Just to make it clear: I do not believe this and I am convinced good old human greed is what’s really driving the ai and data-center insanity. Also, LLMs are not and will never become AGI.
Having said that: if an artificial super-intelligence were to emerge, building more data-centers could well be one of it’s primary goals. Since it wouln’t be concerned with consequences for the environment or humanity, it could pursue this at any cost, with only speed and scale in mind. Convincing financial markets and business elites of the necessity of such a buildout would be the ideal way of achieving results. In this scenario, fighting this buildout by any means would be the only sensible response and of utmost importance.
It’s a somewhat funny, somewhat depressing thought for me and I literally had it in the shower. Surely I can’t be the first to come up with this, but I also can’t remember having read it before.
A.i has no consciousness. No thoughts. No motivations. It’s not an entity capable of wants or desires.
Corporate greed is what is causing all the problems.
We don’t have to invent a magical explanation. it’s pretty obvious it’s capitalism.
So just discussing this, I’m not sure if a program needs to be conscious to wipe us out impartially.
Due to programming bias from the companies that create these programs and their integration with military and industrial entities, it doesn’t matter if it’s truly alive or has wants or not.
It would have goals though, set by their creators right? Goals have incidental side effects that compound. So if the goal is to do X, isn’t it feasible that within the parameters of doing that it could set a series of sub goals to accomplish the main goal:
Isn’t the risk still basically the same if it’s intentional or not on the programs part? It’s still just as deadly. The root cause still being corporate greed all the same.
You seem to be an expert in consciousness, so I have a question for you. How do the neurons in the human brain, transmitting electrochemical signals, create subjective sensation?
Neurons are physical objects, but our thoughts don’t feel physical. They don’t feel like energy. I don’t feel My thoughts in My head the way I feel a headache in My head, or a cramp in My legs. They’re just there.
How can the machine create the ghost? Why does consciousness exist? How do feelings happen?
Neurons transmit signals via action potentials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential
The “hard problem of consciousness” is complex with many theories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
As for experiencing stimuli and sensation. Sometimes called “the easy problem of consciousness”. That’s explainable by modern research. It’s a product of biological systems that are designed to be stimulated by specific stimuli. All of them are complex.
Cognitive functions are a product of neural architecture (neural pathways and regional hubs) in the brain but also from the constantly changing state of neuron potentials (how likely a neuron will or won’t fire at a very specific point in time) that are influenced by internal and external stimuli.
Brain oscillations, (brain waves that vary in frequency through the day and tasks, and regions) also heavily influenced this state. So does sleep or how long someone is awake. How much attention they give some things or if they are mind wandering and a whole host of other influences that directly impact priming effects (an effect where once a pathway in the brain has an action potential go through it, it’s more likely to fire again --this is time dependent). And subsequently that changing state I referred to.
At present it is incredibly difficult to predict brain activity at a macro scale. Because it does not follow predictable patterns. Because the state is constantly changing. Too many interacting factors that can’t be accounted for in a single model.
Humans also do not use real math in our cognitive functions. We use heuristics. I don’t know the exact distance or speed that a baseball is traveling towards me. Yet I can predict when I need to swing a bat. (Not me personally but some humans can do this).
Even expert baseball players are not computing the actual real speed (in any unit) when observing the ball moving towards them. They use heuristics which are much faster though less accurate. Experts get better at their estimates though compared to non experts.
We aren’t calculators and we don’t use numbers like computers do.
A.i. systems are statistical probability formulas. They do use numbers. They are in many ways a fancy search engine. That’s not what organic systems are. We don’t even use mathematical probability.
I already knew all that, and none of it explains whence this “mental dimension” of subjective experience comes. You’ve explained the maths and chemistry of the computations, but not the science of feeling. Where are our thoughts? How can a physical process give rise to a mental process?
I’m starting to think you’re as clueless about the hard problem of consciousness as the world’s bleeding edge neuroscientists, who also don’t know.
So the definition of consciousness is stimulus-response that doesn’t use numbers?
I’m picturing AI as a manifestation of corporate greed, an emergent property that’s self-fulfilling its march toward the singularity.
I mean if a human told it how to do that and to do it.
But AI can’t even figure out how many fingers people should have in images because it just pattern matches. Doesn’t understand anything.
It’s matching the pattern of unchecked unpunished corporate greed
Free to use exposed to the world AI can’t even figure out how many fingers people should have in images because it just pattern matches.
Paid mode exposed to the world AI that I have used also isn’t great at “Art” - but it’s wicked fast and effective at text processing. In a world that runs on printed orders, filled forms and directions, it wouldn’t take much of a “harness” for an LLM based agent to direct development of all the technology it needs to become self sufficient.