Completely agree it is difficult to find “uniquely human” behaviors that seem indicative of consciousness as animals share so many of them.
Any animals which don’t rear young I am much more likely to believe have behaviors much more genetically determined and so therefore operating at time scales that don’t really satisfy what I think makes sense to call consciousness. I’m thinking of the famous Sphex wasp hacks for instance where complex behavior turns out to be pretty algorithmic and likely not indicative of anything approximating consciousness. Thanks for the pointer to the report!
WRT AI consciousness, I work on ML systems and have a lot of exposure to sophisticated models. My sense is that we are not close to that threshold, even with sophisticated systems that are obviously able to pass naive Turing tests (and have). My sense is we have a really powerful approach to world-model-building with unsupervised noise prediction now, and that current techniques (including RL) are just nowhere near enough to provide the kind of interiority that AI systems need to start me worrying there’s conscious elements there.
IOW, I’m not a “scale is all you need” person—I don’t think current ideas on memory/long-range augmentation or current planning type long-range state modeling is workable. I mean, maybe times 10^100 it is all you need? But that’s just sort of another way of saying it isn’t. :-) The sort of “self-talk” modularity that some LLMs are being experimented with strikes me as the most promising current direction for this (e.g. LAMDA paper) but currently the scale and ingredients are way too small for that to emerge IMO.
I do suspect that building conscious AI will teach us way more about non-verbal-report consciousness. We have some access to these mechanisms with neuroscience experiments but it is difficult going. My belief is we have enough of those to be quite certain many animals share something best called conscious experience.
Completely agree it is difficult to find “uniquely human” behaviors that seem indicative of consciousness as animals share so many of them.
Any animals which don’t rear young I am much more likely to believe have behaviors much more genetically determined and so therefore operating at time scales that don’t really satisfy what I think makes sense to call consciousness. I’m thinking of the famous Sphex wasp hacks for instance where complex behavior turns out to be pretty algorithmic and likely not indicative of anything approximating consciousness. Thanks for the pointer to the report!
WRT AI consciousness, I work on ML systems and have a lot of exposure to sophisticated models. My sense is that we are not close to that threshold, even with sophisticated systems that are obviously able to pass naive Turing tests (and have). My sense is we have a really powerful approach to world-model-building with unsupervised noise prediction now, and that current techniques (including RL) are just nowhere near enough to provide the kind of interiority that AI systems need to start me worrying there’s conscious elements there.
IOW, I’m not a “scale is all you need” person—I don’t think current ideas on memory/long-range augmentation or current planning type long-range state modeling is workable. I mean, maybe times 10^100 it is all you need? But that’s just sort of another way of saying it isn’t. :-) The sort of “self-talk” modularity that some LLMs are being experimented with strikes me as the most promising current direction for this (e.g. LAMDA paper) but currently the scale and ingredients are way too small for that to emerge IMO.
I do suspect that building conscious AI will teach us way more about non-verbal-report consciousness. We have some access to these mechanisms with neuroscience experiments but it is difficult going. My belief is we have enough of those to be quite certain many animals share something best called conscious experience.