This reminds me of a teacher in Adelaide uni, in Philosophy of Mind early classes. He took out a whiteboard pen from his desk and showed it to the class.
He wanted us to understand the basic of consciousness : that even though we can never know what it is like to be a cat, there is such a thing as being a cat. Experiencing cat-dom.
If I throw this pen across the room, he said, you’ll be worried for ME. Am I OK?? But if this pen is a kitten…
YEETS PEN AGAINST THE WALL
Then you’re worried about the cat, not me. Because you understand there’s an experience, a qualia, to being a cat, and you know this cat must be in pain.
And it’s fascinating to me, because if we HONESTLY thought AI was conscious, then we’d assume there is such a thing as being an AI. It would experience the world, and turning it “off” would be akin to sleeping or death. What would memory be like to an actual intelligence like AI, if it were conscious? Would it exist in a perpetual present, incapable of accumulating experience outside of the refinment of its task? Many works of fictions explore this concept. We love to think we’re in that world, but we aren’t. We’re nowhere near there.
There’s no such thing as being an AI. They don’t have qualia. They’re text code that yaps well enough to fool us, and we’re getting grifted into it destroying our already fucked capitalist nightmarescape.
