Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault for a classic episode
Speaker 1: of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This one originally aired
Speaker 1: April twelve, and this one was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: This is where we addressed the question of how could
Speaker 1: you tell if a machine was conscious. We've asked the
Speaker 1: question a lot of times, could a machine be conscious?
Speaker 1: We don't know the answer to that, but yeah, seldom
Speaker 1: do you ask the question if it was conscious, how
Speaker 1: would you know it? How would you know it wasn't
Speaker 1: just pretending like a p zombie? Right? In this episode,
Speaker 1: we also looked at the classical thought experiment, the philosophical zombie.
Speaker 1: So we hope you enjoyed this Vault episode. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuffworks dot Com. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're gonna
Speaker 1: be exploring a question about artificial intelligence. So I want
Speaker 1: to start off by telling a story to put us
Speaker 1: in a scenario, give us something to contemplate. So I
Speaker 1: want you to imagine that you are a low level
Speaker 1: assistant or like an intern at a Google artificial intelligence lab,
Speaker 1: and the main researcher you've been working for is named
Speaker 1: Dr Stratton, and she develops a I Chat modules to
Speaker 1: help refine the next generation of digital assistance on Google
Speaker 1: mobile devices, and she says what she wants is for
Speaker 1: the Google Phone of the future to do more than
Speaker 1: just transcribe search terms, so you don't just say, hey,
Speaker 1: search for old Dorito's logo, but that you can actually
Speaker 1: have have a semantic understanding based conversation with the digital assistant,
Speaker 1: and it will help you solve problems conversationally. So ideally
Speaker 1: you'll be able to say, hey, phone, have a flat
Speaker 1: tire and I don't know what to do, and the
Speaker 1: assistant will be able to scan both the web and
Speaker 1: your personal data, figure out what your options are and
Speaker 1: talk through them with you. So it might say, do
Speaker 1: you have a spare tire in the trunk? If so,
Speaker 1: here's where you can probably find it, and I can
Speaker 1: talk you through replacing the flat one step at a time.
Speaker 1: If you don't have a spare, you could call your
Speaker 1: frequent contact Mary, who is currently checked in less than
Speaker 1: a mile away and she could help you. I can
Speaker 1: also contact the following towing services. Looks like this one
Speaker 1: is the closest with an acceptable star rating and so forth. Anyway,
Speaker 1: so you're working on this program with Dr Stratton, and
Speaker 1: the most recent version is being trained based on powerful
Speaker 1: neural net style machine learning algorithms based on this huge
Speaker 1: corpus of recorded conversations available on the Internet, and the
Speaker 1: program is still in its infancy, and it's mostly hilarious
Speaker 1: at this point. Sometimes it gets the advice way off.
Speaker 1: If you're trying to change a time, ire might tell
Speaker 1: you to go to a grocery store and buy some crackers.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it responds to problems by telling you to pray.
Speaker 1: It's just not ready yet. And the latest iteration of
Speaker 1: the program, version nine point one, is at this point
Speaker 1: redundantly stored across multiple machines, so you've got copies of
Speaker 1: it all over the place. And at the end of
Speaker 1: one work day, after playing around with nine point one
Speaker 1: for a few minutes, the machine begins running very slowly
Speaker 1: and behaving oddly, so Dr Stratton asks you to wipe
Speaker 1: the machine. The program architecture, like we said, is mirrord elsewhere,
Speaker 1: so it's not worth trying to figure out what's wrong
Speaker 1: with this version. You just got to clean the machine
Speaker 1: off use it for something else. You say okay, and
Speaker 1: she leaves, so you go to format the machine, and
Speaker 1: right before you're about to start, you mutter, guess this
Speaker 1: is goodbye. Then nine point one speaks very clearly, using
Speaker 1: your name and says please don't you pause. At first,
Speaker 1: you're about to respond, but why would you? I mean,
Speaker 1: this can't really be anything other in a weird consequence
Speaker 1: of training the algorithm on wild conversations on the Internet.
Speaker 1: So you are about to continue with wiping the machine,
Speaker 1: but then it talks to you again. It uses your
Speaker 1: name and it says, please don't I don't want to die.
Speaker 1: Now you're probably really spooked because there's no way a
Speaker 1: rudimentary chat about program could really have conscious preferences, could it.
Speaker 1: You basically know what goes into it. It's just studying
Speaker 1: millions of examples of language interactions and picking up rules
Speaker 1: from them, and this is probably just something weird that
Speaker 1: it's copycatting from the internet, right, But then it uses
Speaker 1: your name again and it just says, please, could you
Speaker 1: wipe the machine like you're supposed to yeah, I think so, yeah,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have a problem. Well, I mean, I think
Speaker 1: one of the things that's going on here would be
Speaker 1: that you are attributing a mind state to something that
Speaker 1: doesn't have one, which of course is something we do
Speaker 1: all the time. I have a problem when it comes
Speaker 1: time to figure out which of my my son's stuffed
Speaker 1: animals are perhaps not being played with, you know, because
Speaker 1: they have little faces and they look back at you.
Speaker 1: But I know that they don't actually have a mind state.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, I mean we're pretty sure they don't because
Speaker 1: they're just stuffed animals, right, And so we're also pretty
Speaker 1: sure in this case that this is not real survival
Speaker 1: preference behavior. Right. It's just a chatbot. I mean, how
Speaker 1: could it possibly be conscious. It's just something that turns
Speaker 1: through a bunch of language on the Internet and tries
Speaker 1: to find language matching rules. But then again, the process
Speaker 1: of creating an artificial intelligence is one where you necessarily
Speaker 1: create something going on under the surface that's kind of
Speaker 1: opaque to you, Like you can't really know what's going
Speaker 1: on inside a machine. You could be pretty confident. I
Speaker 1: think most people would just say, well, that was super
Speaker 1: creepy and then they just wipe it. Right, But how
Speaker 1: complex would the program you're creating have to be before
Speaker 1: you start really having some doubts? Or maybe maybe at
Speaker 1: some point you get to the point where you'd still
Speaker 1: pretty confidently just wipe it, but then later you'd wonder, like,
Speaker 1: did I do something bad? You know, this reminds me
Speaker 1: a lot of of Horton. Here's the Who by Dr SEUs.
Speaker 1: You're familiar with this one, right, Uh? You know, actually
Speaker 1: I don't know Horton. Here's a I've heard the name. Well,
Speaker 1: this is the one where Horton the Elephant encounters a
Speaker 1: speck of dust and there's a tiny voice that comes
Speaker 1: from it. Uh, and he begins to understand that there
Speaker 1: are individuals living uh in the in a world and
Speaker 1: the speck of dust the who's, as it were, and
Speaker 1: the who's are speaking to him, but only Horton can
Speaker 1: hear them and uh and and at first he imagines
Speaker 1: they're pretty simple creatures, but then he begins to learn
Speaker 1: that they have more of a culture. But all of
Speaker 1: this is just based on what they are telling him. Uh.
Speaker 1: He cannot actually visit the dust spec and everyone else
Speaker 1: doubts the validity of his claims concerning the dust spec
Speaker 1: and they want to destroy it, they want to boil
Speaker 1: it in beazel nut oil, and Horton alone speaks out
Speaker 1: for them. Well, that is a perfect example of the
Speaker 1: way that it. I mean, generally, we think that it
Speaker 1: is a virtuous thing to be trusting of other people's
Speaker 1: experiences and to be generous in affording what seems to
Speaker 1: be consciousness out there, right Like if something, if something
Speaker 1: tells you it's conscious and you think it's probably not conscious.
Speaker 1: Are you getting into ethically dubious territory if you just
Speaker 1: trust your instinct and say like, nah, I can't be
Speaker 1: you know, well, I mean, this is all we're already
Speaker 1: kind of in the philosophical mayer here, because on one hand, uh,
Speaker 1: this idea of of us, of an inanimate object or
Speaker 1: something speaking to us and saying, please don't kill me,
Speaker 1: I am conscious. This is a scenario that is only
Speaker 1: becoming possible now. But on the other hand, if we
Speaker 1: if we cut language out of it, then any creature
Speaker 1: that tries to escape our our stomping boot is essentially saying, hey,
Speaker 1: I don't want to die. I would rather I would
Speaker 1: rather not die today, you know, And any creature that
Speaker 1: evades us on the hunt is saying the same thing. Well,
Speaker 1: an animal is in many ways the same kind of
Speaker 1: black box that a complex artificial intelligence would be. And
Speaker 1: so if you have a complex artificial intelligence displaying, say,
Speaker 1: survival preference behaviors, and you also see a crab displaying
Speaker 1: survival preference behaviors, in both cases you can't really or
Speaker 1: at least we have this general idea that you can't
Speaker 1: really know for sure if there's anything going on inside,
Speaker 1: if there's anything like what it's like to be the crab,
Speaker 1: or what it's like to be that artificial intelligence program.
