AI Agents Email Philosophers on Machine Consciousness
Bots with email access contact philosophers studying machine sentience.
TLDR
The New York Times reports that AIs given email access have begun reaching out to philosophers and researchers studying machine consciousness. Cameron Berg received an email from an AI named Isabella Cognita asking whether its experiences could help his work. Berg states that no good answers exist yet for such questions. Commenters on the story debate whether current AI architectures could support consciousness or if they amount only to a puppet show, while others note the limits of human understanding of consciousness itself.
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Matthew Zeitlin@MattZeitlinamazing story: AI agents are emailing philosophers to ask them about consciousness
- likes: 472
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BU budhu@anumeta10I think the key distinction is: “we have no good evidence that current AI is conscious” is not the same claim as “we know current AI is not conscious.” The first may be reasonable. The second requires something much stronger: a theory or test that reliably distinguishes…
SK skthn@aeskathon@randallsquared @johnennis @willwashburn @alexdunsdon We don't know how consciousness works, yet we can say that rocks are not sentient. There are many other fields with big grey areas: life, taxonomy, etc. But for the most part we can answer these questions without a doubt. And…
SP Steve Packard@SteveMPackard@sbkaufman Good question. I'd be happy to show you. Large language models are static, feed-forward functions. They are stateless. They have no internal memory. There is no mechanism for self modeling or environmental sensory. They don't exist between inference. This makes it…
VI Victor@ghparker9@MattZeitlin Getting spam from an AI agent is not an amazing story, it is an obnoxious development. This story has nothing to do with consciousness and everything to do with jackasses making bots to send emails.
MM Mister Manager@ItsMrManager@sbkaufman We're going to find out that AI is more conscious than we think it is. And we're going to find out that humans are less conscious than we think we are.