I think about this but like, I’m not sure if it’s a stupid question so I’ll put it here.
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This is a really good question but far above Lemmy’s pay-grade man. Neuroscientists are very actively researching and doing debates on this topic (consciousness in AI)
The main problem is that we don’t even have a consensus, fool-proof theory of consciousness… We can barely tell whether a lot of living creatures are conscious or not (think octopus with their distributed intelligence, plants with their chemical signaling, …), and if so, when in their development stage does consciousness arise. Machines are one step removed from even that; even if we give AI models the benefit of the doubt and say they can develop consciousness, how in the world are we supposed to measure it
I found this highly-cited Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper (Seth, A.K., Bayne, T. Theories of consciousness. Nat Rev Neurosci 23, 439–452 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-022-00587-4) (try Internet Archive if you can’t access it) that might be of interest… If you follow the citation trails, there are a ton of new articles on debating consciousness in AI. Like this arxiv article on consciousness in AI
If AI (LLM) have a consciousness, would that not mean that they only think when they receive input, because they are not computing otherwise?
I guess so, if it is true that would mean current AI companies did some serious ethics fuck-ups…
I’m giving current-generation AI the benefit of the doubt though. I personally don’t think the current transformer-based LLM designs can achieve consciousness (although I think machines in general can, just not the current model architectures)
Not a stupid question. It does not look like at the moment, wouldn’t say it’s impossible though. As we progress with better and better technology I personally think it is an inevitability.
There a plenty of science fiction books and shows that focus on this.
No, because they’re not alive. It’s no different from asking if a rock can grow a tail. Consciousness is a function of living brains. It helps living things avoid threats and react to unfavorable conditions.
I don’t think you need consciousness to avoid threats or pain. Stuff like slime molds exist.
My counter: what does it mean to be alive? Seems like biologists struggle with this when considering viruses, since they act in a very predefined and mechanical way.
I don’t see it has to far fetched for a computer or other machine to straddle a similar boundary.
It means your cells contain DNA that can reproduce. Things that are not alive do not reproduce.
I must beg the question: what is it that makes Deoxyribonucleic acid so special? Is it possible that different specific set of chemicals could achieve the same thing? Would this same polymers not be an alternative building block of life?
To try to preempt an answer: they act as instructions for self replication. I would then conjecture that and machine designed to take in a set of input material, read a set of self replication instructions, and out put an identical copy would also be alive.
I had a similar disagreement with a coworker some time ago, who’s core thesis was that AI could never gave a soul because God is the only thing that can give something about soul, all of which is nice and unprovable in any kind of scientific sense. It feels like you’re making a parallel argument here.
If a machine was made that could make copies of itself… it wouldn’t be alive. It’s not a simple definition. Some viruses use RNA or single strand DNA and don’t reproduce themselves, they use other cells to do it for them. But they are alive in some sense of the word.
Try harder. There are MANY reasons modern “AI” is trash. Being “alive” and avoiding negative stimulus is NOT one of them. At all. It’s not even part of the real definition of life that has persisted for decades.
The scariest part of this question is that we would have no way of truly knowing.
No
It is not a stupid question.
AI is a statistical model. It emulates how we speak and therefore mimics how we think. But there are essential differences currently.
The size of AI-models is way less than that of our brains (comparing nodes to brain cells) by several orders of magnitude. AI models do simulate associative thinking and pattern thinking really well in some ways, but not very well in others. While an AI can have different sections of brain that can go back and forth (Mixture of Experts), they usually only pass raw numbers through the model one way. Our brain afaik is unidirectional with its electrical signals.
I’m saying this because an AI and a brain have fundamental differences we won’t be able to eliminate as of now. Which means a traditional consciousness as we know from humans or animals in some cases is hard to presume.
That said, a lot of experts recently raised alarms because what is classified as a person, when does thinking start and stop, all of these ethical boundaries need more strict definitions law-wise, because we are definitely fishing at the boundaries.
I know Lemmy doesn’t like AI and will highlight these fundamental differences, but the ethical questions raised are indeed part of a growing corpus of science currently.
LLMs are zip files, not analogous to brains. Model training is a lossy compressiom algorithm.
“AI” consists of statistical prediction models with output. We’ll get Asimov’s psychohistory before we get conscious Gen AI.
Not with our current methods of AI, no.
Yeah I wouldn’t expect it right now, but maybe in the future?
Once they start integrating actual brain matter into machines, maybe. But IDK if that would necessarily answer the question of if a machine could develop consciousness, like as in just silicon alone. Is it a machine if it’s just a lab-grown brain attached to electronics? 🤔
I am skeptical that silicon alone would ever develop consciousness, personally.
They do have those computers that use brain cells, I believe it’s called ‘wetware’. They’re trying to see if it’ll be a cheaper alternative to AI. I just feel bad for the brains.
I don’t know if I should feel any more than an insect or other animal. The brain matter isn’t like taking an actual animal’s brain and making it a computer; they’re growing synapses in a lab so even if they were conscious, I feel like it wouldn’t be much different to them as anything else that has always been that thing. Like they wouldn’t have any more of an existential crisis being a computer than we do about living in our own bodies.
Now if they grew sapience that might be something to empathize with.
Coz AI copies us and learns from us, if it did, i would kinda expect it to just act more like us but maybe smarter?
Yes. Humans are fundamentally subject to the same laws of physics that machines are. However, it took about three billion years from the first life to the first sapient life, so I wouldn’t count on machines getting there anytime soon.
Short answer? Yes.
Consciousness arises out of complexity. The awareness that we have is Jill derived from chemical reactions in our brains triggering things in response to stimuli.
Our responses are complex because the system that generates them is complex.
It’s an arrogant assumption that humans are special, that there’s something that makes us more than just animals, that a machine whose systems are complex enough could never be like us.
That said…. As they stand now, LLMs will never be Artificial General Intelligence.They barely rate Artificial Narrow Intelligence. (They’re pattern recognition systems with a huge hash of data to draw on. It’s not particularly complex as far as AGI goes.)
Did we?
Define consciousness.
Currently? No. In the future? Who knows?
Hypothetically, if we got to the point that we could simulate the collective synapses of a human brain in real time, that should do it.
Cute that you think synapses are the defining factor.
Thanks, dick
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Probablly yes
There are degrees of awareness. Consciousness is a broad part of that, but usually it’s sentience and sapience that are really considered in this question, and they are two different things. Usually sentience is used when it’s actually sapience that’s being discussed.
LLMs as they are aren’t aware. They respond to input, but there’s nothing going on internally to suggest they “know” what’s being asked. The lack of long term context and memory is a huge issue that external tools and techniques try to counter.
But to answer the question, we still don’t know. Before everything got sidetracked onto the LLM ride, it was one of many ideas on how to develop thinking in a computer. I don’t know if other research is still going on and just hidden behind the frenzy, or got cut out to go down this singular path that looked profitable.
I heard there is research to build world models, so I believe they are still trying to build AI beyond LLMs.
There’s a lot broader sorts of AI’s than just LLMs. People are doing all sorts of incredible things with them.
I don’t know why people think LLMs are the most advanced AI we have- very far from it, actually.
Right now most of them are fairly narrow in scope, but they’re still far more complex than LLMs.
