| The Turing Test is overrated and/or misunderstood. You can trick an animal into thinking that the scaffold/robot with a camera in its eyes are its kin. So what does that say? All it proves is the limitation of the senses of that animal. It says nothing about us being able to engineer a replica of that animal. > So where do we go from here if we're not convinced yet? The answer is: nowhere. Humans used to deny that animals could have consciousness because they don't have souls or aren't chosen by god according to some sacred books or something along those lines. You bring up religion. People say that AI is conscious based on mystic vibes they unquestioningly take in (or accept gratefully) because the AI can write like a philosopher. That’s exactly like people thinking that the woods and the creeks are Alive. They see the phenonema around these natural objects and make extra-evidential inferences about how the conscious Nature is working with or against them. > They even used to deny that other humans have consciousness to promote slavery and slaughtering. Today many would still deny consciousness in computers even when faced with overwhelming evidence, because they might fear for their jobs and thereby their wealth and social standing. Artificial intelligence is a direct threat to the foundations of personality in a capitalist society. Yeah, preach. Before they enslaved people. Now people are afraid of losing their jobs—their only means of survival—so that the tech billionaires can reap all the productivity benefits for themselves. Preach. And: their sense of personality? No. Just their means of being able to survive and live a good life. That’s how it relates to “capitalist society”. Because their identity (of letting a capitalist extract their value I guess?) is secondary to that more base need. And who cares if the entity that takes their job (presumably) is conscious or not? What does it even matter? It doesn’t. As for the overwhelming evidence, well. I guess it is overwhelming to the kind of person who hears voices in a valley where the terrain happens to have a shape which makes the wind make intonations. |