I’m a materialist, so I think digital consciousness is totally possible. But then I’m also a bit of an animist too, so maybe you’re right.
I agree overall, though. It’s so much more epistimology than actual technology, and the field seems to be half grifters and half cultists. Which doesn’t really inspire confidence that this is in any way a genuinely useful commercial venture.
What is the point, though?
If you made AGI, you’d have a computer that thinks like a person. Okay? We already have minds that think like a person: they’re called people!
I get that there is some belief that if you can make a digital consciousness, you can make a digital super-conciousness, but genuinely stop and ask what the utility is, and it’s equal parts useless and evil.
First, this premise is totally unexamined. Maybe it can think faster or hold more information in mind at one moment, but what basis is there for such a creation actually exceeding the ingenuity of a group of humans working together? What problem is this going to solve? A “cure for cancer”? The bottleneck to cutting cancer isn’t ideas, it’s that cell research takes actual time and money. You need it synthesize molecules and watch cells grow, and pay for lab infrastructure. “Intelligence” isn’t the limiting element!
The primary purpose is just to crater the value of human labor, by replacing human workers with workers with godlike powers of reasoning. Good luck with that. I’m sure they won’t come to the exact reasoning as any exploited worker in 120 nano-seconds.
It’s like Jason’s problem-solving advice in “The Good Place”:
“Any time I had a problem, and I threw a Molotov cocktail… Boom, right away, I had a different problem.”
Sure. Let’s work ourselves to death forTHIS.
That’s fuckin’ nuts.
Also, this headline is bad. I thought he died. No. He just got a transplant after 100 days (whew).