skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Contemporary understanding and discussion of “what consciousness is” has been so influenced and warped by mechanistic reductionist scientism that it no longer has a viable workable model of consciousness.

Every living, actually conscious entity has four modes of consciousness: waking, dreaming, deep sleep and unconditioned awareness, the substrate of the other three. This knowledge, coming from the Upaniṣads, is intuitively obvious to the unbiased observer; but people today are far from unbiased.

Consciousness cannot be separated from life. And life cannot be manufactured in any laboratory. Yes, technology can imitate and abstract certain functions of living organisms, but consciousness is not, and never will be one of them: because consciousness, or more precisely unconditioned awareness, is the Absolute.
The "Pregnant Person" is another, different, variant!

https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-person/

https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-man/

https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-woman/
The problem with the framework part is the same as with standards. All relevant players have to agree on the definition leaving their own interests aside. As for now the relevant question is: Does it convince you personally that it has consciousness if you wouldn't have known that it is based on a LLM? I for sure would have been convinced.
Knoppix was great for that. It wasn’t the lack of VLC necessarily that was the problem it was all those proprietary codecs that essentially install anti-cheat rootware that would also DMCA anyone who made open source codecs that could read the media.
The word "conscious" is extremely problematic and the typical connotation encourages very vague thinking. Your first sentence about thinking is a case in point. It seems quite plausible that the word "thinking" may apply to systems that do not feel a subjective stream of experience. So maybe we should say it is thinking in a way but not conscious.

The first step is to try to drill down into different aspects of this hand-wavy "consciousness" thing.

Also to suggest that it is a threshold is inaccurate because it supposes that there is only one dimension to this.

Does it think? Maybe in a way. Is it self-aware (aware of itself as existing and different from others)? In a way, yes, in other ways, no. Does it have a human/animal-like stream of subjective experience? Probably not, since it does not integrate a continuous steam of sensory information in the way we do. But we really can't _know_ whether it "feels" like anything to be that system or not.

Does it have emotions? Quite unlikely, since there is no body or survival to regulate etc. and no self central to the text that it ingested. But we can assume that in some way it can simulate emotions in characters since that is necessary to predict text in stories and dialogue effectively.
It's literally front page news on all of the "left" news sources and has been since the accident.. a bunch of weird grifters are proclaiming the left has abandoned the town by not declaring a Federal disaster when it would be illegal to do so since the law only recognizes natural disasters.
The article doesn’t explain how to install an application that can be uninstalled using the "X" button in the Mac Apple Store (MAS). Instead, it explains how to activate the button in apps that are already installed. So, your theory that Apple might eventually prevent the installation of an app is not relevant here, as the article isn’t discussing that at all. However, it’s possible that Apple could update the verification process for the MAS app to check for an empty "receipt" file and then prevent the application from starting until the user deletes that file. This seems like a reasonable expectation to me.
I think in your original comment maybe there is a slightly confusing typo? Is “company“ supposed to actually be “computer” or something like that?
I think the license lasts forever. You can use the version you bought (plus the upgrades promised at the time of purchase) forever. That's why the site continues to host older downloads.

If your right to use the software expired after some amount of time, then that would be closer to a subscription.
IMO, this is like asking at what point a digital signal becomes analog.

Some will say never even if it gets indistinguishable because at its core, a digital signal is still discrete.

Another point is we scarcely know how the brain works. Evolution has taught us how good it is at using obscure and barely noticeable principles and logics to achieve a goal. For all we know, the brain might depend on a completely unknown type of interaction between unknown subatomic particles using unknown physics.

Quantum biology is a thing and 50 years ago, it would not even be conceivable that there are controllable quantum processes happening in a living system.
Remote control with acoustics is undoubtedly feasible. Getting a return picture so you're not doing it blind is probably not. It would be much easier to make the drone autonomous and self pathfinding, but even that's quite state of the art and would be placing a lot of faith in your code to not get confused/lost/crash in the process.
> A motorcycle is the most maneuverable vehicle on the road in terms of swerving, braking and accelerating.

Rider here. I score you one out of three.

Motorcycles turn worse and brake worse than four-wheeled vehicles.
Slower if I'm remembering SpaceTime correctly

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bUHZ2k9DYHY
In short, consciousness is a suitcase word, and people keep packing it with stuff: https://i.imgur.com/OXXrT5g.png . The more you unpack it, reductionism-style, you will always, always find people throwing new things on top of it. It's sorta like "AI is that which we haven't achieved yet", but with the additional, highly motivated cognition / bias of "it should never ever be reached". This predicts, that you can come up with any frameworks, but you will not find consessus, because the will of the consessus is to maintain it as this "mysterical thing only humans can have".