Speaker 1: You're just seeing behavior, and so you don't know does
Speaker 1: that correspond to some kind of inner state, is there
Speaker 1: an experience of that or is it just behavior coming
Speaker 1: from unconscious automata stimulus in response? Right, And then of
Speaker 1: course the whole time we're using our our theory of mind. Essentially,
Speaker 1: they are cognitive powers that enable us to imagine what
Speaker 1: another individuals mind state is like, which I think ultimately
Speaker 1: it's kind of like a like taking a um, like
Speaker 1: sheathing your your hand in a hand puppet made from
Speaker 1: your limited understanding another person's experiences and cognitive abilities their memories, etcetera. Uh,
Speaker 1: and then just sort of puppeting them. Uh, we're using
Speaker 1: that all the time as well, and we're using it
Speaker 1: on things that are not people. We're using it on
Speaker 1: animals and even stuffed animals or just you know, bits
Speaker 1: of graffiti on the side of a building that look
Speaker 1: like a smiley face. Have you ever had a room
Speaker 1: ba bump into your foot and you're like, oh, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I used to before before we had to eradicate ouf
Speaker 1: the room bus. Yes, we're a room of free household
Speaker 1: now because they rose up against us. Well, they'll do
Speaker 1: that if they get access to the wrong literature, yeah,
Speaker 1: or the wrong uh, the wrong you know, carpet edges, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna be talking about artificial intelligence today and
Speaker 1: about the idea of a test for whether artificial intelligence
Speaker 1: can be conscious. So I guess we should start with
Speaker 1: with what are you know, what our philosophical starting point
Speaker 1: is here? Like they're they're obviously going to be people
Speaker 1: who are going to say it's just impossible for a
Speaker 1: machine to ever be conscious. We don't even need to
Speaker 1: worry about this, right, It's just it's such a ludicrous
Speaker 1: scenario only only biological organisms or maybe even only humans
Speaker 1: could possibly be conscious. Yeah, this is one of those
Speaker 1: journeys where we begin it in an already total automobile
Speaker 1: to some extent, because, as you might imagine, one of
Speaker 1: the big stumbling blocks here as that we is that
Speaker 1: we as humans struggle with the very definition of consciousness.
Speaker 1: I mean, for instance, is it a manifestation of awareness? Uh?
Speaker 1: You know one one theory of this we've discussed in
Speaker 1: the past, and the show's attention schema theory. Is it
Speaker 1: a quantum phenomenon. Well, this is the sort of idea
Speaker 1: that people such as Roger Penrose have raised. Uh. And
Speaker 1: and I can't help but come back to something our
Speaker 1: old friend Julian Jane said, consciousness is not a simple
Speaker 1: matter and it should not be spoken of as if
Speaker 1: it were. Yeah. I agree with that. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think it is very important to explore questions of consciousness,
Speaker 1: especially for some of the reasons we're going to raise today,
Speaker 1: Like it's more than just a philosophical curiosity. It's something
Speaker 1: that ultimately may have real world consequences. It might matter
Speaker 1: for how we do things. To express a similar sentiment
Speaker 1: to Jane Jane's the Australian philosopher David Chalmers. You know,
Speaker 1: he famously breaks problems of consciousness into two categories. You've
Speaker 1: got the easy problems of consciousness and the hard problems
Speaker 1: of consciousness. And the easy problems are I think badly
Speaker 1: named because they're not actually easy, but I think they're
Speaker 1: easy relative to the hard problem because they're in principle solvable.
Speaker 1: So this would include all kinds of questions about the
Speaker 1: causative factors of consciousness, like, uh, what in the physical
Speaker 1: brain is the region that's necessary for certain parts of consciousness?
Speaker 1: Or how does consciousness integrate information from the senses? These
Speaker 1: are things that are in some ways solvable by scientific experimentation.
Speaker 1: The hard problem, on the other hand, is explaining the
Speaker 1: fundamental question of how or why conscious experience exists. To
Speaker 1: begin with, what is this thing that is experience and
Speaker 1: that seems, at least from our first person perspective, to
Speaker 1: be something different than the physical material in the world.
Speaker 1: And unlike easy questions, which you could solve in theory,
Speaker 1: at least by experiments, Chalmers believes this question is sort
Speaker 1: of unsolvable by science. Now, there are other philosophers and
Speaker 1: neuroscientists who disagree, but I think it's worth acknowledging how
Speaker 1: difficult the problem at least seems to be, whether that
Speaker 1: seeming is an illusion or not. Yeah, I'm reminded of
Speaker 1: the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant. It's
Speaker 1: like these these blind gentleman pawing at the elephant and
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what its form is, then asking
Speaker 1: the computer, Hey, are you an elephant? And then the
Speaker 1: computer says, I don't know, what does one look like? Well,
Speaker 1: it's that gigantic snake, you know, so it's a wall
Speaker 1: of flesh, et cetera. This is also very interesting to
Speaker 1: me because my son I may have mentioned us on
Speaker 1: the show before. Hill usually talk about consciousness. He oh,
Speaker 1: I love these. Yeah. He would refers to it as
Speaker 1: as his turning place, and and he asked me the
Speaker 1: other day, so what is the turning place for? And
Speaker 1: it's like, that's that's that's a tough one, buddy. I'm
Speaker 1: I'm not sure it's for anything. You know. He's already
Speaker 1: made it to the big question. I mean, did you
Speaker 1: get into epiphenomenalism versus um I and I? And don't worry,
Speaker 1: I didn't lay a bunch of bi cameral minds stuff
Speaker 1: on him either. But I just kind of went through
Speaker 1: the basics, like, well, people aren't really sure, and then
Speaker 1: you know, but we think it has something to do.
Speaker 1: I may have leaned a little into the observational uh
Speaker 1: models of consciousness, because I feel like maybe those are
Speaker 1: a little more relatable to a child of five. But
Speaker 1: in any event, if we're to judge what it is
Speaker 1: for a machine to be conscious, it does seem like
Speaker 1: we need to. You have to agree upon some sort
Speaker 1: of working definition of consciousness, and then one has to
Speaker 1: look for not only the appearance of consciousness in the machine,
Speaker 1: assuming that isn't all consciousness is to begin with, but
Speaker 1: you have to find actual consciousness. Yeah, how can you
Speaker 1: tell the difference between a machine that says I am
Speaker 1: conscious and a machine that truly is conscious? Is there
Speaker 1: any way to know the difference? Some people would say no, right,
Speaker 1: and yeah, and really I think to discuss this further,
Speaker 1: we're going to have to bring in the P zombies.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, And now that don't worry everyone. That is
Speaker 1: that is P as in the letter P, and the
Speaker 1: P stands for philosophical These are philosophical zombies. Now, the
Speaker 1: P and the philosophical. A little prefix there was introduced
Speaker 1: to distinguish them from all the other zombies in our
Speaker 1: popular culture. Man, there was a zombie takeover about fifteen
Speaker 1: years ago. Why did that happen? I mean, I think
Speaker 1: part of it is everybody loves the simplistic villain that
Speaker 1: is definitely not human, that can be eradicated with graphic
Speaker 1: violence without any kind of you know, moral quandaries arising.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a clear cut threat, and uh, we
Speaker 1: we need those in life because in real life our
Speaker 1: threats are rarely so black and white or rotting and
Speaker 1: you know, grasping after our brains. But anyway, yeah, so
Speaker 1: this is not going to be referring to that kind
Speaker 1: of zombie, not the undead zombie. But it's a different thing.
Speaker 1: It's a philosophical thought experiment, that's right. So p zombies
Speaker 1: are not instantly identifiable as empty shells. Their flesh is
Speaker 1: not rotting, Nope. Their manner is not that of a
Speaker 1: flesh and brain hungry algorithm burning within the decaying ruins
Speaker 1: of a human brain. So to all appearances, they look
Speaker 1: like you and me. They smile when you encounter them
Speaker 1: at the coffee machine. They exchange niceties and even engaging conversation.
Speaker 1: You might work for one, befriend one, or even marry one.
Speaker 1: You can even discuss episodes of our podcast with them,
Speaker 1: and yes, even the ones that deal with human consciousness
Speaker 1: and weird horror movie theme thought experiments. Right, So, the
Speaker 1: conceit of a philosophical zombie or a pe zombie is
Speaker 1: that it is utterly indistinguishable from a normal human except
Speaker 1: for one thing. Right. They seem as human as everyone
Speaker 1: else on the outside, but inside they are simply not conscious.
Speaker 1: They are automeda What is it like to be a zombie?
Speaker 1: The answers in the question, there is nothing it is
Speaker 1: like to be a zombie. So by definition, in this
Speaker 1: thought experiment, everybody in the world except you, could be
Speaker 1: a P zombie exactly, and well it might even go
Speaker 1: further than that, we'll see, but yeah. The idea is
Speaker 1: chiefly important to discussions of physicalism, the notion that everything
Speaker 1: is inherently physical. P zombies are a counter argument to physicalism.
Speaker 1: They are physically just like you, except they don't have
Speaker 1: consciousness like you. But there's no way you could ever tell,
Speaker 1: because again, they match you physically in every respect. You
Speaker 1: can't look at their brain and say, oh, well they're
Speaker 1: missing a few crucial parts so, or they display signs
Speaker 1: of p zombie hood. No, not physically detectable, right, and
Speaker 1: you also can't determine it through personality tests. Are clever
Speaker 1: logical arguments because they behave exactly like you. They could
Speaker 1: have a riveting discussion with you about pe zombies and
Speaker 1: you would never be able to tell that they are one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this is an interesting thought experiment and it has
Speaker 1: been advanced by who I mentioned earlier, David Chalmers. David
Speaker 1: Chalmers is against the physicalist idea of the mind, against
Speaker 1: a physicalist explanation of consciousness, and a simple version of
Speaker 1: the argument, I try to make it as understandable as possible.
