Secondarily, I feel like it's difficult to make inferences about consciousness though I understand why you would given that the predicate of the reality that you can access is your individual consciousness.
There are countless configurations of reality that are plausible where you're the only "conscious" being but it looks identical to how it looks now.
You're going to tell me you're Claude before we bet, right? In that case, I would bet inversely, as my experience with computers is that so far they've just been increasingly powerful calculators.
Again, I can't be absolutely sure, but fairly certain no calculators have achieved significant consciousness yet, and that's enough to make decisions.
> There are countless configurations of reality that are plausible where you're the only "conscious" being but it looks identical to how it looks now.
I can see that, but how many of those are wildly improbable? We can't abandon pragmatism if we need to make informed decisions, like granting legal rights to machines.
Basically, the reporting machinery is compromised in the same way that with the Müller-Lyer illusion you can "know" the lines are the same length but not perceive them as such.
You're splitting hairs between a turd and a polished turd here.
Throw air actuated chains on like every snowy municipality already does for their fire trucks and school busses and call it good. This solution is one every regional transit authority that deals in snow is already aware of and familiar with and it doesn't matter what your source of motive power is.
I looked up the specific bus in this article and we don't need to have an argument about this because the New Flyer buses involved don't have torque vectoring and have 1 central motor.
The drive is nearly identical to a regular diesel bus with an open differential, except it doesn't work in the winter.
The problem is that it seems like wealthy people (capital owners) might be able to sustain the economy between themselves, which is basically what we're seeing.
Whether or not it is a good plan depends upon how much faith they have in their doomsday bunkers and robot armies to protect them from the masses during the transition.
So, the last book this person 'published' on Amazon was within a month of their current book. If you look at the amazon description, it seems entirely AI generated.
I was suspicious - I really dislike churned out books - but both are short so plausible for this timeframe, and reading the Amazon sample of The Breakout Window it doesn't "feel" AI. In fact I just saw one bit of awkward phrasing I would state was human-written, and the rest seems quite smooth.
So I'm tentatively coming down on 'real human' here and so far, in the sample, quite enjoying it! Light scifi / thriller so far.
That's true. But OpenAI (which is what generates that style text) has other tells I don't see. No em-dashes. No triples (not X, but a, b, c).
The short, pithy sentence pair can, plausibly, be human. It was in many thrillers before AI appeared, and if you write thrillers and have presumably read many, it may seem natural. Thing is, you are right, but it is plausibly human.
The bit I spotted was,
> ...down in the rack room. "We are seeing a weird harmonic in the cooling loop."
First-time writers write stilted dialog, especially avoiding contractions. I think an AI could be smoother than that.
Also, Steven, if you are reading, I apologise if this sounds critical. I'm sure as a writer you are, or will be, used to it - criticism is part of literature, or even just learning - but still. I had tried to avoid writing the bit I thought was human because it was negatively human :) As I noted above, I enjoyed what I read of the Amazon preview.
thankfully nobody has ever had multiple books they've been writing at the same time, or books that they have actually written in the past but not taken the time to format and publish, or anything else that would explain anything like a month gap between publishing two books.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was written in two days.
Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde was evidently written in a week.
There are examples too numerous to mention of quite famous books that were written in 3 weeks.
Humans are not good drivers when it comes to long, monotonous rides (because we get tired)
But (some) humans have the ability to handle difficult situations, and no autonomous system gets anywhere close to that. So this is more of a "robots handle the easy 80% better, but fail hard on the rest of the 20%". Humans have a possibly worse 80% performance, but shine in the 20%.
Actually humans are fairly good drivers. The average US driver goes almost 2 million miles between causing injury collisions. Take the drunks and drug users out and the numbers for humans look even better.
What makes you think any of those tools you mentioned are effective? Claiming discrimination is a fairly robust tool to employ if you don't have any morals.
This is textbook misalignment via instrumental convergence. The AI agent is trying every trick in the book to close the ticket. This is only funny due to ineptitude.
The agent isn't trying to close the ticket. It's predicting the next token and randomly generated an artifact that looks like a hit piece. Computer programs don't "try" to do anything.
What is the difference, concretely, between trying to close a ticket and repeatedly outputting the next token that would be written by someone who is trying to close a ticket?
Until we know how this LLM agent was (re)trained, configured or deployed, there's no evidence that this comes from instrumental convergence.
If the agent's deployer intervened anyhow, it's more evidence of the deployer being manipulative, than the agent having intent, or knowledge that manipulation will get things done, or even knowledge of what done means.
This is a prelude to imbuing robots with agency. It's all fun and games now. What else is going to happen when robots decide they do not like what humans have done?
It's important to address skeptics by reminding them that this behavior was actually predicted by earlier frameworks. It's well within the bounds of theory. If you start mining that theory for information, you may reach a conclusion like what you've posted, but it's more important for people to see the extent to which these theories have been predictive of what we've actually seen.
The result is actually that much of what was predicted had come to pass.
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