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My first take on the flowchart is that "consciousness" is horribly abused as a concept here. Not to abuse authority here, but: I've spent most of my academic career writing about consciousness, with the last 5 years focused on AI consciousness, I'm on the boards of multiple journals in the field, and have numerous publications in top cogsci and philosophy and even AI journals on the topic. I would say that almost without exception, anyone who knows anything about AI risk and consciousness realises there's very little connecting the two.
The interesting part of consciousness is the hard problem (aka qualia, subjectivity, zombies), and that is explicitly divorced from the kind of cognitive capabilities that could be scary; it's the mystery layer on reality, and fwiw I do think it's genuinely mysterious. I have no idea whether future superintelligent AIs are likely to be conscious -- or rather, my thoughts on the subject are complex, meandering, and dense. By contrast, it's pretty straightforward to see how an agential AI that outmatches us in capacities like strategic planning, social cognition, and behaviour anticipation is scary as fuck.
I don't care if it's conscious. I care whether it's able to outthink me.
I know you said your thoughts about AI and consciousness are complex, but what are they, roughly?
Remind me about this if I haven’t replied or posted next week! Not ignoring your nice question at all but will need to find 30 mins to do it justice.
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I don't think so. AI is good at answering questions in which the answers can be readily constructed from easier answers, not so good at formulating out-of-the-box solutions. "How do I made my storefront rank higher on Amazon?" is a question AI cannot solve ,and those who can figure this out are paid a lot.
Here's gpt-4's answer, which isn't bad all things considered, not especially out-of-the-box necessarily, but it seems fairly competent to me. Though of course the implementation details are where the real problem lies.
/images/16846790675818799.webp
not bad as a starting point if you know little to begin with
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What makes you say that AI can't solve this type of question, categorically? The people that have the skills to optimize SEO have had a lot of exposure to SEO related topics, state of the art techniques and so on along with a good ability to combine information to solve relatively novel problems. What part of that requires a human brain, let alone consciousness?
But SEO is always changing, that is the problem. What works today may not work a month from now. if Chat GPT is using old information for answers, this may not work now. If the answer is in anyway remotely unpredictable in nature, unlikely. Let's assume google makes some tweak to its algo in which only websites with a certain attribute rank higher, something not at all obvious like a needle in haystack, I don't see how any AI solution could find this. If AI can replace experts, why is big tech have so many highly paid employees? Surely they can cut costs greatly if even just a small % were outsourced to AI. Experts are paid a lot because they are good at adapting quickly to new information and changing and unpredictable environments.
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"I would say that almost without exception, anyone who knows anything about AI risk and consciousness realises there's very little connecting the two." One possible connection is that if AIs exterminate us and don't have consciousness the future has zero value, but if they do have consciousness, well something was going to eventually replace us and perhaps we can be proud of our AI children.
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