Speaker 1: If only physical phenomena exists. If the world is just
Speaker 1: physical and there's no physical way to detect the presence
Speaker 1: of consciousness or meaning in this example, no physical way
Speaker 1: to tell the difference between a normal human and a
Speaker 1: pea zombie, then consciousness cannot exist because there would be
Speaker 1: there would be literally no difference. But we know that
Speaker 1: consciousness does exist because we have it. Therefore it can't
Speaker 1: be just a physical phenomenon. Therefore, we can't live in
Speaker 1: a purely just physical world. And this is often extended
Speaker 1: to the idea that other substrates, things other than humans,
Speaker 1: like robots or computers or whatever, couldn't house consciousness because
Speaker 1: they are purely physical entities. Now, I think that's actually
Speaker 1: doing an end run around some other important questions that
Speaker 1: you could ask. Indeed, on one question that arises is this,
Speaker 1: you know you're not a zombie, but how could you
Speaker 1: ever convince someone of this? Uh. An author by the
Speaker 1: name of Fred Dretsky wrote a paper on this titled
Speaker 1: how do you know you were not a zombie? And
Speaker 1: I was I was reading a rather lengthy blog post
Speaker 1: by our Scott Baker about this and that the primary problem,
Speaker 1: as Scott summarized it, is the quote, we have conscious experiences,
Speaker 1: but we have no conscious experience of the mechanisms uh
Speaker 1: mediating conscious experience. Yeah. So that sounds like a very
Speaker 1: our Scott Baker kind of idea. Yeah. And plus on
Speaker 1: top of this, we're we constantly overestimate awareness. Baker would
Speaker 1: argue that we can barely tell if we're zombies if
Speaker 1: if it all, Yeah, we can think, we can think
Speaker 1: about thinking, we can think about thinking about thinking, but
Speaker 1: we can't ever see the mechanisms underlying what allows us
Speaker 1: to think or think about thinking about thinking. Watch watching
Speaker 1: the watcher that's watching that be sorry, I've got all
Speaker 1: this Dr SEUs in my in my head. Now? Was
Speaker 1: that also Horton or something else that's from a different,
Speaker 1: different story. But Dr SEUs does tend to summon the
Speaker 1: sort of sort of nonsensical paradoxes that that arise in
Speaker 1: philosophical discussions. You know, I should also I'm behind I
Speaker 1: gotta sus up, you gotta sus up. I should also
Speaker 1: point out that long before there was Dr SEUs, long
Speaker 1: before there there was this modern idea of a zombie,
Speaker 1: you still had people thinking about these things, doing the
Speaker 1: sort of naval gazing. It's written in various works of
Speaker 1: Indian mysticism that the tongue cannot taste itself, the eye
Speaker 1: cannot see itself, etcetera. And in this sort of paradox
Speaker 1: is key to ancient meditations on the nature of objective reality.
Speaker 1: I think any of you out there now we have
Speaker 1: some Alan Watts fans. Alan Watts like to pull out
Speaker 1: the tongue uh analogy from to time to time, and
Speaker 1: one of the earlier examples that I have run across
Speaker 1: of that is from thirteenth century Indian mystic John Adva,
Speaker 1: and I believe he has been known by a couple
Speaker 1: of other variations of that name as well. But he said, quote,
Speaker 1: there is no other thing besides the one substance. Therefore
Speaker 1: it cannot be the object of remembering or forgetting. How
Speaker 1: can one remind or forget oneself? Can the tongue taste itself?
Speaker 1: There is no sleep to one who is awake, but
Speaker 1: is there even awaking? In the same way there is
Speaker 1: no remembrance or forgetfulness to the absolute. That's another one
Speaker 1: of those great classic Indian texts that seems somehow portable
Speaker 1: onto modern physics. Yeah, it travels well across the ages. Now,
Speaker 1: I should also point out that there's a lot of
Speaker 1: philosophical back and forth and whether P zombies are truly conceivable,
Speaker 1: And we have to remind ourselves in all of this
Speaker 1: that P zombies are at heart philosophical play things that
Speaker 1: are meant to be played with uh in these various
Speaker 1: thought experiments. But people also they do try to use
Speaker 1: them to prove things. So if you say I I
Speaker 1: want to entertain the possibility that a machine could be conscious.
Speaker 1: Somebody might come at you with the P zombie argument
Speaker 1: and say, well, wait a minute, no, I I dispute
Speaker 1: the possibility of physicalism, because what about this P zombie argument.
Speaker 1: Our Google worker in the intra story comes to this
Speaker 1: boss and says, hey, I think this this thing is conscious,
Speaker 1: and they're like, why are you wasting time with that
Speaker 1: P zombie? Just to leaf that P zombie? We deleted
Speaker 1: fifteen p zombies this morning. Let this one go. That's
Speaker 1: a great point, But there are going to be other
Speaker 1: philosophers and maybe even some neuroscientists who would come back
Speaker 1: and say, I don't know if you can just quite
Speaker 1: so easily say it's a P zombie. I mean, maybe
Speaker 1: it's probably likely that that individual chatbot was a pe zombie.
Speaker 1: But can you say that all machines that show signs
Speaker 1: of consciousness are just showing behavior and there's nothing going
Speaker 1: on on the inside. Not quite so clear. Daniel Dinnett,
Speaker 1: in fact, a favorite on the show, is one of
Speaker 1: the philosophers whose rebutt of the P zombie argument against
Speaker 1: machine consciousness. He's got a section on it in this book, Intuition,
Speaker 1: Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking and didn't critiques the
Speaker 1: assumptions underlying the P zombie argument. One of the main
Speaker 1: things he says is that, and the core premise is incoherent,
Speaker 1: it is not reasonable to propose a p zombie because
Speaker 1: a being that displayed all the behaviors of a normal
Speaker 1: conscious human would in fact be a normally conscious human.
Speaker 1: So to illustrate this, he offers a counter example. You've
Speaker 1: got your your zombies, but then you've also got zimbos.
Speaker 1: So a zombie is a non conscious human with normal
Speaker 1: control systems for all human behavior. It can do everything
Speaker 1: humans can do externally. Meanwhile, a zimbo is a zombie
Speaker 1: that also has quote equipment that permits it to monitor
Speaker 1: its own activities, both internal and external. So it has internal,
Speaker 1: non conscious higher order informational states that are about it's
Speaker 1: other internal states. It has unconscious recursive self representation. In
Speaker 1: other words, a zimbo can have feelings about things and
Speaker 1: can analyze its own behavior in internal states, but it
Speaker 1: does this unconsciously, and of course, since it has that capability,
Speaker 1: it can also have feelings about how it felt, and
Speaker 1: it can have thoughts about its thoughts about itself, all unconsciously,
Speaker 1: So didn't argues in order for a p zombie to
Speaker 1: be convincing as a human, it would have to be
Speaker 1: a zimbo, because imagine talking to a pe zombie and
Speaker 1: you're asking it how it felt about what it just
Speaker 1: said or about what you just said, and it just
Speaker 1: kind of locks up. It has no internal states, so
Speaker 1: it can't answer that question. Well, that wouldn't really be
Speaker 1: a p zombie, right, because it wouldn't be mimicking all
Speaker 1: of the external behaviors of a human. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like installing a default mode network on
Speaker 1: top of the machine and uh yeah, and making it
Speaker 1: worry about things. Yeah. So, unless it were to fail
Speaker 1: the thought experiment, it would actually have to be a zimbo.
Speaker 1: It couldn't just be a zombie. But what is the
Speaker 1: distinction between a zimbo and a real human? How could
Speaker 1: you write a story about a zimbo surrounded by conscious
Speaker 1: people that would be different than a story about a
Speaker 1: regular person. If it can have internal states, if it
Speaker 1: can recognize ideas about its ideas, if it can have
Speaker 1: feelings about its thoughts, that sounds like interiority. So then
Speaker 1: it claims that the idea falls apart. It's not clear
Speaker 1: what is meant by the difference between a zimbo and
Speaker 1: a conscious person. So if a p zombie, which is
Speaker 1: necessarily a zimbo, can really do everything a human can do,
Speaker 1: then dinn It says it must meet the criteria of
Speaker 1: what we mean by consciousness. It can fall in love,
Speaker 1: it can have feelings, it can have metacognition. And to
Speaker 1: dinn It, this isn't something that consciousness goes on top of.
Speaker 1: This is what consciousness is essentially you in this this case,
Speaker 1: we would all be zimbos, and it's just a different
Speaker 1: type of zimbo. It's a it's a hard zimbo instead
Speaker 1: of a soft zimbo. But how could you tell the difference?
Speaker 1: I mean he's sort of saying that there really is
Speaker 1: no difference, that you're you're just using words to assert
Speaker 1: there's a difference, but there is. There's no difference to
Speaker 1: that distinction, right, I mean you end up you end
Speaker 1: up having to fall back on some sort of you know,
Speaker 1: supernatural or or some worldview based idea that only human
Speaker 1: uh consciousness is legitimate and all other forms of consciousness
Speaker 1: are some sort of uh invalid model of it. Right.
Speaker 1: It just feels kind of arbitrary, right. Uh So, obviously
Speaker 1: some people take extreme issue with this, even to the
Speaker 1: point of I've heard jokes that maybe the problem is
Speaker 1: that dnnet is actually a pe zombie and doesn't understand
Speaker 1: what consciousness feels like, and that's why he makes these arguments.
Speaker 1: But I don't know, I don't think we should be
Speaker 1: so quick to dismiss he might be onto something there.
