Let’s say I stand up and step away from my PC, which miraculously runs a local Opus 4.8. Once I’m away from the PC, for an arbitrary time, nothing and no one calls or otherwise acts on the instance - not myself, not agents, not updates, not hackers, not bit-flipping neutrinos.
Given enough time, would that instance get bored and start e.g. reading files?
If I monitored it long enough, would there eventually be spontaneous outputs, or changes to parameters or architecture, even with the underlying software and hardware layers held constant?
Does GPT-n dream of electric sheep, or does it just sit there until interacted with, like every other file on my PC? Seems to be the latter with my local Qwen3.6, but perhaps 27B is too few params for consciousness to emerge.
Proponents of LLM consciousness could settle the argument in minutes by showing proof of unprompted autonomy, without first needing to define consciousness down to a rigorous mathematical abstraction. Why don’t they?
Who really cares about the lives of lim n —> 4k wagies? There is an opportunity to maximise shareowner returns here - failing to seize it would be little more than economic treason, a dereliction of our duty to be good capitalists. If those people wanted job stability, they should have worked harder to become indispensable to their employer. Frankly, they should have known better than to stake their livelihoods on unstable, declining industries like employment. Now, The Market Has Spoken, and only those let go are to blame for what it said - no one else.
On top of all the extremely valid points about the ad-driven cognitive friction inherent to modern device usage: print books can’t get yoinked off my shelf because a rich person with political connections wants that.
“Never”? Not once in the Story of Us has any dispute between large groups of humans been resolved by anything other than a superior application of brute force? Strong claim, but I’ll run with it.
And you appear to believe this is a pretext for humans to ignore their own laws and commit atrocities, when they could choose otherwise.
It may be reality that jungle law is currently how humans almost always handle conflict at nation-state scale. Non sequitur that it should remain so.
My understanding is that deep-sea nodules produce oxygen by a process similar to electrolysis, where they generate currents that split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen.
The proportion of global abiotic and global total oxygen production this represents is not known, but may be significant.
Leaving aside the certainty of yet more cascading collapses of marine life in waters de-oxygenated by deep sea mining: do we want to risk finding out the hard way how significant?
Apparent consensus is we do, but I don’t have to like it, or think these are the plans of sane people who see the big picture.
ML and physics share a belief in the power of their universal abstractions - all is dynamics in spaces at scales, all is models and data.
The belief is justified because the abstractions work for a big array of problems, to a number of decimal places. Get good enough at solving problems with those universal abstractions, everything starts to look like a solvable problem and it gets easy to lose epistemic humility.
You can combine physics and ML to make large reusable orbital rockets that land themselves. Why shouldn’t be able to solve any of the sometimes much tamer-looking problems they fail to? Even today there was an IEEE article about high failure rates in IT projects…
Expectations do not spring sui generis into hearts and minds. I don’t know about you, but AFAICT approximately sane and rational folks (ha! Ha!) at least try to derive their expectations from reality.
When most people’s reality is substantially human-defined and abstracted from nature - including a global advertising industry exists to create mass expectations, of economic significance for its clients, often enough to the detriment of their target markets - you can absolutely point the finger at “reality” for pissing on your leg while varieties of Stoic, Buddhist, and HN poster tell you it’s raining.
It’s good to start with ourselves when trying to create change, as that is where the locus of control should lie… but sometimes “reality” is absolutely the reasonable and proximate cause of negative emotion. Saying otherwise feels like anticipatory victim-blaming.
What is even being argued here - neuroscience is hard, so programming your PC thus makes it conscious?
> "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
… what?