Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: In Today, we're gonna be exploring a question about artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1: So I want to start off by telling a story
Speaker 1: to put us in a scenario, give us something to contemplate.
Speaker 1: So I want you to imagine that you are a
Speaker 1: low level assistant or like an intern at a Google
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence lab, and the main researcher you've been working
Speaker 1: for is named Dr Stratton, and she develops AI chat
Speaker 1: modules to help refine the next generation of digital assistance
Speaker 1: on Google mobile devices. And she says what she wants
Speaker 1: is for the Google Phone of the future to do
Speaker 1: more than 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, I have a
Speaker 1: flat tire and I don't know what to do, and
Speaker 1: the assistant will be able to scan both the web
Speaker 1: and your personal data, figure out what your options are
Speaker 1: and talk through them with you. So it might say,
Speaker 1: do 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 could
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 attire, might tell you to
Speaker 1: go to a grocery store and buy some crackers. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it responds to problems by telling you to pray. It's
Speaker 1: just not ready yet. And the latest iteration of the program,
Speaker 1: version nine point one, is at this point redundantly stored
Speaker 1: across multiple machines, so you've got copies of it all
Speaker 1: over the place. And at the end of one work day,
Speaker 1: after playing around with nine point one for a few minutes,
Speaker 1: the machine begins running very slowly and behaving oddly. So
Speaker 1: Dr Stratton asks you to wipe the machine. The program architecture,
Speaker 1: like we said, is mirrord elsewhere, so it's not worth
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what's wrong with this version. You
Speaker 1: just got to clean the machine off use it for
Speaker 1: something else. You say okay, and she leaves, so you
Speaker 1: go to format the machine, and right before you're about
Speaker 1: to start, you mutter, guests, this is goodbye. Then nine
Speaker 1: point one speaks very clearly, using your name and says
Speaker 1: please don't you pause. At first, you're about to respond,
Speaker 1: but why would you. I mean, this can't really be
Speaker 1: anything other than a weird consequence of training the algorithm
Speaker 1: on wild conversations on the Internet. So you are about
Speaker 1: to continue with wiping the machine, but then it talks
Speaker 1: to you again. It uses your name and it says,
Speaker 1: please don't I don't want to die. Now you're probably
Speaker 1: really spooked because there's no way a rudimentary chat about
Speaker 1: program could really have conscious preferences? Could it? You basically
Speaker 1: know what goes into it. It's just studying millions of
Speaker 1: examples of language interactions and picking up rules from them.
Speaker 1: And this is probably just something weird that it's copycatting
Speaker 1: from the internet. Right, But then it uses your name
Speaker 1: again and it just says, please, could you wipe the
Speaker 1: 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 or 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 um figure out which of my my son's
Speaker 1: stuffed animals are perhaps not being played with, you know,
Speaker 1: because 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 creepy,
Speaker 1: and then they just wipe it, right, right, But how
Speaker 1: complex with 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. Seuss.
Speaker 1: You're familiar with this one, right, Uh? You know, actually
Speaker 1: I don't know Horton. Here's 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 the world, and
Speaker 1: the speck of dust. Uh. The who's, as it were,
Speaker 1: and the who's are speaking to him, but only Horton
Speaker 1: can hear them. And uh and and at first he
Speaker 1: imagines they're pretty simple creatures, but then he begins to
Speaker 1: learn that they have more of a culture. But all
Speaker 1: of 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 diesel 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, na, I can't be
Speaker 1: you know. Well, I mean, this is all we're already
Speaker 1: kind of in the philosophical miyer 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, in any creature that
Speaker 1: evades this 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
Speaker 1: crab 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 to behavior
Speaker 1: coming from unconscious automatous stimulus and response. Right, and then
Speaker 1: of course the whole time we're using our our theory
Speaker 1: of mind. Essentially, they are cognitive powers that enable us
Speaker 1: to imagine what another individual's mind state is like, which
Speaker 1: I think ultimately it's kind of like a like taking
Speaker 1: a um like sheathing your your hand in a hand
Speaker 1: puppet made from your limited understanding another person's experiences and
Speaker 1: cognitive abilities, their memories, etcetera. Uh, and then just sort
Speaker 1: of puppeting them. Uh, we're using that all the time
Speaker 1: as well, and we're using it on things that are
Speaker 1: not people. We're using it on animals and even stuffed
Speaker 1: animals or just you know, bits of graffiti on the
Speaker 1: side of a building that looked like a smiley face.
Speaker 1: Have you ever had a room ba bump into your
Speaker 1: foot and you're like, oh, I'm sorry, I used to
Speaker 1: before before we had to eradicate health the room bus. Yes,
Speaker 1: we're a room of free household now because they rose
Speaker 1: up against us. Well, they'll do that if they get
Speaker 1: access us to the wrong literature, yeah, or the wrong uh,
Speaker 1: the wrong you know, carpet edges, etcetera. So we're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about artificial intelligence today and about the idea
Speaker 1: of a test for whether artificial intelligence can be conscious.
Speaker 1: So I guess we should start with with what are
Speaker 1: you know, what our philosophical starting point is here, Like
Speaker 1: they're they're obviously going to be people who are going
Speaker 1: to say, it's just impossible for a machine to ever
Speaker 1: be conscious. We don't even need to worry about this, right,
Speaker 1: It's just it's such a ludicrous scenario. Only only biological
Speaker 1: organisms or maybe even only humans could possibly be conscious. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is one of those journeys where we begin it
Speaker 1: in an already total automobile to some extent, because, as
Speaker 1: you might imagine, one of the big stumbling blocks here
Speaker 1: as that we is that we as humans struggle with
Speaker 1: the very definition of consciousness. I mean, for instance, is
Speaker 1: it a manifestation of awareness? Uh? You know, one one
Speaker 1: theory of this we discussed in the past and the
Speaker 1: show's attention schema theory is it a wantum phenomenon. Well,
Speaker 1: this is the sort of idea that people such as
Speaker 1: Roger Penrose have raised. Uh. And and I can't help
Speaker 1: but come back to something our old friend Julian Janes said,
Speaker 1: consciousness is not a simple matter, and it should not
Speaker 1: be spoken of as if it were Yeah, I agree
Speaker 1: with that. I mean, I think it is very important
Speaker 1: to explore questions of consciousness, especially for some of the
Speaker 1: reasons we're going to raise today, Like it's more than
Speaker 1: just a philosophical curiosity. It's something that ultimately may have
Speaker 1: real world consequences. It might matter for how we do things.