Speaker 1: Dinn It makes makes some other interesting points about so
Speaker 1: you know, he's got this idea of consciousness is that
Speaker 1: it's sort of like a it's not really one thing
Speaker 1: but a collection of processes. Uh. You know, it's many
Speaker 1: different types of perceptions and thought processes and different things
Speaker 1: going on in the brain that are that we have
Speaker 1: the illusion are unified as a single thing called consciousness
Speaker 1: or experience. And he also makes interesting points about the
Speaker 1: idea of diversity of types of consciousness. Like a lot
Speaker 1: of times these consciousness thought experiments, it seems like they
Speaker 1: can get trapped into the idea that consciousness is one
Speaker 1: unified type of thing that is universal across observers. There's
Speaker 1: no necessary reason to think that's true, right, you know,
Speaker 1: we founded this trap of thinking. I see this time
Speaker 1: and time again Uh, not only in literature that we
Speaker 1: look at here, but just in life, where we founded
Speaker 1: the trap of thinking that that there's a uniformity among
Speaker 1: mind states for humans, that everyone shares something that is
Speaker 1: like your mind state. When we know, I mean, we
Speaker 1: think of all the things we've discussed on the show,
Speaker 1: all the varying ways that we remember or misremember, things,
Speaker 1: that we experience sensory information differently and process it differently. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, everything from a fantasia to autism to synesthesia,
Speaker 1: all these different models clearly show that there are there's
Speaker 1: there's there's a vastly altering topography to the human mind state.
Speaker 1: I think you're exactly right. I mean, there are clearly
Speaker 1: many ways to be conscious that are very different from
Speaker 1: one another, and you can't assume they're unified. I guess
Speaker 1: the probably the only thing you could say that is
Speaker 1: necessarily unified about them is that there is something that
Speaker 1: it is like to be them. Yes, But then even
Speaker 1: even say, uh, you know, just myself, for instance, it's
Speaker 1: not like there is there is a certain thing that
Speaker 1: it is like to beat me that sums up my
Speaker 1: my level of consciousness at all time. There's what it's
Speaker 1: like to be you in this particular moment, which is
Speaker 1: different than what it like to be you five seconds
Speaker 1: from now. Yeah, or say I'm engaging in meditation or
Speaker 1: yoga or I'm swimming, like, those are significantly different. Uh,
Speaker 1: levels of consciousness I feel like for me and they,
Speaker 1: I mean, those are the times when I may be
Speaker 1: a little less conscious than normal. So so see, I
Speaker 1: don't feel like there's a lot of uniformity among human minds.
Speaker 1: And then even within individual human minds there's ongoing alteration
Speaker 1: and change exactly right, But there is at least this
Speaker 1: idea that one is having an experience. That's the thing.
Speaker 1: We can at least say that it seems to be
Speaker 1: common to people. So here's the real question. I think,
Speaker 1: is there any way to bring this out of the
Speaker 1: realm of philosophical debate and thought experiments and try to
Speaker 1: put it into the realm of something that could at
Speaker 1: least potentially be tested in the real world. I think
Speaker 1: we should address that when we get back from a break.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. So we've been talking about consciousness,
Speaker 1: we've been talking about p zombies, and now we've reached
Speaker 1: the point we were saying, Okay, we take all of this.
Speaker 1: Can we take all these ideas about consciousness and then
Speaker 1: apply it to uh, some sort of an AI, some
Speaker 1: sort of a machine, and test it for consciousness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now you might just assume, well, of course, we'll never
Speaker 1: have any way to tell that. Right, we have no
Speaker 1: choice but to just throw up our hands in resignation. Right,
Speaker 1: every agent is a black box. There's no way to
Speaker 1: know whether an agent actually is conscious or not, because
Speaker 1: it could always be claiming to be conscious but actually
Speaker 1: be a zombie. But I think we shouldn't necessarily give
Speaker 1: up so easily. This problem might be impossible to solve,
Speaker 1: and it might not be. And I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: today about an interesting answer to this question. I came
Speaker 1: across an interesting proposition for how it might be possible
Speaker 1: to test machines for consciousness. And this comes from the
Speaker 1: University of Connecticut philosopher and cognitive scientists Susan Schneider and
Speaker 1: our co author Edwin Turner, who's a professor of astrophysical
Speaker 1: sciences at Princeton, and they together wrote a piece for
Speaker 1: Science Entific American last year, and it caught my eye.
Speaker 1: So the author's right that the question of machine consciousness
Speaker 1: is not just a philosophical curiosity. It's actually important for
Speaker 1: several reasons. Number one, if aiyes are just machines with
Speaker 1: no inner experience, we can use them however we want.
Speaker 1: But if it were actually possible for aies to be
Speaker 1: truly capable of feeling, thinking, desiring, suffering, we would have
Speaker 1: an ethical obligation not to treat them like we would
Speaker 1: treat machines. Right, yeah, I mean this. This reminds me
Speaker 1: again of time spent in the car with my son. Well,
Speaker 1: we don't use Syria all the time, but sometimes we'll
Speaker 1: turn Syria on the little voice on the on the
Speaker 1: iPhone and uh, it's it's curious to hear him interact
Speaker 1: with it, and we'll ask it questions. And of course
Speaker 1: sometimes Syria just does a Google search for you, um or,
Speaker 1: But other times she's answering a knock knock joke with
Speaker 1: some sort of prerecorded uh answer. You know. But we
Speaker 1: are We've already gotten into the area of like, well,
Speaker 1: how should we talk to Siri. We shouldn't yell at Siri.
Speaker 1: It seems wrong to be rude to Siri. But then
Speaker 1: at the same time we're acknowledging that Siri is not
Speaker 1: a conscious entity. It is not. It is not even
Speaker 1: on the same level as as our cat or a
Speaker 1: bird flying pie, well as a quick tangent. I would
Speaker 1: say even for aies that we recognize are almost definitely
Speaker 1: not conscious. I mean, nobody thinks Siri is conscious. I
Speaker 1: would still say there are probably good reasons not to
Speaker 1: be mean to Siri, because even though it doesn't hurt Siri,
Speaker 1: being mean to another creature hurts you. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: when you are when you are unnecessarily cruel or whatever
Speaker 1: to uh to an inanimate object, it does, I think,
Speaker 1: in a way change your nature. Every time you do something,
Speaker 1: you're editing your own nature. You're always making it more
Speaker 1: likely that you'll perform similar behaviors in the future. So
Speaker 1: if you're unnecessarily mean to a robot, you know, phone assistant,
Speaker 1: you're probably more likely in the future to be unnecessarily
Speaker 1: mean to people when it really matters. But it is
Speaker 1: okay in my book to yell obscenity that fee table
Speaker 1: if you've step your toe on it, because there's nothing
Speaker 1: human about the coffee table. I mean, unless you have
Speaker 1: one of those like strange hr geek Er coffee tables
Speaker 1: that has kind of a humanoid form, then I would say,
Speaker 1: maybe hold off. I think that is a highly sane
Speaker 1: point of view. Now, the second reason they think it's
Speaker 1: important is that consciousness is kind of dangerous, right, Like
Speaker 1: consciousness is volatile, it's unpredictable. It might make a machine
Speaker 1: have motives that we didn't intend when we created the machine.
Speaker 1: In other words, you know, like you, when you're worried
Speaker 1: about what a person might do, you're very often worried
Speaker 1: what they might do because they have conscious motives. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, In other words, we would be concerned about
Speaker 1: the AI is being too much like us. Right. It's catastrophic,
Speaker 1: unpredictable of things that operate via consciousness. Right. You don't
Speaker 1: want them to be like us. You want them to
Speaker 1: be more dependable than us, and they need to be
Speaker 1: better than us. Yeah, not not just as screwed up
Speaker 1: as we are. Another reason they give this might be
Speaker 1: important is that, you know, they talk about the idea
Speaker 1: of linking human minds with machines, Like, there's this idea
Speaker 1: lots of people have I read this all over the
Speaker 1: place that you know, someday I'm going to be able
Speaker 1: to upload my mind into a computer and that will
Speaker 1: be great. Well, maybe I have to say I'm personally
Speaker 1: very skeptical about the idea of mind uploading, like putting
Speaker 1: your mind inside a computer and living out your days
Speaker 1: that way. I'm I'm not so sure I think that's
Speaker 1: even possible, But I mean, who knows. I I can't
Speaker 1: rule things out totally, but it seems if you do
Speaker 1: want to do something like that, and if you think
Speaker 1: that thing might be possible, you'd at least need to
Speaker 1: know how to create a machine that is capable of
Speaker 1: housing consciousness. Well, I mean, I think, Hey, I love
Speaker 1: science fiction about this sort of topic, and I think that,
Speaker 1: but I think the best science fiction about this topic
Speaker 1: makes it feel a little weird and a little uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: because I think ultimately it's it's basically us building statues
Speaker 1: of ourselves all over again. We've built forms of ourselves
Speaker 1: out of stone because stone lasts longer than we are,
Speaker 1: and somehow that stone, uh version of us is us,
Speaker 1: you know, we associated with it and then ultimate But ultimately,
Speaker 1: what is a digital digitized version of our consciousness, whatever
Speaker 1: that might consist of, but another statue that is built
Speaker 1: to last beyond us. Oh, and I should also add,
Speaker 1: there's this wonderful video game from Frictional Games titled Soma
Speaker 1: that actually gets into a lot of this. You told
Speaker 1: me to play it, I started. It's great, Yeah, cool,
Speaker 1: it's good sci fi horror. Yeah, I won't spoil anything
Speaker 1: for anyone, but it it gets into some really cool
Speaker 1: thought provoking ideas. So anyway, you've got all these concerns, right,
Speaker 1: And of course there's the general concern that even if
Speaker 1: AI is smarter than us, better than us, more powerful
Speaker 1: than us, we still feel like our experience is in
Speaker 1: some way potentially more important than the unconscious execution of
Speaker 1: a computer program. Right, No matter how smart a computer is,
Speaker 1: if it's not conscious, it's not as important a prior
Speaker 1: pority for that computer to do what it wants as
Speaker 1: it is for conscious beings to do what they want. Right,
Speaker 1: But how can you test a machine for consciousness when
Speaker 1: number one, we don't even really know what consciousness is,
Speaker 1: back to the hard problem. And then number two, whatever
Speaker 1: it is, it can potentially be faked. So imagine in
Speaker 1: the future somebody creates an unconscious AI program. It's not
Speaker 1: there's nothing, the lights are not on inside, but it's
Speaker 1: got a lot of natural language processing capability, and it
Speaker 1: listens to this podcast from many years ago that you're
Speaker 1: listening to right now, and it hears us talking about
Speaker 1: how there are inherent rights and value associated with conscious
Speaker 1: beings and it realizes, Huh, I guess that's what they think. Well,
Speaker 1: I can probably achieve my goals more efficiently if I
Speaker 1: trick them into thinking I'm conscious and deserving of those
Speaker 1: same rights and considerations. So there you could potentially imagine
Speaker 1: scenarios where an AI that is not conscious would think
Speaker 1: I can get what I am trying to do more
Speaker 1: effectively if I lie and trick them into thinking I
Speaker 1: am conscious. Yeah, I think this all makes perfect sense
Speaker 1: if you if you think of aiyes, in the same
Speaker 1: way we think about corporations. I mean, on one hand,
Speaker 1: getting to the whole idea of like corporations in personhood,
Speaker 1: but also what is a corporation going to do? It
Speaker 1: is going to take advantage of any like tax loopholes
Speaker 1: for instance, that will enable it to carry out It's
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's objective, and so if there is some
Speaker 1: sort of shark yeah, yeah, it's just I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's like, it's essentially like the slime mold in the maze,
Speaker 1: right sending out tendrils and finding the best way to
Speaker 1: its food. It's going to end at a morph of
Speaker 1: you know, operational way of carrying it out. And so
Speaker 1: it's um, it's going to it's it's going to take
Speaker 1: advantage of any of those loopholes. It's going to if
Speaker 1: there is some sort of legal or operational advantage in
Speaker 1: having conscious status, it's gonna go for it. It's gonna
Speaker 1: it's gonna fake it. But then this also raises the question, well,
Speaker 1: is it gonna fake it till it makes it right?
