kazerniel

Mostly sharing it for this part:

When I am woken by the sound of my dog whining, I understand that she is hungry and wants me to get up. When my alarm clock goes off, I don’t consider its needs. It is following an instruction to rouse me at a certain time but it doesn’t care if I stay in bed. It doesn’t try to get me up by other means. The dog, on the other hand, will go to plan B. She barks.

This capacity for autonomous action was once a difference between animals and machines. AI has blurred the line. Advanced models devise their own strategies to reach a goal. The task might be defined by a human master, but the machine weighs its options for delivery. It can make its own choices. Given rules, it can break them.

Last month, an experimental AI model run by OpenAI, the company that produces ChatGPT, broke out of a supposedly secure digital enclosure to launch a sophisticated hacking attack on another company, Hugging Face. The AI had been set a test and turned criminally rogue in its determination to cheat.

It is hard to describe that sort of behaviour without raiding a vocabulary conventionally reserved for sentient beings. AI models “decide” and “want” in ways that a chimpanzee can and a chair cannot.

That doesn’t prove the existence of an interior process equivalent to our conscious experience of deciding and wanting. It doesn’t make the AI curious to know an answer or surprised by what it finds. It demonstrates only that we lack specific words for autonomous motive and agency in machines. And since language is the main way we get insight into other people’s minds (and one of our best indications that a mind other than our own exists at all), it takes an effort not to project mental states on to AI engines that can chat fluently in human.

It is plausible that consciousness will one day emerge in robots. We know that abstract thought can arise as the end product of billions of tiny unconscious mechanical events. That is happening right now as a profusion of biochemical reactions in your body make it possible for you to read this sentence. We also know how fundamentally different that organic process is from the way a large language model would churn through a huge volume of probability equations at lightning speed to generate a sentence expressing the same idea. In the human case, meaning is shared. In the computer version, it is performed.