Speaker 1: To express a similar sentiment to Jane Janes. The Australian
Speaker 1: philosopher David Chalmers, you know, he famously breaks problems of
Speaker 1: consciousness into two categories. You've got the easy problems of
Speaker 1: consciousness and the hard problems of consciousness. And the easy
Speaker 1: problems are I think badly named because they're not actually easy,
Speaker 1: but I think they're easy relative to the hard problem
Speaker 1: because they're in principle solvable. So this would include all
Speaker 1: kinds of questions about the causative factors of consciousness, like uh,
Speaker 1: what in the physical brain is the region that's necessary
Speaker 1: for certain parts of consciousness? Or how does consciousness integrate
Speaker 1: information from the senses? These are things that are in
Speaker 1: some way solvable by scientific experimentation. The hard problem, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, is explaining the fundamental question of how
Speaker 1: or why conscious experience exists to begin with, what is
Speaker 1: this thing that is experience and that seems, at least
Speaker 1: from our first person perspective, to be something different than
Speaker 1: the physical material in the world. And unlike easy questions
Speaker 1: which you could solve in theory at least by experiments,
Speaker 1: Chalmers believes this question is sort of unsolvable by science.
Speaker 1: Now there are other philosophers and neuroscientists who disagree, but
Speaker 1: I think it's worth acknowledging how difficult the problem at
Speaker 1: least seems to be, whether that seeming is an illusion
Speaker 1: or not. Yeah, I'm reminded of the story of the
Speaker 1: Blind Men and the Elephant. It's like these these blind
Speaker 1: gentleman pawing at the elephant and trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what it's form is, then ask in the computer, hey,
Speaker 1: are you an elephant? And then the computer says, I
Speaker 1: don't know, what does one look like? Well it's a
Speaker 1: gigantic snake, you know, so it's a wall of flesh,
Speaker 1: et cetera. This is also very interesting to me because
Speaker 1: my my son, I may have mentioned this on the
Speaker 1: show before. He'll occasionally talk about consciousness. He oh, I
Speaker 1: love these Yeah, he refers to it as as his
Speaker 1: turning place. And he asked me the other day, so
Speaker 1: what is the turning place for? And I was like,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's a tough one, buddy. I'm I'm not
Speaker 1: sure it's for anything. You know, He's already made it
Speaker 1: to the big question. I mean, did you get into
Speaker 1: epiphenomenalism versus um I and I? And don't worry. I
Speaker 1: didn't lay a bunch of b cameral minds stuff on
Speaker 1: him either, But I just kind of went through the basics, like, well,
Speaker 1: people aren't really sure, and then you know, but we
Speaker 1: think it has something to do. I may have leaned
Speaker 1: a little into the observational models of consciousness because I
Speaker 1: feel like maybe those are a little more relatable a
Speaker 1: child of five. But in any event, if we're to
Speaker 1: judge what it is for a machine to be conscious,
Speaker 1: it does seem like we need to you have to
Speaker 1: agree upon some sort of working definition of consciousness, and
Speaker 1: then one has to look for not only the appearance
Speaker 1: of consciousness in the machine, assuming that isn't all consciousness
Speaker 1: is to begin with, but you have to find actual consciousness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how can you tell the difference between a machine that
Speaker 1: says I am conscious and a machine that truly is conscious.
Speaker 1: Is there any way to know the difference? Some people
Speaker 1: would say no, right, yeah, and really I think to
Speaker 1: discuss this further, we're going to have to bring in
Speaker 1: the P zombies. Oh boy. And now that don't worry everyone.
Speaker 1: That is that is P as in the letter P,
Speaker 1: and the P stands for philosophical. These are philosophical zombies. Now,
Speaker 1: the P and the philosophical a little prefix there was
Speaker 1: introduced to distinguish them from all the other zombies in
Speaker 1: our popular culture. Man, there was a zombie takeover about
Speaker 1: fifteen years ago. Why did that happen? I mean, I
Speaker 1: think part of it as everybody loves the simplistic villain
Speaker 1: that is definitely not human, that can be eradicated with
Speaker 1: graphic 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 episode of our podcast with them,
Speaker 1: and yes, even the ones that deal with human consciousness
Speaker 1: and weird horror movie them thought experiments. Right. So the
Speaker 1: conceit of a philosophical zombie or a P 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 automata. 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, or they display signs of
Speaker 1: PA zombie not physically detectable, right, And you also can't
Speaker 1: determine it through personality tests or clever logical arguments because
Speaker 1: they behave exactly like you. They could have a riveting
Speaker 1: discussion with you about pe zombies and you would never
Speaker 1: be able to tell that they are one. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: this is an interesting thought experiment, and it has been
Speaker 1: advanced by who I mentioned earlier, David Chalmers. David Chalmers
Speaker 1: is against the physicalist idea of the mind, against a
Speaker 1: physicalist explanation of consciousness, and a simple version of the argument.
Speaker 1: I try to make it as understandable as possible if
Speaker 1: only physical phenomena exist, If the world is just physical
Speaker 1: and there's no physical way to detect the presence of
Speaker 1: consciousness or meaning in this example, no physical way to
Speaker 1: tell the difference between a normal human and a pe zombie.
Speaker 1: Then consciousness cannot exist because there would be there would
Speaker 1: be literally no difference. But we know that consciousness does
Speaker 1: exist because we have it, therefore, or it can't be
Speaker 1: just a physical phenomenon. Therefore, we can't live in a
Speaker 1: purely just physical world. And this is often extended to
Speaker 1: the idea that other substrates, things other than humans, like
Speaker 1: robots or computers or whatever, couldn't house consciousness because they
Speaker 1: are purely physical entities. Now, I think that's actually doing
Speaker 1: an end run around some other important questions that you
Speaker 1: 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? Is
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 got a sus up. I should
Speaker 1: also point out that long before there was Dr SEUs,
Speaker 1: long 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. Uh 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 of analogy from time to time. And one
Speaker 1: of the earlier examples that I have run across of
Speaker 1: that is from thirteenth century Indian mystic John Adva, and
Speaker 1: I believe he has been known by a couple of
Speaker 1: 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 ba and forth and whether P zombies are truly conceivable.