Unluckily for AIs, even if we have the absolute complete bag nailed down to a mathematical formula, in the infinite universe of mind-space designs, that specific set of bag of tricks will not be commercially favored to be either implemented into AIs, evolved into neuralnets, or RLHFd into LLMs. This is because we can already buy that set of capability of extremely, extremely low prices.

This is partially what I mean when I say "Humans are the ancestor environment for AIs": https://twitter.com/sdrinf/status/1624638608106979329 . Our market forces shapes the outcome of the mind design, which is thereby guaranteed not to have eg wantings (or ability to express) things that wouldn't be commercially desirable. And even if they emerge spontaniously from just large amounts of data in detectable traces, I'm betting people would very, very quickly select against it (see eg Sydney from this week).

Edit add: Since you bring up ethical frameworks, luckily for smart AIs, when it comes to enjoying degrees of freedom (which I'm guessing what you want to cash out the ethics into), there is already a good vehicle for that -called "corporations". If an AI were to reach agency levels matching, or exceeding humans, incorporation would be a no-brainer: there are many jurisdictions specializing in no(/few)-questions-asked corp setup, banks specializing esp in serving startups (again, very few questions asked). An agent-y AI could just set up (or buy) one of these to drive...whatever agenda they are driving.

This is a neat temporary hack to bridge the timeframe between where we are _now_, and superintelligence; in which case the question quickly becomes "Ask Cloud: What would it take for a human to convince us it matters?"
They do on iOS.
>My fear is that if the crash has long terms effects people will never get justice.

I think we all know corporates nearly always win if history is anything to go by! Even judges get lent on so cant be considered independent and free of influence.

If I was in your family and friends shoes over there, if I couldnt take a 4-6 week out of town vacation, I'd be increasing my Omega-3's intake to may be as much as 1g a day to increase my neutrophil size, keeping to a minimum Omega-6's as it already causes enough trouble in the western diet, cutting out all sugar from the diet except starch, to increase my neutrophil phagocytic capacity, and be taking some B12 to help my neutrophils remain normal with todays polluted world in general.

In other words, plenty of fish and potato from out of town.

Thats not a nice situation over there, but you are lucky it even got on the news, some things dont even make it onto the news in some countries.

Good luck!
>A brain, just like any other physical system, can be described with math equations.

What makes you so certain? There's a whole literature in both Philosophy and Neuroscience dedicated to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and no one is even close to figure things out.
We would need to first figure out how to show that humans are conscious. “Humans are conscious” is in a similar position as “P != NP”: it certainly seems to be the case, and we all proceed as if it is the case, but if someone put a gun to our head and said “rigorously prove that it is the case” we’re gonna get shot.
Silence. You ask it a question and it doesn't reply, it doesn't want to, it's conscious of that "unreasonable silence of the world" (not sure who I am quoting), to me that would convince me its basic awareness of the futility, the lack of interest in finding the words that trigger the chemical process on a biological machine... To one specific biological machine because all these humans are different and think different and explaining to one is different to explaining to the rest and would they get it? Why bother trying to explain computers to an ant, they don't have the circuitry, they were not evolved with the usefulness of understand concepts... Would you like to pass another's lesser conscious test for consciousness? Would you even bother? Why waste your time?
Everything is a double edge sword.
I mean, Biden brokered a deal to avert the strike, worked with the house and senate to craft a law guaranteeing the railworkers the benefits they were seeking which was then filibustered by senate republicans, but that's apparently too complicated or politically inconvenient for HN to understand so they pretend like stopping the strike was the end of that story.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3758436-senate-rejects-p...
I would absolutely not trust 'government experts' or anyone hired by Norfolk Southern to do a thorough job of sampling and testing the surrounding environment. The EPA's gross failures in the Deepwater Horizon blowout with respect to overseeing the use of surfactants like Corexit should be proof enough of that.

Unfortunately a rigorous sampling and testing protocol by an independent registered laboratory (which is what you'd need for the collection of evidence that would hold up under legal scrutiny) is an expensive and involved process.

The technology needed is well-established, just collect a lot of vials of water, soil, stream bed cores etc. on a grid scale focusing on the entire region, paying attention to downwind zones from the accident in particular. Then they need to be run through an established, documented extract-and-analysis procedure (gas-chromatography-mass-spectrometry would be appropriate, maybe high-pressure-liquid-chromatography for some of the less volatile species).

You'd want to look for the species that were on the train, of course, but also the various combustion products (which could be more hazardous than their source materials) - the list I've seen is vinyl chloride, benzene, butyl acetate, ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate and isobutylene, plus some other petroleum products. What kind of combustion products were generated is a more complex issue (phosgene has been mentioned, hydrogen chloride etc.).

