alt Hacker NewsAs an engineer who is also spiritual at the core, it seems obvious to me the missing piece: consciousness.
Hear me out.
I love AI and have been using it since ChatGPT 3.5. The obvious question when I first used it was "does this qualify as sentience?" The answer is less obvious. Over the next 3 years we saw EXPONENTIAL intelligence gains where intelligence has now become a commodity, yet we are still unable to determine what qualifies as "AGI".
My thoughts: As humans, we possess our own internal drive and our own perspective. Think of humans as distilled intelligence, we each have our own specialty and motivations. Einstein was a genius physicist but you wouldn't ask him for his expertise on medicine.
What people are describing as AGI is essentially a godlike human. What would make more sense is if the AGI spawned a "distilled" version with a focused agenda/motivation to behave autonomously. But even then, there are limitations. What is the solution? A trillion tokens of system prompt to act as the "soul"/consciousness of this AI agent?
This goes back to my original statement, what is missing is a level of consciousness. Unless this AGI can power itself and somehow the universe recognizes its complexity and existence and bestows it with consciousness I don't think this is phsyically attainable.
Replies
I think you are mixing up consciousness and will.
I could not have consciousness and you would not be able to tell, you don't have proof of anyone's counciousness except your own. You don't even have proof that the you of yesterday is the same as you, since you-today could be another consciousness that just happens to share the same memories.
All of that is also orthogonal to your belief in a spirit/soul... but getting back to the main point, the specificity you mention is a product of a limited time and learning speed, I'd be happy to get a surgeon or politicians training if given infinite time.
Are you saying that consciousness is unique to meat and no other matter can produce the same result? That seems very short sighted.
This is an interesting perspective.
A follow up is maybe this is a feature not a bug: Do we want AI to have its own intrinsic goals, motivations, and desires, i.e. conciousness
Im imagining having to ask ChatGPT how its day was and respect its emotions before I can ask it about what I want.
Not very long ago, we thought that "life" was due to a non-material life-force thought to inhabit biological entities and thus raise what would be a biological machine to the status of living being.
The Occam's Razor-logic of looking for the simplest explanation possible leads me to the hypothesis that consciousness will similarly turn out to be an emergent property of the mechanical universe [1]. It may be hard to delineate, just as life is (debates on whether a virus is alive, etc.) but the border cases will be the exceptions.
Current research on whether plants are sentient supports this, IMO. (See e.g. "The Light Eaters" and Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness, "A World Appears".)
Meditation adds to this sense. We do not control our thoughts; in fact the "we" (i.e. the self) can be seen to be an illusion. Buddhist meditation instead points to general awareness, closer to sentience, as the core of our consciousness. When you see it that way, it seems much more likely that something equivalent could be implemented in software. (EDIT to add: both because it makes consciousness seem like a simpler, less mysterious thing, but also once you see the self as an illusion, that thing that dominates your consciousness so much of the time, it seems much less of a stretch for consciousness itself to be a brain-produced illusion.)
[1] To be clear, the fact that life turned out to not be a mystical force is not direct proof, it is an argument by analogy, I recognize that.