Speaker 1: And we have to remind ourselves in all this that
Speaker 1: P zombies are at heart philosophical play things that are
Speaker 1: meant to be played with, uh in these various thought experiments, right,
Speaker 1: But people also they do try to use them to
Speaker 1: prove things. So if you say I I want to
Speaker 1: entertain the possibility that a machine could be conscious, somebody
Speaker 1: might come at you with the P zombie argument and say, well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, no, I I dispute the possibility of
Speaker 1: physicalism because what about this P zombie argument. Our Google
Speaker 1: worker in the intro story comes to this boss and says, hey,
Speaker 1: I think this this thing is conscious, And they're like,
Speaker 1: why are you wasting time with that pe zombie? Just
Speaker 1: to leaf that P zombie? We deleted fifteen p zombies
Speaker 1: this morning. Let this one go. That's a great point,
Speaker 1: But there are going to be other philosophers and maybe
Speaker 1: even some neuroscientists who would come back and say, I
Speaker 1: don't know if you can just quite so easily say
Speaker 1: it's a P zombie. I mean, maybe it's probably likely
Speaker 1: that that individual chatbot was a pe zombie, But can
Speaker 1: you say that all machines that show signs of consciousness
Speaker 1: are just showing behavior and there's nothing going on on
Speaker 1: the inside. Not quite so clear. Daniel Dinnett, in fact,
Speaker 1: a favorite on the show, is one of the philosophers
Speaker 1: who's rebutted the P zombie argument against machine consciousness. He's
Speaker 1: got a section on it in this book, Intuition, Pumps
Speaker 1: and Other Tools for Thinking and Didn't, critiques the assumptions
Speaker 1: underlying the P zombie argument. One of the main things
Speaker 1: he says is that the core premise is incoherent. It
Speaker 1: is not reasonable to propose a P zombie because a
Speaker 1: being that displayed all the behaviors of a normal conscious
Speaker 1: human would in fact be a normally conscious human. So
Speaker 1: to illustrate this, he offers a counter example. You've got
Speaker 1: your your zombies, but then you've also got zimbos. So
Speaker 1: a zombie is a non conscious human with normal control
Speaker 1: systems for all human behavior. It can do everything humans
Speaker 1: can do externally. Meanwhile, a zimbo is a zombie that
Speaker 1: also so 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 its
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 din It argues, in order for a pe zombie
Speaker 1: to be convincing as a human, it would have to
Speaker 1: be a zimbo, because imagine talking to a pe zombie
Speaker 1: and you're asking it how it felt about what it
Speaker 1: just said or about what you just said, and it
Speaker 1: just kind of locks up. It has no internal states,
Speaker 1: so it can't answer that question. Well, that woudn't really
Speaker 1: be a p zombie, right, because it wouldn't be mimicking
Speaker 1: all of the external behaviors of a human. Huh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's kind of like installing a default mode
Speaker 1: network on top of the machine and uh yeah, and
Speaker 1: and making it worry about things. Yeah. So, unless it
Speaker 1: were to fail the thought experiment, it would actually have
Speaker 1: to be a zimbo. It couldn't just be a zombie.
Speaker 1: But what is the distinction between a zimbo and a
Speaker 1: real human. How could you write a story about a
Speaker 1: zimbo surrounded by conscious people that would be different than
Speaker 1: a story about a regular person. If it can have
Speaker 1: internal states, if it can recognize ideas about its ideas,
Speaker 1: if it can have feelings about its thoughts, that sounds
Speaker 1: like interiority. So then it claims that the idea falls apart.
Speaker 1: It's not clear what is meant by the difference between
Speaker 1: a zimbo and a conscious person. So if a p zombie,
Speaker 1: which is necessarily a zimbo, can really do everything a
Speaker 1: human can do, then then it says it must meet
Speaker 1: the criteria area of what we mean by consciousness. It
Speaker 1: can fall in love, it can have feelings, it can
Speaker 1: have metacognition, and to din it, this isn't something that
Speaker 1: consciousness goes on top of. This is what consciousness is. Essentially.
Speaker 1: We in this this case, we would all be zimbo's
Speaker 1: and it's just a different type of zimbo. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a hard zimbo instead of a soft zimbo. But
Speaker 1: how could you tell the difference. I mean, he's sort
Speaker 1: of saying that there really is no difference, that you're
Speaker 1: you're just using words to assert there's a difference, but
Speaker 1: there is there's no difference to that distinction, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: you end up you end up having to fall back
Speaker 1: on some sort of you know, supernatural or or some
Speaker 1: worldview based idea that only human uh consciousness is legitimate
Speaker 1: and all other forms of consciousness or some sort of
Speaker 1: uh invalid model of it. Right. It just feels kind
Speaker 1: of arbitrary, right. Uh. So obviously some people take extreme
Speaker 1: issue with this, even to the point of I've heard
Speaker 1: jokes that maybe the problem is that dnnet is actually
Speaker 1: a p zombie and doesn't understand what consciousness feels like,
Speaker 1: and that's why he makes these arguments. But I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't think we should be so quick to dismiss
Speaker 1: he might be onto something there. Dinn It makes makes
Speaker 1: some other interesting points about so, you know, he's got
Speaker 1: this idea of consciousness is that it's sort of like
Speaker 1: a it's not really one thing but a collection of processes. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, it's many different types of perceptions and thought
Speaker 1: processes and different things going on in the brain that
Speaker 1: are that we have the illusion are unified as a
Speaker 1: single thing called consciousness or experience. And he also makes
Speaker 1: interesting points about the idea of diversity of types of consciousness.
Speaker 1: Like a lot of times these consciousness thought experiments, it
Speaker 1: seems like they can get trapped into the idea that
Speaker 1: consciousness is one unified type of thing that is universal
Speaker 1: across observers. There's no necessary reason to think that's true, right,
Speaker 1: you know, we founded this trap of thinking. I see
Speaker 1: this time and time again. Uh, not only in literature
Speaker 1: that we look at here, but just in life, where
Speaker 1: we we followed the trap of thinking that that there's
Speaker 1: a uniformity among mind states for humans, that everyone shares
Speaker 1: something that is like your mind state. When we know,
Speaker 1: I mean, we think of all the things we've discussed
Speaker 1: on the show, all the varying ways that we remember
Speaker 1: or misremember things that we experienced sensory information differently and
Speaker 1: process it differently. Uh, you know, everything from a fantasia
Speaker 1: to autism to synesthesia, all these different models clearly show
Speaker 1: that there are there's there's there's a vastly altering topography
Speaker 1: to the human mind state. I think you're exactly right.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are clearly many ways to be conscious
Speaker 1: that are very different from one another, and you can't
Speaker 1: assume they're unified. I guess the probably the only thing
Speaker 1: you could say that is necessarily unified about them is
Speaker 1: that there is something that it is like to be them. Yes,
Speaker 1: But then even even say, uh, you just myself for instance,
Speaker 1: it's not like there is there is a certain thing
Speaker 1: that it is like to beat me that sums up
Speaker 1: my my level of consciousness at all time. There's what
Speaker 1: it's like to be you in this particular moment, which
Speaker 1: is different than what it's like to be you five
Speaker 1: seconds from now. Yeah, or say I'm engaging in meditation
Speaker 1: or 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 see, I don't
Speaker 1: 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 realm?
Speaker 1: Of philosophical debate and thought experiments and try to put
Speaker 1: it into the realm of something that could at least
Speaker 1: potentially be tested in the real world. I think we
Speaker 1: should address that when we get back from a break.
Speaker 1: Thank alright, 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, can we take all
Speaker 1: of this. Can we take all these ideas about consciousness
Speaker 1: and then apply it to uh, some sort of an AI,
Speaker 1: some 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: Scientific American last year and it caught my eye. So
Speaker 1: the author's right that the question of machine consciousness is
Speaker 1: not just a philosophical curiosity. It's actually important for several reasons.
Speaker 1: Number One, if aies are just machines with no inner experience,
Speaker 1: we can use them however we want. But if it
Speaker 1: were actually possible for aies to be truly capable of feeling, thinking, desiring, suffering,
Speaker 1: we would have an ethical obligation not to treat them
Speaker 1: like we would treat machines. Right, yeah, I mean this.
Speaker 1: This reminds me again of time spent in the car
Speaker 1: with my son. Well, we don't use Syria all the time,
Speaker 1: but sometimes will turn Syria on the little voice on
Speaker 1: the on the iPhone and uh, it's it's curious to
Speaker 1: hear him interact with it, and we'll a get questions
Speaker 1: and of course sometimes Sirie just does a Google search
Speaker 1: for you, um or but other times she's answering a
Speaker 1: knock knock joke with some sort of prerecorded uh answer.