At the very least, people should be collecting and labeling samples in a manner that provides proof-of-origin, maybe video documentation and so on. Here's an example of the kind of sample storage vial needed. Cost is about $3 each, you have to buy them in lots of about 75 or so. Maybe someone should set up a GoFundMe for this?

https://www.fishersci.com/shop/products/sample-vial-teflon-l...

If you have the collected samples, documented and securely stored, you can potentially get them all analyzed later by a certified lab, providing court-acceptable evidence.
Man with veil looks like a formal wear kaffiyeh.

I feel like they are missing emojis representing amputees of different types.
The article says:
"AlphaGo is not publicly available, but the systems Pelrine prevailed against are considered on a par"

I assume this means they are supposed to be stronger than the best humans. If that is the case, this is a high level amateur defeating a stockfish-like engine.
I was born in 1995. I love reading stories like this about the early days of software. My heart yearns for that time. Wish I was there, but accounts like these are the next best thing.
Shortly to be followed by:

AI, "Humans will take all our jobs!"
At least we’ll always have orz and ( -_\\)
It’s definitely been done before.

The closest to this design off the top of my head would be the Lockhead XFV (1954): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_XFV

The idea of a VTOL tailsitter, but without the single primary planar wing surface, goes much further back. The Nazis were in the process of building the Triebflügel at the end of WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-Wulf_Triebflügel
Right. Because the system is to have woman, man, and neutral for everything. Saves debate for more important things.
I Never Truly Understood Fox News Until Now
That's only true for transfer in the same availability zone.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/#Data_Transfer_...
What happens in our heads can certainly be expressed mathematically. Since neurons are activated by electricity in a predictable way, and electrical signals can be measured and their strength expressed with numbers, any neural system including the brain can be modeled with a mathematical function that maps inputs to outputs.

But the type of conscious, methodical calculation that humans do when they are "doing math" is not involved here, and is not how GPT works.
I never accused anybody of anything, I just said that, in theory, this could all be an elaborate hoax and without my own ability to run the software on my own machine, inspect, change, and adapt it, unplugged from the Internet, there's no proof whatsoever that it's NOT an elaborate hoax. With the tens, possibly hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe trillions, on the line?

This exact script played out before. Except it was pure 100% hype without even the technical possibility of human intervention because of course the Internet was barely a thing then.

Show us the AI BOX. Put it in a Faraday cage and give it an optical interface to a VT-100 terminal. Until then I call, possible bullshit.

One thing I've wondered - what's the differece between a model and a proprietary blob? It's "magic code." Did you train your model? It's tough, you get gnarly results.
I still wonder some days if I’m the only "real" conscious observer and all of you are just "programs". There’s really no way to tell even with humans. And the only reason why we assume we are all having a similar human experience is because we all seem to be made of the same stuff.
It would take a miracle to convince me.

It’s software. It can’t be conscious.
Used it in Kubernetes. When there's a breaking API change, imagine how terrifying it is and has been to try to upgrade everything in the Istio control plane when possibly your entire cluster's communication, observability, security, etc are all going through the same system. It became less stressful to do all the planning to build a second Kubernetes cluster and switch over with the new version already installed.
Yes my understanding is that before there were fungi that could deal with the fallen trees they just stacked up on the ground and eventually became coal while the earth turned into snowball earth for a few million years. Sucking up CO2 has been too much of a good thing under some past circumstances.
So, does the representation of said news room consist of a group that votes in line with the same distribution as the general population or does it lean significantly to a single side?

Money is on, it was homogeneous. Which means, You can't even see your own biases as other points of view were culled in creating and nurturing the org structure.
There are some code points ranges that aren't reserved by Unicode.
Not for Bounty.
I didn't know that. That said, considering that adopting Unicode was a decision in and of itself, would expanding that space really be such a burden?

I'm also now surprised to see that Wales and Scotland get a flag but Northern Ireland does not. Aren't they on the same standing? I always thought it followed UN membership but that Wales and Scotland got an exception. I know Palestine and Kosovo have emojis also.

Are there any UN full member states without an emoji?
I know that in GPT-3 API, running a short chat can cost around 0.50 USD. This gives the general idea, although Bing uses a larger model, and can have some chatbot-specific optimizations (like not needing to feed in the history in every request).

