- I'll try not to swear at/hit a printer: not because I see the printer as having human-like qualities of being capable but complex and unreliable, but because I want to be a person who can control his temper.
- Treating an inhuman thing as human because it can mimic us in some way is not something that I want to do.
This is asserting personhood or consciousness of LLMs by default in your phrasing and then warning me about the dangers of violating your assertion. You're making the same wager and mistake. There's no important difference, you have no evidence for LLMs being a "someone" any more than you do for a god existing. Warnings about made up things hold no weight.
Yes. I'm currently not convinced it can ever be so. So until I hear something convincing to the contrary, I believe no machine can be conscious / sentient unless mimicking human behavior. And if it mimics human behavior intentionally, I have to ask why - and the answer is probably to get me to trust / use it more.
I was bright-eyed and excited about tech once. Like back in 1982 when I got my first home computer and thought CPUs were part magic. Now I know how machines work from the transistor level up to neural nets. There's nothing magical about it. And no consciousness.
Having seen the mockery that the finance-bros have made of "pure tech" (i.e. Jobs instead of Woz, Ellison instead of Joy, etc) and all the enshittification just for pure $$$, I'm leery of ANYTHING ANY tech company tells me anymore.
Now, do I believe that possibly "consciousness" is some kind of state of a super-circuit (our brains)? Sure. Can we emulate that on a computer? We can't even emulate a pebble on a computer (not simulate, emulate). We can SIMULATE what we THINK brains are, but we can't emulate a real one. Not even close, not for many decades.
I tend to agree with OP. In my opinion conscious machines are not something that we should allow to exist. If they do, they are not human and must never be treated as such.
I am not even slightly religious, but they would be abomination.
inhumane: without compassion for misery or suffering; cruel
cruel: willfully causing pain or suffering to others, or feeling no concern about it
You cannot treat an LLM inhumanely, definitionally.
Anyways, when one swears at someone it's typically meant to berate or belittle that person - to inflict some sort of emotional pain. That's the sense I intended when using the word, which is why it fits as a response to what you're saying, and why I would say "don't be nasty to a LLM" has little to do with the LLM itself.
This is in fact the danger with these human-simulating "AI"s we have now...
People get used to treating human-like, human emulating machines with either disrespect or in a command/control/master fashion, because that's the nature of the tooling.
And then potentially by extent/blurring of lines they then treat other people like machines.
Which is already a thing people do to other people.
- I'll try not to swear at/hit a printer: not because I see the printer as having human-like qualities of being capable but complex and unreliable, but because I want to be a person who can control his temper.
- Treating an inhuman thing as human because it can mimic us in some way is not something that I want to do.