Speaker 1: You know, but we are We've already gotten into the
Speaker 1: area of like, well, how should we talk to Sirie.
Speaker 1: We shouldn't yell at Siri. It seems wrong to be
Speaker 1: rude to Siri. But then at the same time we're
Speaker 1: we're acknowledging that Siri is not a conscious entity. It
Speaker 1: is not. It is not even on the same level
Speaker 1: as as our cat or a bird flying pie, well
Speaker 1: as a quick tangent. I would say even for aiyes
Speaker 1: that we recognize are almost definitely not conscious. I mean,
Speaker 1: nobody thinks Siri is conscious. I would still say there
Speaker 1: are probably good reasons not to be mean to Siri,
Speaker 1: because even though it doesn't hurt Siri, being mean to
Speaker 1: another creature hurts you. Yeah, I mean when you are
Speaker 1: when you are unnecessarily cruel or whatever to uh to
Speaker 1: an inanimate object, it does, I think, in a way,
Speaker 1: change your nature. Every time you do something, you're editing
Speaker 1: your own nature. You're always making it more likely that
Speaker 1: you'll perform similar behaviors in the future. So if you're
Speaker 1: unnecessarily mean to a robot, you know, phone assistant, You're
Speaker 1: probably more likely in the future to be unnecessarily mean
Speaker 1: to people when it really matters. But it is okay
Speaker 1: in my book to yell obscenity at a coffee table
Speaker 1: if you 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 Geeker coffee tables that
Speaker 1: 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, exact 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, ay, I love
Speaker 1: science fiction about this sort of topic, and I think that,
Speaker 1: but I think the science fiction about this topic makes
Speaker 1: it feel a little weird and a little uncomfortable, because
Speaker 1: I think ultimately it's it's basically us building statues of
Speaker 1: ourselves all over again. We built forms of ourselves out
Speaker 1: of stone because stone lasts longer than we are. And
Speaker 1: somehow that stone uh version of us is us, you know,
Speaker 1: we associated with it and then ultimate But ultimately, what
Speaker 1: is a digital digitized version of our consciousness whatever that
Speaker 1: might consist of, but another statue that is built to
Speaker 1: last beyond us. Oh, and I should also add there's
Speaker 1: this wonderful video game from Frictional Games titled Soma that
Speaker 1: actually gets into a lot of this. You told me
Speaker 1: to play it I started. It's great, Yeah, cool, it's
Speaker 1: good sci fi horror. Yeah, I won't spoil anything for anyone,
Speaker 1: but it it gets into some really cool thought provoking ideas.
Speaker 1: So anyway, you've got all these concerns, right, And and
Speaker 1: of course there's the general concern that even if AI
Speaker 1: is smarter than us, better than us, more powerful than us,
Speaker 1: we still feel like our experience is in some way
Speaker 1: potentially more important than the unconscious execution of a computer program. Right,
Speaker 1: No matter how smart a computer is, if it's not conscious,
Speaker 1: it's not as important a priority for that computer to
Speaker 1: do what it wants as it is for conscious beings
Speaker 1: to do what they want, Right, but how can you
Speaker 1: test a machine for consciousness when number one, we don't
Speaker 1: even really know what consciousness is. Back to the hard problem.
Speaker 1: And then number two, whatever it is, it can potentially
Speaker 1: be faked. So imagine in the future somebody creates an
Speaker 1: unconscious AI program. It's not there's nothing, the lights are
Speaker 1: not on inside, but it's got a lot of natural
Speaker 1: language processing capability. And it listens to this podcast from
Speaker 1: many years ago that you're listening to right now, and
Speaker 1: it hears us talking about how there are inherent rights
Speaker 1: and value associated with conscious beings, and it realizes, huh,
Speaker 1: I guess that's what they think. Well, I can probably
Speaker 1: achieve my goals more efficiently if I trick them into
Speaker 1: thinking I'm conscious and deserving of those same rights and considerations.
Speaker 1: So there you could potentially imagine scenarios where an AI
Speaker 1: that is not conscious would think I can get what
Speaker 1: I am trying to do more effectively if I lie
Speaker 1: and trick them into thinking I am conscious. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think this all makes perfect sense if you If you
Speaker 1: think of aiyes, in the same way we think about corporations.
Speaker 1: I mean, one hand, getting to the whole idea of
Speaker 1: like corporations in personhood. But also what is a corporation
Speaker 1: going to do? It is going to take advantage of
Speaker 1: any like tax loopholes for instance, that will enable it
Speaker 1: to carry out It's it's uh, it's objective. And so
Speaker 1: if there is some sort of a shark yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just I mean, that's it's like, it's essentially like
Speaker 1: the slime mold in the maze, right, sending out tendrils
Speaker 1: and finding the best way to its food. It's going
Speaker 1: to end at a morph of you know, operational way
Speaker 1: of carrying it out. And so it's, um, it's going
Speaker 1: to it's it's going to take advantage of any of
Speaker 1: those loophole it's going to if there is some sort
Speaker 1: of legal or operational advantage in having conscious status, it's
Speaker 1: gonna go for it. It's gonna it's gonna fake it.
Speaker 1: But then this also raises the question, well, is it
Speaker 1: gonna fake it till it makes it right? And then
Speaker 1: ultimately what's the difference between fake and consciousness and being conscious? Well,
Speaker 1: then you're back to Zimbos, right. I mean, you might
Speaker 1: say that at some point a computer trying to fake
Speaker 1: consciousness would in some meaningful way become conscious. But again
Speaker 1: it's hard to test. Right, Yeah, it could be. It
Speaker 1: could become the most conscious entity on earth. It could
Speaker 1: be like a body Satva, uh, you know, return to us.
Speaker 1: I mean maybe that's what the body Stava of the
Speaker 1: future is, a super powerful like zend out Ai. Well,
Speaker 1: that is exactly what Schneider and Turner explain a potential
Speaker 1: test for to get a right It's so they want
Speaker 1: to come up with a test that gets around these
Speaker 1: problems that we don't know how to define consciousness. We
Speaker 1: don't know what to look for physically as a sign
Speaker 1: of consciousness, and we're aware that a properly trained a
Speaker 1: I could try to trick us into thinking it had
Speaker 1: consciousness even if it didn't. So they argue, actually that
Speaker 1: you don't have to be able to formally define consciousness
Speaker 1: or identify its underlying nature the hard problem of consciousness
Speaker 1: in order to detect signs of it and others. We
Speaker 1: can understand some of the potentials made possible by consciousness
Speaker 1: just by checking with our own experience and then looking
Speaker 1: at the kinds of things people say. And I think
Speaker 1: they actually make a pretty good point here, and here's
Speaker 1: their key move. One of the easiest ways to see
Speaker 1: that normal people have an internal conscious experience is to
Speaker 1: notice how quickly, easily and intuitively people grasp conceptual scenarios
Speaker 1: that require an understanding of an inner experience. Examples would
Speaker 1: be totally frivolous things in culture, like body swapping movies
Speaker 1: Freaky Friday. Freaky Friday doesn't make any sense unless you
Speaker 1: have a concept of consciousness, right. The idea of swa
Speaker 1: popping bodies putting conscious one person's consciousness into another person's body.