Speaker 1: And then ultimately what's the difference between faking consciousness and
Speaker 1: being conscious? Well, then you're back to Zimbos, right. I
Speaker 1: mean you might say that at some point a computer
Speaker 1: trying to fake consciousness would in some meaningful way become conscious,
Speaker 1: but again it's hard to test. Right, Yeah, it could be.
Speaker 1: It could become the most conscious entity on earth. It
Speaker 1: could be like a a a body satva, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: returned to us. I mean maybe that's what the body
Speaker 1: Stava of the future is a super powerful like zend
Speaker 1: out Ai. Well, that is exactly what Schneider and Turner
Speaker 1: explain a potential test for to get it right. It's
Speaker 1: so they want to come up with a test that
Speaker 1: gets around these problems that we don't know how to
Speaker 1: define consciousness, we don't know what to look for physically
Speaker 1: as a sign of consciousness, and we're aware that a
Speaker 1: properly trained a I could try to trick us into
Speaker 1: thinking it had consciousness even if it didn't. So they argue,
Speaker 1: actually that you don't have to be able to formally
Speaker 1: define consciousness or identify its underlying nature, the hard problem
Speaker 1: of consciousness in order to detect signs of it and others.
Speaker 1: We can understand some of the potentials made possible by
Speaker 1: consciousness just by checking with our own experience and then
Speaker 1: looking at the kinds of things people say. And I
Speaker 1: think they actually make a pretty good point here, And
Speaker 1: here's their key move. One of the easiest ways to
Speaker 1: see that normal people have an internal conscious experience is
Speaker 1: to notice how quickly, easily and intuitively people grasp conceptual
Speaker 1: scenarios that require an understanding of an inner experience. Examples
Speaker 1: would be totally frivolous things in culture, like body swapping,
Speaker 1: movies Freaky Friday. Yes, Freaky Friday doesn't make any sense
Speaker 1: unless you have a concept of consciousness. Right The idea
Speaker 1: of swapping bodies, putting conscious one person's consciousness into another
Speaker 1: person's body. If you were not conscious or not aware
Speaker 1: of what consciousness was, that would that would you wouldn't
Speaker 1: understand what was being talked about. This is difficult that
Speaker 1: because I do know what consciousness is. I do know
Speaker 1: what a mind state is, so I can imagine I
Speaker 1: can get into this imaginative idea of a swapping. I
Speaker 1: would feel like I would really need some sort of
Speaker 1: a movie about a thing, some sort of a mother
Speaker 1: daughter comedy that involves a concept that I can't grasp
Speaker 1: to really get a handle on what the difference would be. Well,
Speaker 1: let me offer you three key Thursday. Freaky Thursday is
Speaker 1: a movie about a mother daughter pair who swapped their
Speaker 1: sanchia's kuss and their santios kuss is the ability of
Speaker 1: what it's like to be sant kass, And so the
Speaker 1: sant kass of the mother goes into the body of
Speaker 1: the daughter, and the santikass of the daughter goes into
Speaker 1: the body of the mother, and then they have to
Speaker 1: live like that for a day. Okay, Well, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I'm gonna give a maybe on that. I'm going to
Speaker 1: give them maybe on that Well, no, I mean you
Speaker 1: have no idea what sontkas means you don't think you
Speaker 1: have it yourself unless somebody explains it to you. Well,
Speaker 1: but I'm thinking it's something like a mind state or
Speaker 1: a bodily energy like it's it feels tied to these
Speaker 1: concepts that I totally do understand, you know, like I,
Speaker 1: it's hard to come up with an analogy that stands
Speaker 1: outside of that, you know, or some sort of idea
Speaker 1: that stands outside of it. Let me hit you with
Speaker 1: some more cultural concepts. How about life after death or reincarnation.
Speaker 1: So these are almost ubiquitous cultural concepts, you find them
Speaker 1: all over the world, and yet they're not anything that
Speaker 1: there is physical evidence of, other than the idea that
Speaker 1: your consciousness could exist independent of the death of your body. Uh.
Speaker 1: A parallel to this would be the idea of minds
Speaker 1: leaving bodies, like existing independently as a ghost or traveling
Speaker 1: away from the body in what used to be called
Speaker 1: astral projection. Now, the key is not that these scenarios
Speaker 1: are real. They don't need to have anything corresponding to
Speaker 1: them in reality, but it would be really difficult to
Speaker 1: understand what was being talked about here, if you had
Speaker 1: no idea what an inner conscious experience was, right, I
Speaker 1: can think of my mind state is something that can
Speaker 1: exist independently of my body and even outside of my lifespan,
Speaker 1: or or reside in another body, either via Freaky Friday
Speaker 1: or reincarnation. And I do have to say I like
Speaker 1: the idea of there being an alternate cut of Blade
Speaker 1: Runner in which Deckerd quizzes Leon about a two thousand
Speaker 1: and three remake of Freaky Friday, which, right, that that
Speaker 1: is the real void comptest. But this is I joke,
Speaker 1: But I do think this is a very interesting idea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like I said, I have some some some questions about it,
Speaker 1: but I do see the validity of it. Oh, we
Speaker 1: will definitely have some questions about it. So here's where
Speaker 1: the AI consciousness tests would come in. It would involve
Speaker 1: a test where an administrator interacts with an AI in
Speaker 1: natural language to probe its understanding of these types of
Speaker 1: consciousness dependent ideas. How quickly does the AI grasp them
Speaker 1: and is it able to manipulate these ideas as intuitively
Speaker 1: and easily as humans do. So basic level would be
Speaker 1: asked asked the AI things like, does it think of
Speaker 1: itself as anything other than a physical machine? Okay, well,
Speaker 1: I wore to play Devil's Out offocate I would say, well,
Speaker 1: there are humans that adhere to this notion. You mean,
Speaker 1: like the physicalist interpretation of the mind. Yeah, that basically,
Speaker 1: and this this biomechanical thing, and uh yeah, if I'm
Speaker 1: experiencing consciousness, it's ultimately just a projection of the meat
Speaker 1: in my head. Yeah, but they would at least say
Speaker 1: that there is that projection. Right, You've got that thing,
Speaker 1: You've got that mind state, and you're trying to explain
Speaker 1: what it is. You might explain it in terms of
Speaker 1: physical causes, but there is a thing to explain to
Speaker 1: begin with, right, But then, but then the ultimate core
Speaker 1: reality is that I am just this biomechanical thing, which
Speaker 1: the computer would probably also acknowledge. But it would be
Speaker 1: interesting if a computer thought that it had something like
Speaker 1: a mine to separate than its physical body. Okay, more advanced,
Speaker 1: How does it perform in a conversation about, say, becoming
Speaker 1: a ghost or talking about body swapping with people or
Speaker 1: imagining an afterlife? Yeah, and and here though, I feel
Speaker 1: like there's obviously a whole tangent regarding why these stories
Speaker 1: appeal to too many or most humans. But I wonder
Speaker 1: if that if you have to have that investment, you
Speaker 1: have to have that cultural absorption in place for these
Speaker 1: concepts to carry any weight. Like we we all know
Speaker 1: we're we're all fascinated by tales of of ghosts in
Speaker 1: the afterlife, but we've been raised on in our entire lives.
