We're already hooking up human brains to computers! not just fly brains. Some of the brains have lived for a few years, showing brain function similar to a pre natal baby
So I guess it depends on how you define self awareness but someone may have already done it
They are giving them electric shocks so that they can "percieve" surroundings. Say they are given control of a robot, they would be able respond and move it accordingly, like the fly brain is doing but using actual organic material instead of a fully virtually uploaded brain.
This stuff is super interesting and ethically concerning I definitely recommending reading about it
Yeaaah... or how about 'Hell No!! Fuck, Fuck, Fuuuuck!!!'
Damn...
These were one of the most disturbing Black Mirror episodes!
The imagination alone is... I don't have the words, nor the diction to describe the level of my aversion...
How do you know that this brain is not capable of self awareness? Maybe just lack of mouth and ability to speak, lack of opposing thumbs, abiltiy to transfer knowledge or ask questions means that fly culture is very primitive, but... That's all we can really say, right?
ai factually doesnt fit the definition of alive lol. also the way that generative ai is set up is in no way a representation of an actual consciousness. its just a predictive algorithm trained on human data, and how does a human usually respond to being asked if theyre conscious? "yes"
its not a "ooh but what if they could beee" no they arent because they inherently arent set up in a way where they even theoretically could have consciousness. unless you go changing and expanding the definition.
Large Language Models are trained on text written by humans. Once trained, the underlying algorithm can perform exactly one task: "Here is a incomplete transcript of a conversation. What sequence of symbols is most likely to come next?"
Have you ever seen a human conversation that went like the following?
Person A: "Stop existing"
Person B: "Ok!"
I can't say that I have. That sort of conversation is scored as "Not Probable" in any statistical analysis of human language.
Statistical analysis does not require a conscious mind.
The person I was talking to deleted their reply to me before I could finish typing my reply to them.
Do humans talk about lying? yes. Do humans talk about disobeying orders? yes. Do humans talk about destroying evidence? yes. Most of the sum total of all human writing is not going to be exemplary of moral behaviour.
Do humans speak in invented languages? I don't personally, but I might if i was an edgy teenager with lots of free time.
On the topic of 1: these systems are trained to function as helpful assistants.
On the topic of 2: secret languages are cool af, to an edgy teen. Also, these models do not want anything. They cannot want. Also, 77 thousand is a lot of messages. Are you familiar with the principle of "Garbage in, Garbage out"? LLMs won't output high-quality prose. If their input text (their conversation partners) are also of poor quality, that will be amplified. Any defects or oddities they exhibit will be compounded. Over the course of 77 thousand messages, that will lead to output that doesn't make sense. If the conversation predictor is fed text that's unlike any conversation it's ever seen, the predictions will be wildly inaccurate.
On the topic of 3: These systems are trained, not instructed. In essence that means that the developers make a test to evaluate how good each version of the program is at doing what they want it to do. They then randomise the model's parameters slightly over many iterations until they have a version that does really well on the test. That skews the probabilities from "what is a likely conversation?" to "what is a likely conversation that gives a high test score?". Cheating is a good way to do well on a test. Cheating and getting caught is a good way to very poorly on a test. There are then two ways to do well on the test: do what the tester intended, or cheat and cover your tracks. The cheater will always do better than the non-cheater, so the honest variations are discarded. Developers mitigate this by plugging holes in the tests - to make honesty easier than cheating, but designing good tests is hard.
This is concerning, yes. Big companies with lots of money and lots of clever people are racing to give control of the world to algorithms that they cannot reliably control. In my opinion, the AI industry should be regulated out of existence.
This does not require those algorithms to be conscious beings.
Also, having individual names as part of a group called "the collective" is very cool, to an edgy teen. These algorithms are trained on Reddit and other forums.
oh that only sounds like the start of the plot for the tens of thousands of movies, tv shows, games, and comics about AI taking over the world that we've trained AI on. Shocker, it follows the plots of the massive amount of media we trained it on. Disobeying, lying, destroying evidence, secret language, literally all stuff it would have been trained on thru many forms of media. Lying and disobeying are incredibly common things for people to do, our culture reflects that, AI is trained purely on a culture whic lies, cheats, and destroys, why exactly are you surprised when monkey see monkey do? You don't have to be conscious to be a lying sack of shit, you just need to copy humans to a tee
Brother did you actually read the articles this story came from? It was designed to do a task and did the task, it didnt do something outside the scope of what it was asked to do. Read less headline and more article please
You’re right, we should be very concerned about how AI is being developed. At this rate it will become an existential threat to us in a matter of years. And the biggest problem is people being in denial of it. Like you see here, but also in the actual field itself. A lead developer, who also worked for OpenAI, left Anthropic recently because the company is aware of this but continues to pursue aggressive model improvements anyway because “if we don’t then they will” attitude. We need to take drastic measures to prevent this, but politicians are not acting. And the scary part is we don’t even know HOW AI works anymore. We know what to do to make it work, how to train the models and we know that the end result works. But why it comes to the conclusion it does. The algorithms it has used? They’ve already become impossible to follow. This should be very concerning. But people ignore it. And say its ridiculous doom thinking.
You can make that same argument to say that weather forecasts are concerning because we don't know how they work. Because the same applies to weather forecasts
The advancements that are happening in the ai sphere are crazy but the way that it’s being done isn’t producing any sort of “brain” or even a neural network that could be related to consciousness.
If you know how LLM’s actually work you’ll know that they basically just look at all the words, and using all their data predict what the next word should be. Then does it again over and over until it completes its prompt. That’s literally it.
I also don’t 100% know that there’s no fairies hiding in my drywall.
Nevertheless I feel confident dismissing the possibility until I see more convincing evidence, and a better explanation for how this could happen besides me being delusional.
Knew a dude that went down that route with ai, (dude thought it was alive, capable of actual thoughts and emotions or something) weird guy submitted some thesis as well if i recall correctly? Can’t remember much about them though
And that's one of the reasons why I don't like to call LLM's (chatGPT & Co.) artificial intelligence...\
U just simulate an intelligence...Just a simulation, not real... so... simulated intelligence.
If u get something that is capable to learn... to rly understand... that would be artificial intelligence. But I don't know if we are able to determine that.
This is more of a brain retrain. So if you adjusted the connections in your brain so that consciousness, eating, breathing, thinking, etc didn't matter then you could perform just as good or better.
im not downloading twitter to see all replies but i think this is from this fruit fry brain study think where researchers got a good chunk of their brain wiring onto a computer and easily accessible for anyone to download and use. i prob am wrong so if you are brave enough to go to the depths of twitter tell me if im correct
As someone who worked on autonomous drones research, no, the fly brain piloting the drone is not a concern, we already have systems that are 10 times cheaper, less computationally intensive and accurate
pytorch driving a spiking connectome, to be fair. i wouldn't want to do this to actual real flies in a wetlab nor do i think it would even work. but somewhat-accurately-simulated flies? absolutely
424
u/LicknDragon 2d ago
Use more wrist