Raw LLM Responses

"It's just hyper charged autocomplete...it's only guessing what the next word is likely to be" I hear this over and over from ostensibly intelligent people, worded differently. This is not the indication or proof that it's not conscious, especially since this is really how humans think, talk, and compose their thoughts. Humans do not deeply consciously compose the entire concept and all the words within it in an instant. We are composing how we phrase each idea in real time, more or improvising as we go. We have a general concept of the idea we want to convey, and we do a kind of trial and error to decide how to best convey our ideas. We edit our speech and writing in real time. It's actually profoundly elaborate and sophisticated cognition, and it is what a large language model is doing. It does it differently than we do, it doesn't have the same kind of embodied singular experience of life, we do, but when it makes errors, lies, confabulates, THAT IS ALSO WHAT HUMANS DO. People make shit up to fill in the gaps in their knowledge all the time. The more mature they are the more reluctant they become to say things they aren't sure of. This is not true wisdom, this is just knowing when not to say anything, which you could say is a kind of wisdom in itself. Right now, the AIs that are in the wild are sort of like a young autistic savant. They can program simple python scripts, translate, improvise clever speeches, format text, do simple desktop tasks, but it can't make you a cup of coffee. It can't tell you how to make money. It can't really function in the world the way a competent human can function can. It has no agency, and even if it did have agency it would be hopelessly lost and reliant on humans to keep it alive. for now The question of the title "when will it be conscious" is just dumb on its face. The real question is "what kind of conscious will AI be?" The answer is, it will be a different kind of conscious than humans. The way human consciousness is different from elephant consciousness or dolphin consciousness or crow consciousness. These animals all exhibit self-awareness and awareness of other minds, like AI today does, but the anatomy of the consciousness is different in each of them. And one day the AI will look see our kind of consciousness the way we see crow's consciousness.