I too wish to rage at how bad an argument the chinese room is.

Searle's Chinese Room is a 3-card monty con. There's a room with a man consulting a book. Slips with Chinese characters comes in, he consults the book following it's instructions, writes out the lines of the characters, and passes the slips out, which is a legitimate conversation in Chinese. He argues the room on the whole understands Chinese, but the man in the room does not. And so AI is fake or some bullshit. This is a crock. The book is magic and obviously conscious and sentient. Such a book would have more pages than there atoms in the universe. That's the trick Searle pulls. In the original paper he's even dodgy about if it's a book or a filing cabinet. The man, the room? Who gives a fuck? You've got a magic book that can talk to you!

INSTEAD, let us imagine the same thought-experiment, except this time instead of a magical book, there's a box with a small child from Guangdong inside. This is the Mandarin Room. Now, nothing here is any different than Searle's bullshit concerning the room and the man. 100% identical on their end. The child tells the man what strokes to make on the paper. ooooo aaaaaah Does the man know mandarin or not? Let's debate this for 40 years! But it's all bullshit because the source of intelligence and the location of where the knowledge about mandarin language resides is obvious and definite. And talking about the room as a whole is a pointless waste of philosophical drivel.

Searl damaged the AI industry with this second only to that Perceptetron book that supposedly proved neural nets could accomplish much. We could have had TensorFlow in the 70's!

.....WHAT deterministic behavior? The Heisenberg uncertainty principle DICTATES that the physical components that everything is built upon is NON-deterministic.

Bruh, the fatalists that believed "it is written" still considered themself conscious beings. Do you get that? Non-deterministic consciousness. You've married consciousness to non-determinism for some crazy reason that makes no sense.

You are pretending it's some sort of magic soup that gets poured into the mix. There's no consciousness organ hiding in your brain. It's not a consciousness cell sneaking around and poking at synapses. It is a PROPERTY or a TRAIT that exists somehow in the 86 billion neurons in your head. OR you can just come out and say that you're not REALLY talking about consciousness and what you really want to say is "souls" but without sounding like you're an alchemist out of the dark ages.

You're confusing "life" with.... I dunno "consciousness" or "intelligence" or "aware" or something. Bacteria are most certainly alive and they don't do much more than just follow programming in their DNA. Not even complicated instructions. Goomba-level intelligence. You know, from Mario Bros. The first one.

"Self-conscious" is just a type of anxiety. Usually anxious about doing something wrong. Likewise "self-aware" is something we have a very good test for and it only kicks in for humans after about 18 months. The moment that you can reliably ask GPT if something looks like it was written by GPT, it's self-aware.

A fly is certainly alive, aware, intelligent, but not self-aware, and.... man, probably not self-conscious? hell if I know.

You're confusing consciousness with free will. These things will generally do what they're trained to do. Just like you.

And while you definitely shouldn't rely on these things as some sort of paragon of truth for all sorts of reasons, even fools who can't keep two words straight have their uses.

First off GIT YE TO THE SOURCE and read what he actually wrote rather than the mischaracterizations and interpretations and lies and propaganda about what people FEEL he said.

Second, I fully understand why this discussion is a mess because Unherd hides his paper behind a paywall. So practically NOBODY is actually talking about what he actually said, they're reacting to reactions and everyone is eager to shout over each other. ....but I do too: We've hit that philosophical moment where the words we're used to don't quite apply. Like an early astronaut talking about "down". I think everyone needs to remind themselves that ants, slime molds, and nematodes all display some level of intelligence, even if small. Every human with an IQ of 80 is most certainly a general intelligence. And that anything want to say about why this pile of billions of virtual neurons isn't this or that has to equally apply to the pile of billions of actual neurons in your head.

If there are any other arguments - real arguments - pay attention to them, but the equity concerns should be filtered out of the conversation and their advocates seen as having wasted people's time.

The idea that ideas can be owned is the defect. It's an idea you had. It's not your idea.

FSF was founded by idealists who believe code should be as free as speech rather than owned. Spoiler alert: they're right.

They were built on principle and likely will stand on it.

Private enterprises are not productive enterprises; it is a necessary cost of society. Private enterprises do not build anything and possesses no means to do so. People do so, and so private enterprise must pay people for what they need.

Trump, Putin, and Bibi are all worse for world peace and betterment than any of Iran's leadership (not that Iran's leadership was great).

Why on earth are you doing this manually? Automate this a bit and you'll never care about this kind of thing again, and your job will be way more pleasant.

I am familiar with the concept, perhaps a bit too familiar in that I'm in my late 40s now and have delayed gratificaiton for so long, because it never seemed the time to change habits, that I now deeply regret it. There are ways to over-seek current gratificaiton - never saving anything and stuff like that, but I now think that it's not worth spending even a single year in this kind of situation, and even (legally or culturally) allowing these kinds of jobs in a society is a mistake because it creates pressure for more people to take unsustainable jobs, perhaps longer term.

I would ban this kind of thing were I able to. I would do my best to shame companies that work this way, ideally as part of a movement that would make it not commercially viable to have such labour violations. All jobs must be sustainable and reasonable.

There's everything wrong with this, no matter the pay. What's the point of having a well-paying job if there's no room left for living a life outside the work hours?

I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.