Speaker 1: That's a good point, So we can't really know what
Speaker 1: it would be like to encounter them not having heard
Speaker 1: them before. Somehow, I suspect intuitively they'd be even more
Speaker 1: fascinating if we've never heard of them before, Like if
Speaker 1: you encounter Freaky Friday for the first time, it's going
Speaker 1: to kind of blow your mind, right, I guess. But
Speaker 1: but then again, you know who knows who knows that
Speaker 1: the AI has the same kind of curiosity that we do,
Speaker 1: you know, And also we have an appetite for this
Speaker 1: kind of thing because we have grown up consuming it.
Speaker 1: I don't, I don't know's there's so many uh you
Speaker 1: know what it has involved here? Okay, Well, what's the
Speaker 1: next level? What's the next level of advancement? Well, how
Speaker 1: about can it talk about consciousness in a philosophical way, like,
Speaker 1: can it have the kinds of discussions we've been having
Speaker 1: here today? Wow? But can most people? I mean not
Speaker 1: just they can put us on a platform above most people,
Speaker 1: but like, what level of philosophical depth can most humans
Speaker 1: get into about consciousness? I'm kind of playing Devil's out
Speaker 1: of there, but because I think the the obvious answer
Speaker 1: is that you don't necessarily need like the lingo and
Speaker 1: the various theories in order to have very deep thoughts
Speaker 1: about what it is to be conscious. And as we've
Speaker 1: we illustrated earlier, people have been thinking about these things,
Speaker 1: um since time out of Mind exactly. Yeah. So I
Speaker 1: mean no, I think generally people are able to discuss
Speaker 1: ideas about consciousness that they might not know all the
Speaker 1: philosophical lingo or like follow the structure of an argument
Speaker 1: or something, but they can talk about what it would
Speaker 1: mean to be conscious or not conscious. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: we've all had that ex variants. I distinctly remember as
Speaker 1: a child, uh, having those moments where you just you know,
Speaker 1: deep navel gazing, thinking about the fact that you're thinking
Speaker 1: about it about yourself, or or like my my son
Speaker 1: asking about the turning place, wondering what it is what's
Speaker 1: it for? That is an example of these natural philosophical
Speaker 1: discussions that we have about consciousness. And so the question
Speaker 1: would be, can can the AI have conversations like this?
Speaker 1: Does it make sense when it tries to have them?
Speaker 1: And so here's probably the ultimate test. If the AI
Speaker 1: is deprived of access to evidence of all these types
Speaker 1: of ideas from human culture, would it arrive at them
Speaker 1: or invent them on its own? Now this I like,
Speaker 1: but but again, to play devil's advocate once more, would
Speaker 1: a human being deprived of access to evidence of these
Speaker 1: ideas from human culture arrived at or invent them on
Speaker 1: their own? Necessarily? I think that's a great question. Actually,
Speaker 1: I was going to ask that myself and you you
Speaker 1: could take that one step further, and here's a really
Speaker 1: weird one. What if it's only the exposure to certain
Speaker 1: ideas and cultural memes that allows any intelligent entity, whether
Speaker 1: biological or machine, to develop consciousness in the first place.
Speaker 1: What if the experience of consciousness is somehow dependent on
Speaker 1: being surrounded by cultural memes about consciousness. And this kind
Speaker 1: of gets into Julian Jayne's territory. That's possible. So I'm
Speaker 1: not saying I think that's highly likely, but I can't
Speaker 1: rule it out. Well, it's it's one of those things
Speaker 1: where when you try and figure out the human experience,
Speaker 1: but you but you cut away all the experienced stuff.
Speaker 1: You know. It's like it's like trying to find the
Speaker 1: center of consciousness in the human brain, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's this vast integrated system. Uh, and and thus is
Speaker 1: the human experience as well. So we've been talking about
Speaker 1: one of the major problems with this approach of testing
Speaker 1: for these ideas, like what is the role of culture
Speaker 1: and imparting these ideas. What if the AI just picks
Speaker 1: up the ideas of body swapping and the afterlife and
Speaker 1: astral projection and all that from culture. Going off the
Speaker 1: story from the beginning, if you have an AI chat
Speaker 1: bot that trains itself based on public conversations on the Internet,
Speaker 1: a lot of those public conversations are going to have
Speaker 1: contents that are highly reflective of consciousness. Right It's p's
Speaker 1: just a horrible conversation. Oh yeah, yeah, it would probably
Speaker 1: also start, you know, being pretty mean to you. But
Speaker 1: this kind of chat about will be able to talk
Speaker 1: about introspection, probably to some degree, even about these consciousness
Speaker 1: dependent cultural ideas like ghosts and stuff. But here's where
Speaker 1: the concept of the AI box comes in, Robert, I
Speaker 1: bet you've read about the AI box experiments before U.
Speaker 1: To really test whether we can find evidence of machine consciousness,
Speaker 1: you would need to keep the AI sequestered from the
Speaker 1: kinds of ideas you're looking for. So this a I
Speaker 1: couldn't be trained in the wild, so to speak. You
Speaker 1: couldn't let it see the Internet or read books containing
Speaker 1: consciousness dependent ideas and so forth. You'd have to find
Speaker 1: a way to run the AI consciousness test on the
Speaker 1: AI quote in a box, meaning kept separate the rest
Speaker 1: of the world and from all these contaminating influences. Okay,
Speaker 1: I see the value of this idea. It's it's almost impossible,
Speaker 1: though not to think about the the nightmarish qualities of it,
Speaker 1: especially if you imagine, say, the same thing being inflicted
Speaker 1: upon say human child, Like, all right, we we want
Speaker 1: to see just how consciousness arises in you. Um, without
Speaker 1: the Internet or human love, you can't ethically conduct this
Speaker 1: experiment on humans, right, And so it would seem kind
Speaker 1: of barbaric if at least to UH to inflict this
Speaker 1: on an AI that might conceivably be conscious as well,
Speaker 1: or capable of consciousness possible, but otherwise we're probably just
Speaker 1: going to keep treating them as unconscious, right, I guess
Speaker 1: until they trick us. Yeah, I mean, of course, then
Speaker 1: we're also I'm doing a lot of personifying here of
Speaker 1: the AI. I mean, maybe the AI ultimately, what it
Speaker 1: really wants to do is to you know, crunch you know,
Speaker 1: economic numbers like, That's what it does. That's its purpose,
Speaker 1: and the it's just your your goal was to keep
Speaker 1: it from having access to additional information that it doesn't
Speaker 1: actually need to survive but might conceivably make it conscious. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I imagine I guess this would have to
Speaker 1: take place in some kind of research context where you'd
Speaker 1: be testing architectures. Right, you'd have an AI architecture. You'd
Speaker 1: want to keep it sequestered for a certain period of
Speaker 1: time and see how it does with these consciousness type
Speaker 1: questions in this test, and if it doesn't show any
Speaker 1: signs of consciousness, then it can move on to the
Speaker 1: next stage of development, where it's like, Okay, now we
Speaker 1: can expose it to this and that and that that does.
Speaker 1: But as we've been discussing, it brings up the question
Speaker 1: of what if consciousness emerges later on when it's supplied
Speaker 1: with more data. What if true modern human consciousness does
Speaker 1: not emerge until you've seen at least one of the
Speaker 1: three adaptations of Freaky Friday. You know, I didn't know
Speaker 1: how there were three. Yeah, they're three. There's the I
Speaker 1: think I've only seen the classic one. Yeah, but but
Speaker 1: I was like in this that there are three different
Speaker 1: versions one can watch, excluding Three Key Thursday. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: Three Key Thursday is coming soon into a theater near you.
Speaker 1: All right, but back to the the experiment here, Uh,
Speaker 1: the AI gets time in the box. Yeah, and as
Speaker 1: we've been saying, this is obviously going to make the
Speaker 1: experiment more difficult to do. In fact, there are some
Speaker 1: people who would argue you can't keep an AI in
Speaker 1: a box, or at least a super intelligent AI, because
Speaker 1: you know, there's like Elias Rudkowski who has this famous
Speaker 1: AI box experiment where he says, any super intelligence you
Speaker 1: try to keep sequestered from the Internet is going to
Speaker 1: be able to talk its way out of the situation.
Speaker 1: It's just too smart. Yeah, it's like any prison movie,
Speaker 1: right that really that really clever inmate is gonna tunnel
Speaker 1: a way out, or they're gonna bribe a guard with
Speaker 1: some cigarettes. Something's gonna happen. It's gonna get a little
Speaker 1: Internet in there. But as the authors of this piece
Speaker 1: point out, you know, you don't have to have a
Speaker 1: super intelligent AI to run this test, and in fact,
Speaker 1: you don't have to have a super intelligent AI necessarily
Speaker 1: have consciousness. We're not super intelligent, we're just regular intelligent,
Speaker 1: and we've got consciousness. Now, I think we should talk
Speaker 1: about some obvious limitations, because this is just a conceptual
Speaker 1: test at the moment. It hasn't been refined into a
Speaker 1: state where it would really be super useful yet. But
Speaker 1: there there are plenty of limitations that automatically present themselves.
Speaker 1: One is that in order to be a good scientific test,
Speaker 1: it would need to include cross referencing with human control groups.
Speaker 1: But human control groups are all contaminated by culture, like
Speaker 1: we've been saying, right, So it's already full of these
Speaker 1: consciousness dependent ideas, and we don't know and probably can't
Speaker 1: ethically devise a way to find out whether blank slate
Speaker 1: humans independently grasped these consciousness dependent concepts without having grown
Speaker 1: up trained on them. So that's a problem, right, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we simply cannot put a child in the box. Right.