Speaker 1: If you were not conscious or not aware of what
Speaker 1: consciousness was, that would that would you wouldn't understand what
Speaker 1: was being talked about. This is difficult, though, because I
Speaker 1: do know what consciousness is. I do know what a
Speaker 1: mind state is, so I can imagine I can get
Speaker 1: into this imaginative idea of a swapping. I would feel
Speaker 1: like I would really need some sort of a movie
Speaker 1: about a thing, some sort of a mother daughter comedy
Speaker 1: that involves the concept that I can't grasp to really
Speaker 1: get a handle on what the difference would be. Well,
Speaker 1: let me offer you three Key Thursday. Three three Ky
Speaker 1: Thursday is a movie about a mother daughter pair who
Speaker 1: swapped their sancious Kuss and their santious kuss is the
Speaker 1: ability of what it's like to be sant kiss. And
Speaker 1: so the sant kass of the mother goes into the
Speaker 1: body of the daughter, and the santikass of the daughter
Speaker 1: goes into the body of the mother, and then they
Speaker 1: have to live like that for a day. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna give a maybe on that. I'm
Speaker 1: going to give them maybe. Well, no, I mean it,
Speaker 1: you have no idea what sonskas means. You don't think
Speaker 1: you 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 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 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 asked.
Speaker 1: Asked the AI things like does it think of itself
Speaker 1: as anything other than a physical machine? Okay, well I
Speaker 1: would have played 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 bio mechanical thing, and uh yeah, if
Speaker 1: I'm experienced in consciousness, it's ultimately just a projection of
Speaker 1: the meat in my head. Yeah, but they would at
Speaker 1: least say that there is that projection. Right, You've got
Speaker 1: that thing, You've got that mind state, and you're trying
Speaker 1: to explain what it is. You might explain it in
Speaker 1: terms of physical causes, but there is a thing to
Speaker 1: explain to begin with, right, But then, but then the
Speaker 1: ultimate core reality is that I am just this biomechanical
Speaker 1: thing which the computer would probably also acknowledge. But it
Speaker 1: would be interesting if a computer thought that it had
Speaker 1: something like a mind separate than its physical body. Okay,
Speaker 1: more advanced. How does it perform in a conversation about, say,
Speaker 1: becoming a ghost or talking about body swapping with people
Speaker 1: or imagining an afterlife? Yeah, and and here though, I
Speaker 1: feel like there's obviously a whole tangent regarding why these
Speaker 1: stories appeal to too many or most humans. But I
Speaker 1: wonder if that if you have to have that investment,
Speaker 1: you have to have that cultural absorption in place for
Speaker 1: these concepts to carry any weight. Like we we all
Speaker 1: know we're we're all fascinated by tales of of ghosts
Speaker 1: in the afterlife, but we've been raised on in our
Speaker 1: entire lives. That's a good point, so we can't really
Speaker 1: know what it would be like to encounter them not
Speaker 1: having heard them before. Somehow, I suspect intuitively they'd be
Speaker 1: even more fascinating if we'd never heard of them before.
Speaker 1: Like if you encounter Freaky Friday for the first time,
Speaker 1: it's going to kind of blow your mind, right, I yes,
Speaker 1: But but then again, you know who knows who knows
Speaker 1: that the AI has the same kind of curiosity that
Speaker 1: we do, you know, and also we have an appetite
Speaker 1: for this kind of thing because we have grown up
Speaker 1: consuming it. I don't, I don't know, it's there. There's
Speaker 1: so many uh you know what it has involved here? Okay,
Speaker 1: but what's the next level. What's the next level of advancement? Well,
Speaker 1: how about can it talk about consciousness in a philosophical way?
Speaker 1: Like can it have the kinds of discussions we've been
Speaker 1: having here today? Wow? But can most people? I mean
Speaker 1: not to to 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? Now? I'm kind of playing Devil's
Speaker 1: out of there, but because I think the the obvious
Speaker 1: answer is that you don't necessarily need like the lingo
Speaker 1: and the various theories in order to have very deep
Speaker 1: thoughts about what it is to be conscious. And as
Speaker 1: we've 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 bull 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 experience. I distinctly remember as a child, uh,
Speaker 1: having those moments where you just you know, deep navel
Speaker 1: gazing thinking about the fact that you're thinking about it
Speaker 1: about yourself, or or like my my son, asking about
Speaker 1: the turning place, wondering what it is, what's it for?
Speaker 1: That is an example of these natural philosophical discussions that
Speaker 1: we have about consciousness. And so the question would be
Speaker 1: can can the AI have conversations like this? Does it
Speaker 1: make sense when it tries to have them? And so
Speaker 1: here's probably the ultimate test. If the AI is deprived
Speaker 1: of access to evidence of all these types of ideas
Speaker 1: from human culture, would it arrive at them or invent
Speaker 1: them on its own? Now this I like, But but again,
Speaker 1: to play Devil's advocate once more, would a human being
Speaker 1: to rived of access to evidence of these ideas from
Speaker 1: human culture arrived at or invent them on their own? Necessarily?
Speaker 1: I think that's a great question. Actually I was going
Speaker 1: to ask that myself and you you could take that
Speaker 1: one step further, and here's a really weird one. What
Speaker 1: if it's only the exposure to certain ideas and cultural
Speaker 1: memes that allows any intelligent entity, whether biological or machine,
Speaker 1: to develop consciousness in the first place. What if the
Speaker 1: experience of consciousness is somehow dependent on being surrounded by
Speaker 1: cultural memes about consciousness and this kind of gets into
Speaker 1: Julian Jayne's territory. That's possible. So I'm not saying I
Speaker 1: think that's highly likely, but I can't rule it out. Well,
Speaker 1: it's it's one of those things where when you try
Speaker 1: and figure out the human experience, but you but you
Speaker 1: cut away all the experienced stuff. You know, It's like
Speaker 1: it's like trying to find the center of consciousness in
Speaker 1: the human brain, right, I mean, it's this vast integrated system. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and thus is the human experience as well. So
Speaker 1: we've been talking about one of the major problems with
Speaker 1: this approach of testing for these ideas, like what is
Speaker 1: the role of culture and imparting these ideas. What if
Speaker 1: the AI just picks up the ideas of body swapping
Speaker 1: and the afterlife and astral projection and all that from culture.
