And yet when there are objective results like "we ported Bun to Rust and 100% of the test suite passes" the response is "so what, the code is obviously crap and has tons of bugs that the tests don't cover".
what they're saying is they want "a service that charges less money". But that idea conflicts with the venues/promoters/artists that want to charge more money.
And it also conflicts with the other fans who are willing to pay more. There is no possible world where you can reliably get Taylor Swift tickets for $25.
There is a possible world where Taylor Swift sings every day in a stadium that fits half a million people, but she'd get a bit tired of it, and make less money.
Housing is absolutely a large reason for the fertility decline, but the main issue is governments forbidding housing from being built which is pretty much the opposite of capitalism.
new construction targets young unmarried people and successively makes smaller units while gradually raising the price per unit
Developers don't get to unilaterally set prices, they're determined by supply and demand. When supply is heavily restricted, prices predictably rise.
>Developers don't get to unilaterally set prices, they're determined by supply and demand.
Eh. Apartment rents are driven by cartel behavior, single management companies own vast swaths of real estate and almost everybody uses a small number of services which calculate the rent they should charge which is more or less price fixing as a service.
And cities which should be SHAPING the supply with zoning are instead allowing an extremely heavily biased supply of homes designed for single occupancy. If there were a lot more 3BR units in attractive areas it would reshape the whole market, they couldn't afford to have a whole mess of empty large apartments and forcing the prices lower on those would have a cascading effect on smaller apartments.
Having internal mental experiences causes my brain to send physical signals to my fingers in order to type the words "I have internal mental experiences". A philosophical zombie would type those same words, but they would be caused by something else since by definition it lacks those experiences. That would be rather surprising, and it would be even more surprising that the words that the zombie emits coincidentally correspond exactly to the experiences that the non-zombie has.
As the article says the alternatives (that the author seems to favor instead) boil down to "there's some physics we missed" and probably that's the point where we differ. I find that implausible, what would that be? Consciousness quantum field? Consciousness boson? If it's going to be interacting with matter it has to have a way to do that.
So, what exactly is the claim? Are the bits constantly conscious? Do they snap into consciousness when the computer does math with them? Or is it maybe the computer that's conscious while it's processing these bits? How about when it stops doing that and goes back to doing other stuff? Why are these particular bits special? Was the computer always conscious?
These are all fine questions, and they don't become any easier to answer if you replace "computers" with "brains" and "bits" with "neurons".
Of course it isn't conscious, how could it possibly be conscious? Its literally just bits.
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
What is even being argued here - neuroscience is hard, so programming your PC thus makes it conscious?
We don't understand how combining a bunch of obviously(?) non-conscious biological components can produce a larger system that is conscious, so it's unwarranted to be certain that that can't happen with software.
Cells are living entities, can't they be conscious? I think they are. Is not that human consciousness comes out of raw materials. They are alive, not as bits or circuits. That can't be discussed.
it arguably still is. The primary unit of production of the jobs of mathematicians is itself not particularly useful for society. In this sense funding them is a jobs program. It is also true that they occasionally produce things of great value, and more frequently the things they produce can be leveraged by other researchers to directly produce things of value. But neither of these are what the job of a mathematician is (either in a day-to-day sense, or even for many mathematician's careers).
To go back to the analogy of jobs programs for alcoholics, it is somewhat similar if there was a small chance every time an alcoholic defecated in public gold came out. This fact might be used to support a jobs program for alcoholics, on the basis of it being positive ROI to society. At the same time, the "job" any individual alcoholic is doing in this setup is not particularly useful to society, so one might still call it a jobs program.
- Are current LLMs conscious?
- Is it possible that future versions of LLMs with similar architectures could be conscious?
- Can any AI be conscious?
I'd assign probabilities of around 0.1, 0.2, and 0.9. My completely ignorant take is that we probably need something more "dynamic" than a bunch of transformer layers in order to produce consciousness, but I wouldn't be shocked to be mistaken.
I assign probabilities of zero to all 3. Computer program being conscious leads to ridiculous and obviously false conclusions (think about a person running a program using pen and paper for memory).
If it was true, you can create extreme pain by running a program. You can run the program by simulating a CPU, using pen and paper for memory. So you're essentially claiming that some simulated being is in pain because there are some 1s and 0s on paper. In fact, you can decide to use an arbitrary encoding of the memory, so a sufficiently long sequence of 0s written on paper corresponds to a simulated being feeling pain in some encoding. That is clearly nonsense.
Time scale matters a lot in how we as humans perceive things like agency. Plants grow too slow for us to see any intent, but when you speed up a time lapse, suddenly it looks like plants reach for sunlight and vines for supports. Now, that may be projection on our part, but it may not be.
> The crux if it is that if you ever break from "the universe can be fully expressed mathematically", you are stuck in the mud of supernatural beliefs.
That's just not true. I've broken from "science can explain everything" and there's no mud. All of my beliefs are backed with careful reasoning. If there's an unknown, I don't fill it with random garbage.
Isn't pain just a manifestation of a bunch of chemical and electrical signals in the brain and body? It's not "clearly nonsense" to me that you could cause pain by writing a sufficiently long sequence of 0's - for it to be obviously wrong, you'd have to have some understanding of where consciousness comes from.
If you don't understand that, how can you assert that it doesn't come from mathematical relationships?
What specifically you mean by "manifestation of a bunch of chemical and electrical signals"? The brain is a system of physical particles. Why do I feel pain when the system is in state X but feel happy when it's in state Y? Physics can't explain that.
Do you seriously think that there's any chance that writing a lot of zeros on a piece of paper will create a feeling of pain in some conscious being?
This seems like a logical error. I don't understand how an internal combustion engine works, but I know it doesn't come from goblins jumping up and down inside.
The fact that you know it literally means you understand, at least to some extent, how an internal combustion engine works (i.e. it is powered somehow by combustion, and jumping goblins are not combusting generally).
If you would have zero knowledge about ICEs, how would you know?
Once or twice I've experienced extreme pain, and it was downstream of a bright light shining on a wet rock for millions of years.
I try to imagine myself long ago, on the outside looking in, with someone explaining to me that extreme pain, wondrous art, hunger, triumph, and despair would all unfold in due time where the rocks were wet and the lights bright enough.
I think the problem with this argument is that it's too inclusive. Is the bacteria that's adapted to an antibiotic conscious? It's showing intelligence right? I think if you're going to say something is potentially conscious, for me to take the argument seriously at least, there needs to be some plausible mechanism. I just don't see one for LLMs.
maybe the bacteria are conscious. How sure are we that they're not?
The only strong argument I have against it is the anthropic principle -- there are billions of times more bacteria than humans, so it's overwhelmingly unlikely that I'd be a human rather than a bacteria.
Are gifts morally wrong? If I'm near death is it wrong for to give my assets to my children beforehand, or does it only become immoral if done via a will?
If we're going to talk about morality, I think we need to talk about the government as one of the moral actors.
Imagine this scenario, exaggerated to make a point:
1. Alice receives $X. It's from her boss, for laboring in the mines every day. Government man says: "Give me 20% to pay for the shared roads, or you go to jail."
2. Bob receives $X. It's from his parents, for doing nothing other than being born related to them. Government man says: "Gee, I just can't do anything here, I guess I'll have to shake down Alice even harder next time."
Isn't there something off about the morality of Government Man's choices?
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