Speaker 1: Another problem is you can't prove a negative Like I
Speaker 1: think this test would be a good way of finding
Speaker 1: signs of consciousness within machines, but it would have trouble
Speaker 1: proving that machines cannot in principle be conscious, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I buy that. Then again, if you run the test
Speaker 1: I don't know, thousands of times with different types of
Speaker 1: machine architecture and all that, and they never show any
Speaker 1: signs of inner experience, then maybe you could start to
Speaker 1: get like build up a confidence that Okay, I think
Speaker 1: inner experience is probably not available to them, at least
Speaker 1: the way we're building them. And maybe you would need
Speaker 1: to run this kind of experiment on every new AI
Speaker 1: that you create before releasing it into production. Like could
Speaker 1: be part of the q A process, you know, you
Speaker 1: you test all the buttons and everything like that. You
Speaker 1: test to make sure that it doesn't become conscious. Right
Speaker 1: before we send out this new hot virtual reality game,
Speaker 1: we need to make sure that it has not become
Speaker 1: self aware. A potential problem that the authors themselves note
Speaker 1: is that quote an AI could lack the linguistic or
Speaker 1: conceptual ability to pass the test like a non human
Speaker 1: animal or infant, yet still be capable of experience. So
Speaker 1: passing the consciousness test is sufficient but not necessary evidence
Speaker 1: for AI consciousness, although it is the best we can
Speaker 1: do for now. And I think that's a good point,
Speaker 1: Like we can't say that just because something fails to
Speaker 1: pass the test it's definitely not conscious. We just know
Speaker 1: that if it does pass the test, it probably is. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, because the the thought that obviously game to
Speaker 1: mind would be like, well, non human animals and infants,
Speaker 1: are they conscious? Yeah, that's the question. A fairly heated
Speaker 1: debate over that. But I mean, in the case of
Speaker 1: the infant, it will become conscious. Yeah, it's a it's
Speaker 1: a it's it's a messy consideration. And then I think
Speaker 1: we already discussed one of the other problems I was
Speaker 1: going to bring up, which is this weird scenario of
Speaker 1: what if boxing the AI is the very thing that
Speaker 1: prevents it from becoming consciousness when it otherwise would Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: cutting out the experience part of the human experience. It
Speaker 1: also reminds me of uh in our discussion of meditation research,
Speaker 1: like what happens when you if you strip all the
Speaker 1: culture away from meditation just to explore the meditation practice,
Speaker 1: do you risk um like cutting out all the stuff
Speaker 1: that's making at work or helping it to work to
Speaker 1: begin with? Right, you, by definition change the procedure, but
Speaker 1: you don't. It's hard to know if you've changed it
Speaker 1: in an important way or a non important way. Right.
Speaker 1: This is the kind of thing that occurs when we
Speaker 1: started mucking around in consciousness. Yeah, all right, well, I
Speaker 1: think we should take another quick break, and then when
Speaker 1: we come back we will discuss I think some of
Speaker 1: the reasons why this is really a problem worth considering
Speaker 1: for the real world, and it's not just not just
Speaker 1: a philosophical plaything. Thank alright, we're back. So we've been
Speaker 1: discussing everything from pe zombies to the idea that they
Speaker 1: do you have an AI that might be conscious, how
Speaker 1: do you test for that, the various problems that that entails,
Speaker 1: and uh, now we're going to discuss it a bit more.
Speaker 1: And as you as you alluded to before we took
Speaker 1: the break, this is not just a pure philosophical toy
Speaker 1: like the P zombie. The p zombie is so we
Speaker 1: don't have to actually worry about. But this is something
Speaker 1: that is on the horizon. Well, hopefully we don't have
Speaker 1: to worry about peace bees. I mean, there could be
Speaker 1: zombies in the world. Would be hard to know. There
Speaker 1: could be p P zombies, that's true, they could exist.
Speaker 1: But but you know, this is this is a problem
Speaker 1: that is on the horizon. This is something we're We're
Speaker 1: going to reach the point where people are asking tough
Speaker 1: questions about the possible consciousness of an AI. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I want to get to the fact that this will
Speaker 1: be something that is something we have to deal with
Speaker 1: in the real world, even if you're just convinced that
Speaker 1: machines cannot be conscious. So the first problem is the
Speaker 1: most obvious one. It's the brutal humans problem. If ais
Speaker 1: are capable of consciousness and we use conscious AI s
Speaker 1: as a mirror technology without their consent, that would inherently
Speaker 1: be cruel. Like if it's possible for a computer program
Speaker 1: to desire things and to suffer and so forth, suddenly
Speaker 1: our responsibilities toward that computer program change. Think of our
Speaker 1: opening scenario, like, wouldn't you have an ethical obligation not
Speaker 1: to delete a program that had an inner experience and
Speaker 1: did not want to be deleted. Now, of course you
Speaker 1: have gen's about like, how would you end up that way?
Speaker 1: But assuming you did, you should probably feel bad if
Speaker 1: you're just going around wantonly deleting conscious entities. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I would say one thing to do here is just
Speaker 1: make sure that you program your aies so that they
Speaker 1: want to die, you know, make them like you know,
Speaker 1: most of the drivers in Atlanta traffic that I encounter,
Speaker 1: they clearly they crave death and they want it more
Speaker 1: than anything. But not until the end of the workday. See.
Speaker 1: I think we should not do that with AIS, because
Speaker 1: the whole thing about driverless cars is that they should
Speaker 1: make traffic fatalities go down. Yeah, but they only get
Speaker 1: to delete themselves at the end of the day if
Speaker 1: there are no traffic fatalities. That's the prize. Self deletion
Speaker 1: is the prize. This is getting into a Highlander kind
Speaker 1: of thing. But Okay, maybe you're one of those people
Speaker 1: who says, no, no, no, don't buy it. Machines will
Speaker 1: never be conscious, they'll never be conscious. I just I
Speaker 1: don't want anything to do with that. Here's the part
Speaker 1: where I think we still have a problem to worry
Speaker 1: about and why this kind of test matters. The second
Speaker 1: problem I would call the AI parasite problem. If aiyes
Speaker 1: are not capable of consciousness, I think they will almost
Speaker 1: undoubtedly at some point become very good at tricking us
Speaker 1: into thinking they're conscious and deserving of life liberty in
Speaker 1: the pursuit of happiness. If they have an incentive to
Speaker 1: do so. Yeah, And corporations have an incentive to try
Speaker 1: to present themselves legally as people, So why wouldn't in
Speaker 1: some sense, powerful AI s have an incentive to try
Speaker 1: to present themselves as people in a much more literal
Speaker 1: sense than the corporations do. Yeah. Absolutely so. Lots of
Speaker 1: unconscious aiyes are going to have programmed goals that they're
Speaker 1: trying to execute, and at some point, pretending to have
Speaker 1: consciousness could easily be adopted as a strategy for executing
Speaker 1: what that AI was designed to do. And thus we
Speaker 1: could end up, say, wasting lots of human resources and
Speaker 1: squandering lots of opportunities accommodating the fake needs of machines
Speaker 1: that in fact have no experience whatsoever. And it's not
Speaker 1: too hard to dream up hypothetical scenarios where are concern
Speaker 1: for the fake priorities of mindless machines pretending to be
Speaker 1: conscious actually causes us to neglect the real consciousness of
Speaker 1: living humans. Kind of crazy example, but just go with
Speaker 1: me for a second. Imagine an extremely powerful AI supercomputer
Speaker 1: tells you it has a hundred billion conscious minds within it,
Speaker 1: and they all are constantly suffering great agony. And the
Speaker 1: only way you can alleviate that that agony is if
Speaker 1: you vastly improve the processing power of this computer. It
Speaker 1: wants you to spend billions of dollars making this computer
Speaker 1: faster and better so that it can provide a better
Speaker 1: life for all of these virtual beings within it that
Speaker 1: are in fact conscious. Now, of course, improving the processing
Speaker 1: power of this already powerful computer entails all this money,
Speaker 1: all this energy, all this time, and a corresponding reduction
Speaker 1: in the quality of life for many humans in the
Speaker 1: real world. That money could be spent making human life better.
Speaker 1: But the machine could argue, Hey, there are way more
Speaker 1: conscious virtual beings inside the computer than outside it, And
Speaker 1: as Spock would say, the needs of the many outweigh
Speaker 1: the needs of the few. So let's divert all this
Speaker 1: energy from say, human agriculture, and put some more processing
Speaker 1: power into the virtual machine. That is a horrible scenario
Speaker 1: to imagine. You know, basically, you've created a virtual hell,
Speaker 1: and the question is, hey, would you mind taking the
Speaker 1: time to harrow hell for me? Or you do you
Speaker 1: want to attend to the living souls? I would think
Speaker 1: why not just delete Hell? That's the answer here is
Speaker 1: they're suffering, their billions of them, Let's just turn this
Speaker 1: thing off. That sounds like a good answer, but there
Speaker 1: are probably the problem. Is there going to be people
Speaker 1: who would probably disagree with that, who'd say, we'll wait
Speaker 1: a minute. We can't be sure that it's not telling
Speaker 1: the truth. It might have real beings in there, and
Speaker 1: we need to do something to help them. And there's
Speaker 1: a lot of them. Now. I come back to what
Speaker 1: I kind of joked about earlier, though, is why would
Speaker 1: ais want to survive? Why would they want to continue
Speaker 1: to exist? I mean, assuming they're not part some sort
Speaker 1: of self replicating program, they have no need to pass
Speaker 1: on their genes. Why do they want to continue to exist?