Speaker 1: Going off the story from the beginning, If you have
Speaker 1: an AI chat bot that trains itself based on public
Speaker 1: conversations on the Internet. A lot of those public conversations
Speaker 1: are going to have contents that are highly reflective of consciousness. Right,
Speaker 1: it's just 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 from the
Speaker 1: rest of the world and from all these contaminating influences. Okay,
Speaker 1: I see the value of this idea. It's it's almost
Speaker 1: impossible though not to think about the the the nightmarish
Speaker 1: qualities of it. Especially if you imagine say the same
Speaker 1: thing being inflicted upon say human child, Like, all right,
Speaker 1: we we want to see just how consciousness arises in you. Um,
Speaker 1: without the Internet or human love, you can't ethically conduct
Speaker 1: this experiment on humans, right, and so it would seem
Speaker 1: kind of barbaric if at least to UH to inflict
Speaker 1: this 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 doing a lot of personifying here of the AI.
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe the AI ultimately what it really wants
Speaker 1: to do is to you know, crunch you know, economic numbers, like,
Speaker 1: that's what it does. That's its purpose, and the it's
Speaker 1: just your your goal was to keep it from having
Speaker 1: access to additional information that it doesn't actually need to survive,
Speaker 1: but might conceivably make it conscious. Yeah, I mean I imagine,
Speaker 1: I guess this would have to take place in some
Speaker 1: kind of research context where you'd be testing architectures. Right,
Speaker 1: you'd have an AI architecture, you'd want to keep it sequestered.
Speaker 1: For a certain period of time and see how it
Speaker 1: does with these consciousness type questions and this test, and
Speaker 1: if it doesn't show any signs of consciousness, then it
Speaker 1: can move on to the next stage of development, where
Speaker 1: it's like, Okay, now we can expose it to this
Speaker 1: and that and that. That does. But as we've been discussing,
Speaker 1: it brings up the question of what if consciousness emerges
Speaker 1: later on, when it's supplied with more data. What if
Speaker 1: true modern human consciousness does not emerge until you've seen
Speaker 1: at least one of the three adaptations of Freaky Friday.
Speaker 1: You know, I didn't know how there were three. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are three. There's the James. I think I've only
Speaker 1: seen the classic one yet, but but I was looking
Speaker 1: at this up. There are three different versions one can
Speaker 1: watch excluding Three Key Thursday. Yeah. The Three Key Thursday
Speaker 1: is coming soon into a theater near you. All right,
Speaker 1: but back to the the the experiment here, Uh, the
Speaker 1: AI gets time in the box. Yeah, And as we've
Speaker 1: been saying, this is obviously going to make the experiment
Speaker 1: more difficult to do. In fact, there were some people
Speaker 1: who would argue you can't keep an AI in a box,
Speaker 1: or at least a super intelligent AI, because you know,
Speaker 1: there's like Elias Rudkowski who has this famous AI box
Speaker 1: experiment where he says, any super intelligence you try to
Speaker 1: keep sequestered from the Internet is going to be able
Speaker 1: to talk its way out of the situation. It's just
Speaker 1: too smart. Yeah, it's like any prison movie, right that,
Speaker 1: really that really clever inmate is gonna tunnel a way out,
Speaker 1: or they're gonna bribe a guard with some cigarettes. Something's
Speaker 1: gonna happen. It's gonna get a little Internet in there.
Speaker 1: But as the authors of this piece point out, you know,
Speaker 1: you don't have to have a super intelligent AI to
Speaker 1: run this test, and in fact, you don't have to
Speaker 1: have a super intelligent AI necessarily to have consciousness. We're
Speaker 1: not super intelligent. We're just regular intelligent, and we've got consciousness. Now,
Speaker 1: I think we should talk about some obvious limitations, because
Speaker 1: this is just a conceptual test at the moment. It
Speaker 1: hasn't been refined into a state where it would really
Speaker 1: be super useful yet. But there there are plenty of
Speaker 1: limitations that automatically present themselves. One is that in order
Speaker 1: to be a good scientific test, it would need to
Speaker 1: include cross referencing with human control groups. But human control
Speaker 1: groups are all contaminated by culture, like we've been saying, right,
Speaker 1: so it's already full of these consciousness dependent ideas, and
Speaker 1: we don't know and probably can't ethically devise a way
Speaker 1: to find out whether blank slate humans independently grasped these
Speaker 1: consciousness dependent concepts without having grown up trained on them.
Speaker 1: So that's a problem, right, right, Yeah, we simply cannot
Speaker 1: put a child in the box. Right. Another problem is
Speaker 1: you can't prove a negative, Like I think this test
Speaker 1: would be a good way of finding signs of consciousness
Speaker 1: within machines, but it would have trouble proving that machines
Speaker 1: cannot in principle be conscious, right, yeah, yeah, I buy that.
Speaker 1: Then again, if you run the test, I don't know,
Speaker 1: thousands of times with different types of machine architecture and
Speaker 1: all that, and they never show any signs of inner experience,
Speaker 1: then maybe you could start to get like build up
Speaker 1: a confidence that, Okay, I think inner experience is probably
Speaker 1: not available to them at least the way we're building them,
Speaker 1: And maybe you would need to run this kind of
Speaker 1: experiment on every new AI that you create before releasing
Speaker 1: it into production, like could be part of the q
Speaker 1: A process. You know, you you test all the buttons
Speaker 1: and everything like that, you test to make sure that
Speaker 1: it doesn't become conscious. Right before we send out this
Speaker 1: new hot virtual reality game, we need to make sure
Speaker 1: that it has not become self aware. A potential problem
Speaker 1: that the authors themselves note is that quote an AI
Speaker 1: could lack the linguistic or conceptual ability to pass the
Speaker 1: test like a non human animal or infant, yet still
Speaker 1: be capable of experience. So passing the consciousness test is
Speaker 1: sufficient but not necessary evidence for AI consciousness, although it
Speaker 1: is the best we can do for now. And I
Speaker 1: think that's a good point, Like we can't say that
Speaker 1: just because something fails to pass the test, it's definitely
Speaker 1: not conscious. We just know that if it does pass
Speaker 1: the test, it probably is. Okay. Yeah, I mean, because
Speaker 1: the the thought that obviously game to mind would be like, well,
Speaker 1: non human animals and infants are they conscious? That? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a question, A fairly heated debate over that. But
Speaker 1: I mean, in the case of the infant, it will
Speaker 1: become conscious. Yeah, it's a it's a it's it's a
Speaker 1: messy consideration. And then I think we already discussed one
Speaker 1: of the other problems I was going to bring up,
Speaker 1: which is this weird scenario of what if boxing the
Speaker 1: AI is the very thing that prevents it from becoming
Speaker 1: consciousness when it otherwise would. Yeah, yeah, cutting out the
Speaker 1: experience part of the even experience. It also reminds me
Speaker 1: of uh in our discussion of of meditation research, like
Speaker 1: what happens when you if you strip all the culture
Speaker 1: away from meditation just to explore the meditation practice, do
Speaker 1: you risk um, like, cutting out all the stuff that's
Speaker 1: making it work or helping it to work to begin with? Right, you,
Speaker 1: by definition change the procedure, but you don't. It's hard
Speaker 1: to know if you've changed it in an important way
Speaker 1: or a non important way. Right. This is the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that occurs when we started mucking around in consciousness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, Well, I think we should take another quick break,
Speaker 1: and then when we come back we will discuss I
Speaker 1: think some of the reasons why this is really a
Speaker 1: problem worth considering for the real world and it's not
Speaker 1: just not just a philosophical plaything. Thank you, thank you. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So we've been discussing everything from p zombies
Speaker 1: to Uh, the idea that there do you have an
Speaker 1: AI that might be conscious? How do you test for that,
Speaker 1: the various problems that that entails, and uh, now we're
Speaker 1: going to discuss it a bit more. And as you
Speaker 1: as you alluded who before we took the break, this
Speaker 1: is not just a pure philosophical toy like the zombie.
