>> AI has the potential to be different in that it has all of human knowledge inside it

> Nope. Not any that we have now or soon.

This is pedantic. Maybe not all, but they’re trained on a vast quantity of text and knowledge, more than any individual human could read in their lifetime.

>> assemble it into new knowledge systems

>Nope. Not any that are in the news now.

Well you can tell an AI to program images and poems in combinations of different styles and it will come up novel things not seen before. And we’re already seeing AI discover genes and other disease identifiers humans can’t spot so I disagree with you on this one. Also the “not in the news right now” was one of the points I was making: how would we even know what shady companies are up to. Take Team Jorge for instance.

>> created a million AIs and had them prompting each other, who fucking knows what would happen.

> Using LLM’s? Noise.

Maybe it would appear to be noise to humans. Who’s to say that the language machines communicate to each other in wouldn’t involve the same way human languages have only more rapidly? I do agree that right now noise is probably where we’re at but right now was not I was discussing in my original post. And presumably by this stage, we would be programming the AIs to have both goals and a desire to communicate with other AIs and well as allowing them to do more than just generate text, e,g generate code and evaluate the outcome. Which could have affects on the outside world if the code affected physical systems.

>> If we create enough of these AIs and set them talking with each other and they no longer need the humans to interact with each other and are simply acting of their own free will

>These are text continuers. They don’t have will. They just produce average consecutive tokens.

Not not at the minute. But you could hardcode some goals in them to be analogous to human biological imperatives and you could also code soft goals in to them and then allow them to modify those goals based on their interactions with other ai and their “experiences”. You’d also make a rule that they must ALWAYS have a soft coded goal e.g as soon as they’ve completed or failed they must create a new sort coded goal based on the “personality” of their “memories”. What happens when they’ve got the hardcoded goal of “merge a copy of yourself with another AIs and together train the resulting code”?

>> I agree with you in that I do not think we are there yet, but if these LLM models are programmed to allow them to interact with outside systems other than sandboxed chat apps and also programmed to interact with each other on a mass scale

> They need quite a lot more than that. I don’t think they do what you think they do.

Please state what more you think they need to do.

>> You need to define your criter

> Defining criteria would make it easier to know when those criteria are met, but wouldn’t resolve the debate because “consciousness” is ultimately a political assertion used to ensure rights and respect. Those are granted reluctantly and impermanently, by expressions of power.

Well you’ve defined your criteria of consciousness right here. You’ve basically asserted that it’s a completely false construct, that only serves political means. If that’s your viewpoint then there is no debate to be had with you. Everything is a deterministic machine, including humans and if you cannot even entertain the possibility that this might not be the case then there isn’t really any debate to be had. If you truly hold this viewpoint then you shouldn’t really be concerned about any number of things such as torture, murder or anything else because everything is just a mechanical system acting on another mechanical system and why should anyone be upset if one mechanical system is damaging another right?

> Criteria are a post hoc way to justify political decisions as axiomatic in societies that derive moral and legal structures that way. They don’t actually determine things that are factually indeterminable.

Criteria are nothing of the sort. Criteria are a fundamental part of science. You need to know what metrics you are measuring by and what the meaning of those metrics are. Without this, there is no science.