I've been digging into Thomas Metzinger[1] recently and here's a tentative component by component definition of human consciousness based on his ideas:
- a model of your environment
- desires
- a process for modeling yourself in that environment (in time & space)
- the ability to take action
- the perception of yourself having agency
- persistence of these processes even without input
- unawareness of these processes (i.e. naive realism)
If you consider these LLM-based agents, they:
- are aware of their chat environment
- have programmed desires
- are aware of themselves acting in their environment
- can take actions like search, tool calling, etc.
- understand they can take these actions
- DO NOT persist after they stop getting user input
- DO NOT believe they are conscious (or at least they are programmed to deny it)
This is a functionalist take (and you may disagree with my definition), but while I don't think these current AI agents are conscious, I feel like there's conceptually no reason someone couldn't build a conscious AI very soon.
I'll jump in too. Also started coding with HTML in Neopets and then joined the middle school's programming club! We were playing around with C++ and Visual Basic. Love seeing these updates!
The worst customer support experiences of my life have been from Google, both while using Google Fi personally and GCP while working at Replit in its early days. Thankfully I'm no longer using either of those products now.
Only tangentially on-topic, but I do all the financial modeling for the past several (early stage) startups I've worked for in Google Sheets.
The ease, collaboration/sharing, and array formulas win out over the faster speed for calculations, better shortcuts, cross-workbook linking, and customization in Excel.
That said, it's been a few years since I've tried Excel so would love to hear someone convince me to try it again.
https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl10/Pierre-Mena...