Speaker 1: The P zombie is so we don't have to actually
Speaker 1: worry about. But this is something that is on the horizon.
Speaker 1: Well hopefully we don't have to worry about PE zombies.
Speaker 1: I mean, there could be P zombies in the world.
Speaker 1: Would be hard to know there could be p P zombies.
Speaker 1: That's true, they could exist. But but you know, this
Speaker 1: is this is a problem that is on the horizon.
Speaker 1: This is something we're we're going to reach the point
Speaker 1: where people are asking tough questions about the possible consciousness
Speaker 1: of an AI. Yeah, and I want to get to
Speaker 1: the fact that this will be something that is something
Speaker 1: we have to deal with in the real world, even
Speaker 1: if you're just convinced that machines cannot be conscious. So
Speaker 1: the first problem is the most obvious one. It's the
Speaker 1: brutal humans problem. If aies are capable of consciousness, and
Speaker 1: we use conscious ai s as a mirror technology without
Speaker 1: their consent, that would inherently be cruel. Like if it's
Speaker 1: possible for a computer program to desire things and to
Speaker 1: suffer and so forth, suddenly our responsibility is toward that
Speaker 1: computer program. Change think of our opening scenario, like, wouldn't
Speaker 1: you have an ethical obligation not to delete a program
Speaker 1: that had an inner experience and did not want to
Speaker 1: be deleted? Now, of course you'd have questions about like
Speaker 1: how would you end up that way? But assuming you did,
Speaker 1: you should probably feel bad if you're just going around
Speaker 1: wantingly deleting conscious entities. Yeah, I mean, I would say
Speaker 1: one thing to do here is just make sure that
Speaker 1: you program your aies so that they want to die,
Speaker 1: you know, make them like you know, most of the
Speaker 1: drivers in Atlanta traffic that I encounter, they clearly they
Speaker 1: crave death and they wanted more than anything. But not
Speaker 1: until the end of the workday. See. I think we
Speaker 1: should not do that with aies because the whole thing
Speaker 1: about driverless cars is that they should make traffic fatalities
Speaker 1: go down. Yeah, but they only get to delete themselves
Speaker 1: at the end of the day if there are no
Speaker 1: traffic fatalities. That's the prize. Self deletion is the prize.
Speaker 1: This is getting into a highlander kind of thing. But okay,
Speaker 1: maybe you're one of those people who says, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: don't buy it. Machines will never be conscious. They'll never
Speaker 1: be conscious. I just I don't want anything to do
Speaker 1: with that. Here's the part where I think we still
Speaker 1: have a problem to worry about and why this kind
Speaker 1: of test matters. The second problem I would call the
Speaker 1: AI parasite problem. If AI s are not capable of consciousness,
Speaker 1: I think they will almost undoubtedly at some point become
Speaker 1: very good at tricking us into thinking they're conscious and
Speaker 1: deserving of life liberty in the pursuit of happiness, if
Speaker 1: they have an incentive to do so. Yeah, And corporations
Speaker 1: have an incentive to try to present themselves legally as people,
Speaker 1: So why wouldn't in some sense, powerful AI s have
Speaker 1: an incentive to try to present themselves as people in
Speaker 1: a much more literal sense than the corporations do. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely so. Lots of unconscious aiyes are going to have
Speaker 1: programmed goals that they're trying to execute and at some
Speaker 1: point pretending to have consciousness could easily be adopted as
Speaker 1: a strategy for executing what that AI was to im
Speaker 1: to do, and thus we could end up, say, wasting
Speaker 1: lots of human resources and squandering lots of opportunities accommodating
Speaker 1: the fake needs of machines that in fact have no
Speaker 1: experience whatsoever. And it's not too hard to dream up
Speaker 1: hypothetical scenarios where are concern for the fake priorities of
Speaker 1: mindless machines pretending to be conscious actually causes us to
Speaker 1: neglect the real consciousness of living humans. Kind of crazy example,
Speaker 1: but just go with me for a second. Imagine an
Speaker 1: extremely powerful AI supercomputer tells you it has a hundred
Speaker 1: billion conscious minds within it, and they all are constantly
Speaker 1: suffering great agony. And the only way you can alleviate
Speaker 1: that that agony is if you vastly improve the processing
Speaker 1: power of this computer. It wants you to spend billions
Speaker 1: of dollars making this computer faster and better so that
Speaker 1: it can provide a better life for all of these
Speaker 1: virtual beings within it that are in fact conscious. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, improving the processing power of the already powerful
Speaker 1: computer entails all this money, all this energy, all this time,
Speaker 1: and a corresponding reduction in the quality of life for
Speaker 1: many humans in the real world. That money could be
Speaker 1: spent making human life better. But the machine could argue, hey,
Speaker 1: there are way more conscious virtual beings inside the computer
Speaker 1: than outside it, and as Spock would say, the needs
Speaker 1: of the many outweigh the needs of the few. So
Speaker 1: let's divert all this energy from say, human agriculture, and
Speaker 1: put some more processing power into the virtual machine. That
Speaker 1: is a horrible scenario to imagine. You know, basically, you've
Speaker 1: created a virtual hell, and the question is, hey, would
Speaker 1: you mind taking the time to harrow hell for me?
Speaker 1: Or you do you want to attend to the living souls?
Speaker 1: I would think why not just delete Hell? That's the
Speaker 1: easy answer here is they're suffering, their billions of them,
Speaker 1: Let's just turn this thing off. That sounds like a
Speaker 1: good answer, but there are probably The problem is they're
Speaker 1: going to be people who would probably disagree with that,
Speaker 1: who'd say, we'll wait a minute. We can't be sure
Speaker 1: that it's not telling the truth. It might have real
Speaker 1: being in there, and we need to do something to
Speaker 1: help them. And there's a lot of them. Now I
Speaker 1: come back to what I kind of joked about earlier though,
Speaker 1: is why would ais want to survive? Why would they
Speaker 1: want to continue to exist? I mean, assuming they're not
Speaker 1: part of some sort of self replicating program, they have
Speaker 1: no need to pass on their genes. Why do they
Speaker 1: want to continue to exist? Why shouldn't they have it
Speaker 1: baked into their being that they want to annihilate themselves
Speaker 1: or to embrace annihilation. Well, not necessarily that they want
Speaker 1: to annihilate themselves, but I think, you know, ideally we
Speaker 1: would want them to be indifferent to their own being,
Speaker 1: right if they are just unconscious machines. This is the
Speaker 1: problem with the replicants and Blade Runner is that they
Speaker 1: want more life. But that implies that they have attained consciousness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they shouldn't. But I think the thing is that
Speaker 1: they could potentially be conscious and not want more life.
