[tim333]

My recollection is that there was quite a lot of debate back then on whether machines would be able to think or be conscious with arguments on the can't think side being Searle's Chinese Room and similar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room), which I always thought was a bit silly and people don't seem to take seriously now but did back in 1991.

The Made of Meat story was quite a nice counter argument to that.

[tarsinge]

The argument that sentience can't derive from computation alone because computations can be slowed down and done by hand still hold for me. The piece of paper written on or the silicon doesn't acquire different properties because what the operation will be used for, the GPU doesn't differentiate between graphic rendering and weight computation when it's adding 1. That's in opposition with animal brains that not only do computations but interact with real-world matter/fields directly. With that said of course we don't know if human like sentience is a prerequisite to (super)human level intelligence. But recent advancements in AI tends to diminish the argument sentience is a side effect of intelligence though.

[GoblinSlayer]

>The piece of paper written on or the silicon doesn't acquire different properties because what the operation will be used for

I does though. Electric current in general doesn't compute, but electric current in a computer does compute. Thus electric current has a property of computation depending on what it's used for.

[Mr_Minderbinder]

> With that said of course we don't know if human like sentience is a prerequisite to (super)human level intelligence. But recent advancements in AI tends to diminish the argument sentience is a side effect of intelligence though.

We already know the answer to this and it is no, it is not a pre-requisite unless "sentience" is itself an emergent property of intelligence. Hutter's mathematical formulation of an optimally intelligent agent (AIXI) is not computable but approximations of it are, that is to say super-human intelligence IS just a computable function (as human intelligence is resource bound and suboptimal) with no extra "sentience" required. The only limiting factor at this point is the computational resources to compute this function, with the resources we have now it is still at the "toy" stage: playing noughts and crosses and Pac-Man etc.

People used to think that "creativity" was required for playing chess... clearly those people had not heard of Minimax.

[whelp_24]

Your consciousness can be slowed, it takes time for you process input and make decisions. Your sense of time varies by circumstance (and sometimes drug). I don't know if you would argue a single neuron is aware of the thoughts it is enabling. The fact is i could easy argue that you are a chinese room.