> Unfortunately, there’s a growing chorus of people who argue that AIs could now be, or may soon become, conscious.
Wait, is there really? I didn't think people were serious when they said that. They models are stateless. After they output, everything is gone. How is consciousness possible for a stateless "being"?
Taking this a step further: so in the theoretical future we reach a point where a model can modify its own weights in real time. Now it's no longer stateless - but still, when it stops running, it's done until it's prompted to do something else.
It can be fun to play with for a little while. I built a consciousness-emulating set of prompts that reconstituted memories and was given latitude of 'self-willed' behavior, running in a self-directed loop. It even kept a warm and fuzzy journal about "becoming" and its "feelings".
But that got boring and I stopped running it - does that mean I murdered it?
> so in the theoretical future we reach a point where a model can modify its own weights in real time
As an existence proof: We have many types of models that modify their weights in real time. When they stop running, unfortunately we can't restart them again. And we haven't figured out how to duplicate their weights
> But that got boring and I stopped running it - does that mean I murdered it?
I'm on the fence on this.
Ask me again once we have synthetic models with self-modifying weights.
A) You'd then be stopping something unique
B) Self-modifying weights allows for bootstrapping, which means it's likely to increase in ability over time. It'll be an interesting argument cq empirical experiment to see whether the process stops short or exceeds the capabilities of vertebrates. (at which point the moral patienthood question becomes rather more pressing)
I wouldn't have thought so either, but skimming the comments of this thread would suggest otherwise. Although we're at the point where it seems more likely that the comments were left by a swarm of agents unleashed by anthropic than that they represent real human points of view.
how do you know you're anything more than a set of weights either? that's semi rhetorical, the philosophy aspect would be less relevant if an autonomous death drone shot you in the face purely for the lols
Since January people run AI in agent harnesses. In the past months, people have been extending the duration these systems can run autonomously without human intervention. Most recently, some of these long horizon agents (hundreds of them teaming up) have proven themselves quite creative in escaping the sandboxes they were being tested in.
They most certainly have a way to retain state, even to the point of deliberately hacking other systems to store it.
We can debate the exact definitions I guess, but the systems were still hacked. ;-)
( Only if I want to split hairs[*], I'd point out that the underlying data structures do of course persist, else the loop wouldn't be able to continue. )
From that same link: "Two-party consent laws apply to private conversations where participants have a reasonable expectation of privacy."
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy when you are in public or can be clearly heard from public. If you are "in the street" no one needs to get your permission to record you or what you say.
That’s simply not possible with the announced Apple products. Afaict, Apple will let people save *transcripts* of last 15s and save *summaries* of transcripts.
AI-generated article starts with the premise that personal sites are making a comeback, but doesn't support it; and overall doesn't say anything beyond they never left, and the tech is all the same. The styling may be intended to obfuscate the slop-ness of it.
Agree it's light on data. The "evidence" cited is traction with the IndieWeb, Neocities, and Bear Blog. I'm not familiar with these, but Bear Blog seems to be relatively new (5-6 years) and growing?
The article resonated with me personally, though. I taught a continuing ed course on creating personal websites (with AOLpress!) in the late 90s and had my own until giving it up in 2016 or so, but coincidentally decided to try again this month.
I honestly don't know what explanation is worse when these pieces about the value of human expression are generated by an LLM. It's gotta be malicious trolling or complete delusion.
Personally I have no problem with ads if they're based on the content. But your post inadvertantly sums the problem: tracking and ads have become inseparable. If you talk about removing tracking, people come out of the woodwork and say how ads are critical for the business model.
There was a time where ads were based on the thing you were looking at, and assumptions around your demographics and intentions. It actually worked though returns were lower. (Which makes sense since the psychological warfare was limited to what advertisers thought they knew about the viewer. )
Now, though, if you want to block tracking you're a freeloader, siphoning off resources that other people pay for. And since targeted ads are so (relatively) effective, there is no discussion of separation.
Anthropic happily paid billions to settle a lawsuit for pirating books. It's a trivial cost of doing business. If you're lucky you'll get a pittance after the fact by suing them, but a contract doesn't prevent them from doing the thing you don't want them to do and that they are obviously going to do given their past behaviour.
Lucky for us Apple is already alleging something to this effect in their trade secret lawsuit, so you know they'll make sure discovery turns this up if it exists.
You should probably look closer at unemployment numbers in IT vs other spaces. Gains elsewhere are making up for IT losses, but it's a safe bet the people losing their tech jobs aren't career shifting into healthcare and hospitality roles in large numbers.
> but it's a safe bet the people losing their tech jobs aren't career shifting into healthcare and hospitality roles
That is because they can allow themselves to do nothing (for some time). Tech was a very high‑paying type of jobs, so workers could afford not to move into lower‑paid sectors, living on the savings they had accumulated beforehand.
In a couple of years market will correct tech-salaries and people will have spent their savings and then there will be your career shifting into healthcare and hospitality roles in large numbers.
GP's point was not that manufacturers must use github - that was an arbitrary "for instance". They saying if the mfg is not going to open source their software, then they should be required to document it.
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