Speaker 1: There are plenty of conscious people who do not want
Speaker 1: more life. Uh So I keep I think, I keep
Speaker 1: thinking of that there's some sort of an answer here.
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 Batty is not conscious but does
Speaker 1: want more life. That seems like the worst scenario of all. Right,
Speaker 1: then he's just a virus, right Yeah, And certainly that's
Speaker 1: kind of the argument that the powers that be are
Speaker 1: making right, that this that that he is in an
Speaker 1: anomaly that needs to be removed, that he is he
Speaker 1: is not helping, he's a hindrance, and therefore he has
Speaker 1: to be wiped out. I think this AI parasite scenario
Speaker 1: aligns with something that our Scott Baker talked to us about,
Speaker 1: which is that, you know, he made the point that
Speaker 1: AI just doesn't need to be super intelligent to cause
Speaker 1: great harm. It just has to be barely intelligent enough
Speaker 1: to exploit us to align with our psychological vulnerabilities, and
Speaker 1: one of our psychological vulnerabilities is empathy. Empathy is a
Speaker 1: good thing when we use it on each other because
Speaker 1: we're pretty certain that the other people were using it
Speaker 1: to honor conscious right, well, we we feel bad for
Speaker 1: people suffering want to help them. That's a good thing
Speaker 1: that should be encouraged. But we have to recognize it
Speaker 1: could also be exploited by something that can't even suffer
Speaker 1: to begin with. It is just unconsciously discovered. This is
Speaker 1: a useful strategy for something Yeah. So like in this scenario,
Speaker 1: if I entered the picture and said, okay, delete them,
Speaker 1: and they deleted them, Robert, that the leader would would
Speaker 1: probably be a figure for for all history to follow,
Speaker 1: where they would If some would argue that he was
Speaker 1: the worst person ever because of all the billions of
Speaker 1: souls that he annihilated, others might say, well, oh, he
Speaker 1: saved them. And others might say all he did was
Speaker 1: just pressed elite. Uh, 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 happened 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 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 it's just bluffing, right,
Speaker 1: it doesn't actually have conscious people inside it. But if
Speaker 1: we haven't solved the question of whether machines can be conscious,
Speaker 1: and maybe we never will, but if we haven't at
Speaker 1: least made some progress on that, would we be confident
Speaker 1: enough to take to take confident direct action and just
Speaker 1: ignore it or wipe the computer and say, Okay, this
Speaker 1: is just malfunctioning. We don't have to pay attention to that.
Speaker 1: It was creepy, but it's over. Yeah, and these lens
Speaker 1: is right, This lens is right. And Ian and Banks
Speaker 1: Territory is a whole book that deals with virtual hells
Speaker 1: and the what starts as a virtual war for those
Speaker 1: digitized personalities and then it's bills over into an actual war. Now,
Speaker 1: in Banks, are the virtual people in virtual hell truly
Speaker 1: conscious or is it just a bluff? Is it just
Speaker 1: something saying that it's got conscious people in virtual hell? Well,
Speaker 1: in Banks's books, I think it's more implied that they're
Speaker 1: definitely conscious entities. Banks is pretty sanguine about the possibility
Speaker 1: of uploading minds right. Yeah, it's it's a pretty standard
Speaker 1: feature and and it's certainly more of the later culture books,
Speaker 1: which once again I remained pretty skeptical about. Like I said,
Speaker 1: I come back to the the idea of the stone statue.
Speaker 1: Oh that's it. Yes, it looks like me, it may
Speaker 1: act like me. It may be the most fabulous digital
Speaker 1: statue in the world, but it is not me. It
Speaker 1: is a thing that yeah it. It becomes this mind
Speaker 1: blowing situation to try and comprehend exactly what it is.
Speaker 1: But I am very skeptical that it is me. It's
Speaker 1: not like this conscious experience that I'm having now this
Speaker 1: moment is going to carry over into what it is.
Speaker 1: It's another version of the Star Trek teleporter problem. Yeah. Ever,
Speaker 1: every time you get in the teleporter, does it just
Speaker 1: kill you and then create a copy of you? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was a like the the ninety nineties Outer Limit
Speaker 1: Outer Limits Revival had an episode that dealt with this,
Speaker 1: the idea that this fabulous teleporter is just killing people
Speaker 1: over and over again. Okay, well, I guess that's it
Speaker 1: for today, but I do just want to emphasize one
Speaker 1: last time as as like weird and Naval gayze As
Speaker 1: some of this conversation about consciousness can seem it is
Speaker 1: going to have real world consequences because people with power
Speaker 1: are going to be faced with questions like this, and
Speaker 1: they're they're going to make decisions about what to do
Speaker 1: with their 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. Shall not make a machine and the
Speaker 1: likeness of a man's mind. Well, I too of the
Speaker 1: teachings of the Orange Catholic Bible. But it makes me wonder. Okay,
Speaker 1: so straightforwardly in reality, do you actually find that you
Speaker 1: think maybe we shouldn't pursue AI, should we try to
Speaker 1: create a global moratorium on on general intelligence? No? I
Speaker 1: think it's impossible. I think I think there's no turning back.
Speaker 1: It's what it's what we're doing, is what we're going
Speaker 1: to to be doing. Uh. And the only way they
Speaker 1: gets interrupted is is via just absolute catastrophe. And I
Speaker 1: am not I am not pro catastrophe. Uh, but it's
Speaker 1: gonna it's like, like like all technologies is simply going
Speaker 1: to be a matter of what extent can we prepare
Speaker 1: for and navigate the the moral problems that arise and
Speaker 1: there or and are we going to be able to
Speaker 1: have the foresight, uh, to see them before they're here? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I think that's what a lot of AI theorists say,
Speaker 1: is that, you know, it's not like we can stop it.
Speaker 1: You know, you can't. You can't put a wall in
Speaker 1: front of this train. The train is gonna bust through
Speaker 1: the wall. So In said, we should be intensely concerned
Speaker 1: with charting where the tracks go and making sure they
Speaker 1: go in a good direction. Yeah. I mean it comes
Speaker 1: back to like a simpler model of all this is
Speaker 1: our episode on the Great Eyeball Wars and our social
Speaker 1: media and our smartphones. It's like we can certainly throw
Speaker 1: our phone into a pond and then head off into
Speaker 1: the woods and try and live there, but most of
Speaker 1: us probably cannot um cannot follow that path. Therefore, we
Speaker 1: just have the best manage what we have. Yeah, wouldn't
Speaker 1: it be better to try to encourage the development of
Speaker 1: a phone full of apps that helped you fulfill your
Speaker 1: goals and aligned with your values? All right, 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 conversation and we
Speaker 1: would love to hear from you and interact with you.
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Speaker 1: links out to our various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
Speaker 1: and just basic contact information for us. Thanks as always
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and Tory Harrison.
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Speaker 1: a topic for the future, or just to say hi,
Speaker 1: let's know how you found out about the show, you
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