just to accept not all beliefs worth holding are empirically verifiable. I deny solipsism because I believe there is a universe and things in it obey some kind regular patterns. You have a brain similar to mine, and similar to other animals. I believe consciousness has something to do with the brain, so I believe you are conscious.

GPerson

2 hours ago

Then we agree. You don’t have empirical evidence that I am conscious.

entropyneur

2 hours ago

The idea that we are in danger of erroneously ascribing consciousness to AI sounds wild to me. Humans always assume whatever is convenient about other beings' (lack of) subjective experience as long as we have power over those beings. In this case the latter might no longer hold, but then it won't matter one bit what we think.

user

3 hours ago

[deleted]

xg15

2 hours ago

> Consciousness, in Chalmers’ usage, is subjective experience: there is something it is like to be a conscious system. Still, nothing in the Transformer architecture or in next-word prediction shows that such an inner point of view exists. Self-reports (“I am sentient”) and fluent dialogue are weak evidence, since these models are trained on vast corpora saturated with human first-person statements. This type of verbal report works for people because it is anchored in shared biology and behavior, however, for machines, it is an echo of training data.

I don't want to argue here that LLMs have consciousness, but this kind of argument annoys me because it feels like an intellectual slight of hand on its own.

There is no definite way (so far) to prove that anything besides oneself has qualia or a subjective experience.

So arguing that we cannot observe LLMs having subjective experience, therefore they cannot have any is cheap - you cannot observe that for animals or for the person sitting next to you either.

The part that self-reports are useless and LLMs sound human because they emit sequences from human training data is correct. But the article implies some sort of fundamental distinction between machines and conscious beings that can never be crossed. And I don't see any reason to assume that.

lutusp

2 hours ago

Apart from the article's probable origin in AI, it makes an elaborate, wordy argument about consciousness without trying to define the term. That's just as well, since consciousness is philosophy's "hard problem," meaning no one has successfully defined it in a way that leads to agreement.

Each of the article's arguments that AI "consciousness" is actually a weak imitation of the "real thing," can with equal justice be applied to people, and the classic Turing Test method to distinguish machines from people has long since lost its authority.

And a future event, one in which AI sprints past humans in its willingness to absorb printed matter (once called "reading") and then put it to use, is ... wait ... umm, never mind, the point I wanted to make is undermined by the fact that this has already happened.

Hard to keep up these days.