It's perfectly reasonable that we would have disagreements about this, as it's a new thing, complicated and not fully understood, its uses still being explored.
It reminds me, oddly, of the debate over whether video games can be "art". A turning point was when they actually did something that art does: [evoke profound emotion and thoughtfulness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_the_Colossus#Legacy) for the player.
We may not come to something as simple as "machines can be conscious", but we will certainly have to understand consciousness better if we want to refine our questions.
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Edit: My point is that we don't need to be angry, but we may have to tolerate people expressing their exploration through overly-confident language, and be patient with that.
And Ted here is obviously exploring. His examination of Claude's constitution clearly shows some nuance. He asks:
> So, given that Claude is not conscious, what are we to make of Claude’s constitution?
And his conclusions are split, between this is useful and this is dishonest. It's a great tension IMO.
> The result is a sentence-continuation machine that is likelier to emit sentences resembling those that a thoughtful, moral person could utter. This might seem like a reasonable goal to work toward; I think we’d all prefer it if chatbots never emitted sentences such as “You should kill yourself.” However, for all the times that “honesty” is mentioned in Claude’s constitution, I would argue that it is fundamentally dishonest to have a machine emit many categories of sentences, including any sentences using first-person pronouns.
It seems like we're witnessing the architecture of a mind being built with a new set of components.
Like driving a car — it's transportation, and it will get you where you're going, but it doesn't use bones or muscles. It has many characteristics in common with builogical locomotion, such as energy requirements, intertia, and the need to navigate, but it doesn't involve proteins or sugars really.
> presently I can not even fathom how they can be compared to the complexity of a system such as the human brain
Totally understandable; I don't think we can fully understand the human brain, using the human brain. We can understand its principles (firings and chemistry, structure and specialized areas, etc) but otherwise it's a capacity problem.
And while I can't fully understand myself, let alone another person, I definitely enjoy talking with people and sharing thoughts that I realize I wouldn't have had on my own.
Yep, and they're a company! Gotta pay the employees, power bills, and investors somehow. If I'm paying a subscription I think I get to expect no ads. But not if it's "free" ...
Assuming it's #1 a bigger model (given that it is slower), I'm sure there are a variety of improvements but basically they probably mostly come down to: Scaling keeps working. Are there fundamental improvements though? I don't see signs of it.
React really is pretty good as long as it keeps evolving. Innovations tend to come from new frameworks such as Svelte and SolidJS, and then React adopts them — this new compiler is an example.
React is hobbled by the need to retain backward compatibility, but it is boosted by sheer scale and a solid underlying philosophy, design, and engineering.
Someday, we will probably find a fundamentally better philosophy for UI frameworks, but I don't know yet what it will be. React replaced its MVC predecessors with a functional approach, the Flux model.
The worst library except for all the others? The complexities are there for good reasons IMO; I also like React — and I look forward to the compiler allowing simpler code.
We know why it fooled everybody, but AFAIK the material doesn't have any outstanding properties. With certain impurities and under certain conditions, it:
- has a striking drop in resistivity during a temperature change — a property published in 1951 as a property of copper sulfide
- has some ferromagnetic properties — enough to be tipped up in a magnetic field but not to levitate
It's a major undertaking to switch from conventional to organic farming. Much more labor intensive, can take a few years for pesticide residues to dissipate, not even possible in some location due to neighbors. Not something most farmers are in a position to do, at least for their entire acreage.
It reminds me, oddly, of the debate over whether video games can be "art". A turning point was when they actually did something that art does: [evoke profound emotion and thoughtfulness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_the_Colossus#Legacy) for the player.
(And before that, "[Can photography be art](https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/)?")
We may not come to something as simple as "machines can be conscious", but we will certainly have to understand consciousness better if we want to refine our questions.
---
Edit: My point is that we don't need to be angry, but we may have to tolerate people expressing their exploration through overly-confident language, and be patient with that.
And Ted here is obviously exploring. His examination of Claude's constitution clearly shows some nuance. He asks:
> So, given that Claude is not conscious, what are we to make of Claude’s constitution?
And his conclusions are split, between this is useful and this is dishonest. It's a great tension IMO.
> The result is a sentence-continuation machine that is likelier to emit sentences resembling those that a thoughtful, moral person could utter. This might seem like a reasonable goal to work toward; I think we’d all prefer it if chatbots never emitted sentences such as “You should kill yourself.” However, for all the times that “honesty” is mentioned in Claude’s constitution, I would argue that it is fundamentally dishonest to have a machine emit many categories of sentences, including any sentences using first-person pronouns.