That's the thing with metaphors, they have similarities but there are also points of divergence. Point is, my metaphor was not meant to be understood as a technical description of the system's workings.
For the unsuspecting soul who approaches this modern oracle without the faintest idea of how it works, the experience of facing unexpected demons could serve as a warning of the dangers they may face if they approach the tool without caution.
People compare AI and robots with Frankenstein's monster (or with Pinocchio, on a good day, if they want to give the story a positive spin), the construct which gains a life of its own.
But current LLM chats are more aptly compared with a ouija board. The machine itself is inert, and you can see it as a playful activity. But the model contains within it the highlights of a whole culture compressed during its training. You can access the souls of all the authors whose works were used for learning; but also of all the internet fanatics, trolls and scammers. When you set the machine in motion, you never know whose spirit are you invoking to answer.
s/how the person mental started/ how the person feels mental states/
There is no room for it to manifest in a computer program. There is no room for any "magic" in computer programs.
That's true for classic software in a trivial way, in the sense that a sequence of logical inference steps (i.e. a deterministic symbolic program) do not reflect upon itself.
However it may be possible that the computer program is not conscious, but the computer running the software is. LLMs in particular generate their output not from the specific instructions included in the program, but from the weights trained in the model; the software instructions are a requirement for the weights being interpreted, but the outcome doesn't necessarily follow the rules of a formal system and an inference process.
Current LLMs do not have consciousness because their processing is too simple for it to emerge; not because the software substrate is deterministic and mathematical. If the base software were processing the weights of the model in ways similar to how neurons generate brain waves, it is plausible that the emergent system-level information patterns appearing at the data level could exhibits the attributes of consciousness, including self-perception and self-reflection. This is true even if the computer software is deterministic, in the same that the neurons in our brain behave in deterministic electro-chemical ways.
On the contrary, it means that neuroscientists have measured precise ways in which brain waves of vision and audio processes converge into taking decisions before the person reports being conscious of taking such decision; and that they have studied precise ways in which altering the brain chemistry affects how the person mental started. Just look for the papers on these experiments for these topics.
The problem is that we can't define consciousness. No one can agree on what it means, or whether it means anything at all
No way. We may not have a full scientific understanding, but neuroscience has made huge advances in how consciousness emerges in the brain and how it is affected by the changing conditions of its low-level processes.
We cannot say that machines at some point will never have similar emergent patterns that could become conscious. But we for sure can say that the current ramblings of text generation from LLMs definitely can't be conscious, because they are created directly by much simpler low-level deterministic computations.
The long LLM-generated dissertations that people mistake for conscious reflections do not come anywhere near from the complex introspective processes that we know are involved in having consciousness; they are just mechanic pattern generation from the highly compressed encoding of human culture one which they have been trained. It's true that our own brains do learn by highly compresssing our live experiences, but we know for sure that our consciousness involves something more than just compiling memories.
What he is saying is that it "looks enough like actual consciousness that it must be it", but that is not sound reasoning.
Something can be functionally equivalent enough to the real thing to give the impression of being the real thing without actually being the real thing.
That nails it. Too many people think that AI models are either Pinocchio or Frankenstein, a constructed being who gained a life of its own, becoming friendly or terrifying; when in fact the current batch is nothing more than The Wizard of Oz, faking the appearance of an awesome entity because some human behind the curtain benefits from making you believe that.
If it can, then it breaks the deterministic behavior of the known and understood physical components.
What makes you believe that? Our current best understanding of consciousness is that it's an after-the-fact rationalisation of the multiple low-level brain processes that converge into a subconscious decision. If that's the case, consciousness doesn't influence the external world in a non -deterministic way.
If LLMs are not conscious it's because they don't have this high-level aggregate feedback loop, not because consciousness needs to be non-deterministic. All their outputs are created from low-level reactions, like the reflexes of an amoeba that grows in its environment towards the gradient with more food.
Paper and glass boxes is the best technology for voting. It's easy to spoof, but it's also easy to detect when someone is spoofing the result.
The most essential property of a voting process is that anyone can understand how it proceeds, and with digital voting you need to rely on techno priests reviewing that everything went as intended. That's not secure, no matter how complex cryptographic algorithm you create to avoid tampering.
I don't understand people who think matters of Copyright have anything to do with ethics.
Copyright is an artificial monopoly granted by law.
Because laws must reflect whatever society collectively considers ethical. The monopoly is granted for an ethical reason (at least in theory), so corporations must comply and accept that, even if they like to pretend it was created only so they can extract profit and ethics was not concerned.
NRA is not the only US 2A rights organization, it's not even the most effective. GOA for example defending Pretti's "right to bear arms while protesting", as did the SAF and many others
People freak out if you threaten to take their guns away.
Do they? Because the last time the President suggested it, along with people from the DHS, the best the NRA could muster was a "it was a bad idea to bring a gun".
Odd, that's not what the NRA stated, nor what any media org reported them as saying. So where do you get that so-called "quote"?
Trump was the one who said "it was a bad idea to bring a gun", and here is the NRA's actual response to trump's suggestion: “The NRA unequivocally believes that all law-abiding citizens have a right to keep and bear arms anywhere they have a legal right to be,”.
Actually, I thought it was legal in the US to make your own firearm for personal use. You just can't sell it. So why would it be different if you 3D print it vs. fabricate it with some machine shop equipment?
You are correct -- under federal law, it is legal to make your own firearm for personal use (PMF), though manufacturing firearms with the intent to resell for profit requires a federal license (FFL). A few states are trying to pass their own local restrictions on firearms manufacture. Some of these proposed bills, such as in the states of Colorado and Washington, also include CNC machine tool fabrication in their bans.
This specific bill proposed in California is focused solely on 3D printing
Did you know all color photocopiers and printers sold have anti-counterfeiting technology? There are special patterns printed on bills that photocopiers and printers can detect and will refuse to print.
Most commercial printers, copiers, and print engines, but not "all"
So it was solved not by a law, and not by software that looks for anything resembling currency, but rather by placing a simple, easily software-detectable, pattern into all currency, and ensuring that anti-counterfeiting tools treat any currency lacking this pattern as fake money.
Okay, so now we just need to mandate the (mostly anonymous, decentralized) designers of printable gun CAD files to embed these special patterns into their open-source STEP and other CAD files, and then convince the open source printer and slicer software developers to include the detection code
This content restriction is already a thing on printers everywhere. Try printing a bank note and see what happens.
The currency detection pattern (The "EURion Constellation") was added to the design of banknotes and certain other documents to enable detection. Good luck getting the printable gun STEP/STL/GCODE people to embed a special small easily-detected feature into their files!
Also worth noting that currency detection isn't a law, and isn't in every printer. The few companies making high-quality color printer/copier internals caved to political pressure and "voluntarily" added detection for a very simple pattern to their firmware. Adobe also embedded this in their (closed source) photoshop software.
Reliable detection of anything that might possibly be a gun or a part of a gun, in any possible 3d rotation, is not a trivial problem, an effective solution would pretty much first depend on developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
The only person who always got his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe.
