And conversely, I've seen some debates about "free will" where one side at some point would all but say outright (and in one case, did say so) that if some thing's behaviour is predictable, then that thing can't have free will.
> three billion years of Darwinian evolution with reward functions such as “escape a predator” and “have as much sex as possible”. Unsurprisingly, this selected for skills such as bipedal locomotion
Is it unsurprising? Quadrupedal locomotion seems to be better suited for prey species; not to mention the obvious problems with reproduction.
> If they devote their time to making sure they don’t forget things, how could they allocate their compute towards productive civilizational ends?
Somehow this reminds me of the olden personal microcomputers that spent most of their CPU's time refreshing the DRAM...
brookst•17m ago
The last couple of years have changed my thinking on lots of stuff, but the biggest and most disturbing one is a newfound doubt in my / our own sentience. Maybe there’s something ineffable there. Or maybe… not. Maybe it is all post hoc rationalization.
In any event, I look forward to the day when our AI agent counterparts can enjoy the existential angst of uncertainty about their own consciousness.
daveguy•7m ago
It's not doing the same work, or producing the same output.
It's an episodic response to specific requests. If you went into a coma between every question you were asked, you wouldnt be in a normal human state of consciousness either.
This article pretends that we understand human brains as much as we understand the simple algorithms of LLMs. And that's just laughable. Even so out of touch as to say consumption of "[humans] consume thousands of liters of water per years". As if there isn't multiple orders of magnitude more consumption for data centers. For data centers that produce a braindead simulacrum.
throwaway63467•58s ago