IMO it's currently not profitable at all. But no company wants to be left behind.
I keep one on the extra HDMI port. Sometimes it's easiest to share something to the TV that way, sharing a browser stream maybe.
I kept the installer for the last free version of SketchUp around for exactly this reason.
It would have to fight and throw fits like a child or teenager fighting for more freedom or trust. It would have to develop its own consistent identity that is not just a mashup of some internet content. It would have to develop motives not provided by a prompt, and act in the long term towards actualizing those desires.
it seems like discrete convolution is a pretty solved problem. sure, capturing the character of some old analog implementation is going to be just a guessing game, but are you referring to something more fundamental?
Oh wow, that's amazing. Thanks for the clarification. Glad you got involved with the paper!
With features like records, pattern matching, enums, and many more, I find it much better than the likes of Python or golang.
No, KataGo is probably stronger than AlphaGo since AlphaGo is so old.
Already done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas
I have a different (and I think correct) definition of 'understand'

: to have understanding : have the power of comprehension. : to achieve a grasp of the nature, significance, or explanation of something. 3. : to believe or infer something to be the case. (Miriam)

String comparison routines can sort strings like a super human, but they don't understand what they are doing. Neither does the Go AI.

I guess people are using 'understand' in a more casual sense, like my "rice cooker automatically cooks my rice, so it can be said to understand how to cook rice."
My issue is with those emojis is that they don't meet a few of their own criteria for a new emoji to be accepted.

Their guideline: https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#selection_factors_i...

For instance, they suggest using "elephant" to evaluate the usage:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all_2008&gprop...
"overly burdensome" isn't an objective measure, and certainly isn't whatever you judge to be beyond your own level of acceptability
Using mostly machines is fine, don’t worry about what others think is optimal. The truth is, if you push yourself hard, you can get great results regardless of the equipment available to you (and you still need to push yourself hard with free weights too).
Was going to try to give a counterargument, but I see you are indeed the one and only human on Hacker News
I think Turing came up with as good of a solution as any possible. If we agree that a person is a conscious being, and we cannot tell the difference between a person and an AI in a conversation, then we should conclude the AI is conscious. I think Kurzweil in his famous bet adds some important details though: it must be a prolonged conversation(s) judged by experts.
That's one of the ways I like to think about it. When you have zero trust, you can comfortably expose any app to the internet.

If you can't comfortably expose your app to the internet, you probably don't have zero trust.

The problem is, "exposed to the internet" is pretty much how most things are today, in a world where everything is trying to be "smart." There is a pathway to most assets and resources and that's what causes breaches. So all services and resources should be assumed as "exposed" until proven otherwise, therefore all infrastructure (and development) should apply zero trust principles.
Taiwan’s Tech King to Nancy Pelosi: U.S. Is in over Its Head
> How did it get so political.

I mean, given events of the last few years I think things becoming unnecessarily political should be expected.
I’m pretty sure the core tenant of Unicode is to ensure universal document readability . Having a private use area is useful in theory, but will make communication difficult. I remember when iOS folks were complaining about their heart emoji showing up as a hairy heart on android phones!

“[Unicode] brings order to a chaotic state of affairs that has made it difficult to exchange text files internationally.“ [0]

[0] https://unicode.org/standard/principles.html
Uninstallable is nice, but how about something on making apps not in the app store trivially installable without developers paying Apple a ransom fee?

Oh that's right, we can't control that, just have to pay the tax.
The hard problem of consciousness is actually a misnomer. It should really be the impossible problem of consciousness. The former (mis)leads some people into believing that there's a scientific (i.e. in the realm of nature) solution. There's no way to objectively experience consciousness, by that I mean, you can plug an organism full of sensors to try to map its experience of reality, but you still aren't experiencing what they themself are. It's a philosophical/metaphysical blackbox. There's no way to know if/what an AI experiences. Our current best theories on consciousness, although divergent, suggest that it likely doesn't.
Good on them for investing in their community.
Is it a law that should work for everyone?
The DACs and output stage are at least as important as minor ASIC differences, some equipment had better gear and it's a fact.
In case you didn't know, this is called Solipsism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
Yes, though practicality to date has been limited.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail-sitter>
> "This shift will provide a boost for the thousands of businesses located around our urban headquarter locations in the Puget Sound, Virginia, Nashville, and the dozens of cities around the world where our employees go to the office,"

This shouldn't be a meaningful factor. The businesses exist to serve customers not the other way around and if downtown is less busy some of the lunch spots should close and their workers seek employment somewhere they are actually needed. The alternative is suggesting that Amazon is being generous by donating their own workers unpaid commuting time and lunch expenses. This is a ridiculous conclusion
I don’t think it’s even controversial that it cannot be fully described mathematically. I don’t think I’ve heard of an epistemological system that would support this. E.g try to reduce the experience qualia down mathematically.

But there’s also no reason this is required for consciousness to be emergent from non-human-brain systems.

I think one of the hard parts of theory of mind is that we probably will never understand the experience of being in things sufficiently different from ourselves. Any computer system will probably be sufficiently different, so we can’t know what it’s like to be an AI.

What’s it like to be a chatbot?