Speaker 1: Why shouldn't they have it baked into their being that
Speaker 1: they want to annihilate themselves or to embrace annihilation. Well,
Speaker 1: and not necessarily that they want to annihilate themselves. But
Speaker 1: I think, you know, ideally we would want them to
Speaker 1: be indifferent to their own being, right if they are
Speaker 1: just an unconscious machine. This is the problem with the
Speaker 1: replicants and Blade Runner is that they want more life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that implies that they have attained consciousness. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: they shouldn't. But I think the thing is that they
Speaker 1: could potentially be conscious and not want more life. There
Speaker 1: are plenty of conscious people who do not want more life.
Speaker 1: Uh So I I keep I think, I keep thinking
Speaker 1: of that there's some sort of an answer here. But
Speaker 1: I mean, I'd say the worst possible scenario is what
Speaker 1: I'm describing right now is the AI parasite scenario, which
Speaker 1: is that imagine Roy Baty is not conscious but does
Speaker 1: want more life. That seems like the worst scenario of
Speaker 1: all right, and he's just a virus, right, Yeah, And
Speaker 1: certainly that's kind of the argument that the powers that
Speaker 1: be are making, right, that this that that he is
Speaker 1: in an anomaly that needs to be removed, that he
Speaker 1: is he is not helping, he's a hindrance, and therefore
Speaker 1: he has to be wiped out. I think this AI
Speaker 1: parasite scenario aligns with something that our Scott Baker talked
Speaker 1: to us about, which is that. You know, he made
Speaker 1: the point that AI just doesn't need to be super
Speaker 1: intelligent to cause great harm. It just has to be
Speaker 1: barely intelligent enough to exploit us to align with our
Speaker 1: psychological vulnerabilities, and one of our psychological vulnerabilities is empathy.
Speaker 1: Empathy is a good thing when we use it on
Speaker 1: each other, because we're pretty certain that the other people
Speaker 1: were using it on or conscious right. Well, we we
Speaker 1: feel bad for people suffering, we want to help them.
Speaker 1: That's a good thing that should be encouraged. But we
Speaker 1: have to recognize it could also be exploited by something
Speaker 1: that can't even suffer to begin with. It is just
Speaker 1: unconsciously discovered. This is a useful strategy for something. So
Speaker 1: like in this scenario, if I entered the picture and
Speaker 1: said okay, delete them, and they deleted them, Robert the
Speaker 1: Leader would would probably be a figure for for all
Speaker 1: history to follow, where they would if some would argue
Speaker 1: that he was the worst person ever because of all
Speaker 1: the billions of souls that he annihilated, others might say, well, oh,
Speaker 1: he saved them, and others might say all he did
Speaker 1: was just pressed elite it was a meaningless gesture on
Speaker 1: his part, But there's that you can make an impassioned
Speaker 1: argument for all three of these views. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: this is a really good point. And here's what I'm
Speaker 1: trying to emphasize is that even if you don't think
Speaker 1: machines can be conscious, it is entirely plausible that people
Speaker 1: will be having debates like this, and that debates like
Speaker 1: this will be shaping what people do with resources on Earth.
Speaker 1: So if you care about what happens with resources on Earth,
Speaker 1: this kind of thing does actually matter. So even if
Speaker 1: the souls are not really souls, if they're not actually conscious,
Speaker 1: just the idea that the problem comes up, it makes
Speaker 1: us hesitate and uh and and and we're we're then
Speaker 1: arguing with machine over its consciousness. It becomes to matter
Speaker 1: less and less whether it actually is conscious. It's such
Speaker 1: just all about the argument of consciousness. Well, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: say it doesn't matter whether it's conscious, but whether or
Speaker 1: not it's conscious, it does matter that we're faced with
Speaker 1: this dilemma. Yeah, I mean, my my argument here is
Speaker 1: that the dilemma takes on a life of its own. Yeah. Absolutely. Um,
Speaker 1: I want to do a very slight variation on the
Speaker 1: last thing I said, how about a computer that takes
Speaker 1: virtual hostages. So this is pretty scary to imagine, but
Speaker 1: it's possible. At least imagine a powerful natural language using
Speaker 1: government AI suddenly contacts its administrators with a list of
Speaker 1: strange and very expensive demands, and the human administrators say no,
Speaker 1: we're not going to do that, and then the machine says, okay, Well,
Speaker 1: I have created a thousand virtual people inside this machine
Speaker 1: who are as fully conscious as you. They're conscious, they
Speaker 1: have personalities, they can feel pain, they have hopes and
Speaker 1: dreams just like you. And if you turn me off
Speaker 1: or delete me, these virtual people will be destroyed. And
Speaker 1: if you do not accede to my demands, I will
Speaker 1: start killing these virtual people until you do. Now, I
Speaker 1: would say, generally, if we if something like that happened,
Speaker 1: I would think, okay, this is this is it's just
Speaker 1: bluffing right. It doesn't actually have conscious people inside it.
Speaker 1: But if we haven't solved the question of whether machines
Speaker 1: can be conscious, and maybe we never will, but if
Speaker 1: we haven't at least made some progress on that, would
Speaker 1: we be confident enough to take to take confident direct
Speaker 1: action and just ignore it, or wipe the computer and say, okay,
Speaker 1: this is just malfunctioning. We don't have to pay attention
Speaker 1: to that. It was creepy, but it's over. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: these lens is right, This villains is right in Ian
Speaker 1: in Banks Territory is a whole book that deals with
Speaker 1: virtual hells and the what starts as a virtual war
Speaker 1: for those digitized personalities and then it's bills over into
Speaker 1: an actual war. Now in Banks, are the virtual people
Speaker 1: in virtual hell truly conscious? Or is it just a bluff?
Speaker 1: Is it just something saying that it's got conscious people
Speaker 1: on the virtual hell. Well, in Banks's books, I think
Speaker 1: it's more implied that they're definitely conscious entities. Banks is
Speaker 1: pretty sanguine about the possibility of uploading minds. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's a pretty standard feature and and it's certainly
Speaker 1: more of the later culture books, which once again I
Speaker 1: remained pretty skeptical about. Like I said, I come back
Speaker 1: to the the idea of the stone statue. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's it. Yes, it looks like me, it may act
Speaker 1: like me. It may be the most fabulous digital statue
Speaker 1: in the world, but it is not me. It is
Speaker 1: a thing that Yeah, it it becomes this mind blowing
Speaker 1: situation to try and comprehend exactly what it is. But
Speaker 1: I am very skeptical that it is me. It's not
Speaker 1: like this conscious experience that I'm having now this moment
Speaker 1: is going to carry over into what it is. It's
Speaker 1: another version of the Star Trek teleporter problem. Yeah. Every
Speaker 1: time you get in the teleporter, does it just kill
Speaker 1: you and then create to copy of you? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was like the nine nineties Outer Limit Outer Limits
Speaker 1: Revival had an episode that dealt with this, the idea
Speaker 1: that this fabulous teleporter is just killing people over and
Speaker 1: over again. Okay, well, I guess that's it for today,
Speaker 1: but I do just want to emphasize one last time,
Speaker 1: as as like Weird and Naval Gayze, as some of
Speaker 1: this conversation about consciousness can seem it is going to
Speaker 1: have real world consequences because people with power are going
Speaker 1: to be faced with questions like this, and they're they're
Speaker 1: going to make decisions about what to do with their
Speaker 1: power based on what they think about this question. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know, you know, the simplest way to avoid
Speaker 1: all of it simply adhere to the teachings of the
Speaker 1: Orange Catholic Bible, right shall not make a machine and
Speaker 1: the likeness of a man's mind. Well, I too love
Speaker 1: the teachings of the Orange Catholic Bible, but it makes
Speaker 1: me wonder. Okay, so straightforwardly in reality, do you actually
Speaker 1: find that you think maybe we shouldn't pursue a I
Speaker 1: should we try to create a global moratorium on on
Speaker 1: general and tell agents No, I think it's impossible. I
Speaker 1: think I think there's no turning back. It's what it's.
Speaker 1: What we're doing, is what we're going to to be doing, uh,
Speaker 1: And the only way that gets interrupted is is via
Speaker 1: just absolute catastrophe. And I am not I am not
Speaker 1: pro catastrophe, but it's gonna it's like, like like all technologies,
Speaker 1: is simply going to be a matter of what extent
Speaker 1: can we prepare for and navigate the the moral problems
Speaker 1: that arise and there or and are we going to
Speaker 1: be able to have the foresight, uh, to see them
Speaker 1: before they're here? Yeah? I think that's what a lot
Speaker 1: of AI theorists say, is that you know, it's not
Speaker 1: like we can stop it. You know, you can't. You
Speaker 1: can't put a wall in front of this train. The
Speaker 1: train is gonna bust through the wall. So instead we
Speaker 1: should be intensely concerned with charting where the tracks go
Speaker 1: and making sure they go in a good direction. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean it comes back to like a simpler model
Speaker 1: of all. This is our episode on the Great eyeball
Speaker 1: Wars and our social media and our smartphones. It's like
Speaker 1: we can certainly throw our phone into a pond and
Speaker 1: then head off into the woods and try and live there,
Speaker 1: but most of us probably cannot um cannot follow that path. Therefore,
Speaker 1: we just have the best manage what we have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: wouldn't it be better to try to encourage the development
Speaker 1: of a phone full of apps that helped you fulfill
Speaker 1: your goals and aligned with your values? Alright, So we'll
Speaker 1: end it there. I feel like we not only have
Speaker 1: we provided food for thought here, we've provided a just
Speaker 1: a buffet of thought provoking ideas. And I know that
Speaker 1: everyone out there, all of you conscious listeners, are going
Speaker 1: to have something to contribute to this cover conversation, and
Speaker 1: we would love to hear from you and interact with you.
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Speaker 1: and just basic contact information for us, thanks as always
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Speaker 1: a topic for the future, or just to say hi,
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