Can you prove that ChatGPT is not conscious? No. The hard problem of consciousness cuts both ways. Right now there is no way to know one way or the other.
You, when you step in dog shit: "Oh no!!! I'm sorry, Mr. Conscious Poop, who is conscious because I can't prove that you aren't!"
I’d say your instincts are correct and I too will dare not venture down that path.
“In the future, there will be brain-generated music”, said Ray Kay, to a young disciple.
“But Master Ray, isn’t music generally brain generated?”, the disciple asked.
“No, you fucking idiot. You fucking buffoon. How dare you question me,” replied Ray. It was then that the disciple reached enlightenment.
This is fundamentally a part of any kind of race science or racism.
And fascism! Or any discriminatory -ism, up to and including capitalism.
A standout, self-contained example of the general badness of this post is this anecdote (CW: transphobia/misgendering):
A trans woman I follow on Twitter complained that a receptionist at her workplace said she looked like some male celebrity. "I'm so mad," she fumed. "I look like this right now"—there was a photo attached to the Tweet—"how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say?" It is genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived in the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand, a thing I think any sane adult (on Earth, and not just dath ilan) should understand— It was a compliment! That receptionist was almost certainly thinking of someone like David Bowie or Eddie Izzard, rather than being hateful. The author should have graciously accepted the compliment and done something to pass better next time.[15] The horror of trans culture is that it's impossible to imagine any of these people doing that—noticing that they're behaving like a TERF's hostile stereotype of a narcissistic, gaslighting trans-identified man and snapping out of it.
It is baffling that they choose to speculate about/rationalise the offending comment to cast aspersions on the protagonist and “trans culture” as a whole.
Epistemic status: I have made it through this swamp. I did not read the footnotes. I glossed over the comments. Also as far as I can tell I am a cishet male, which is probably relevant to mention in reviewing this.
So here is where I am at. This post fractal sucks. Davis clearly doesn’t identify with the gender essentialist notion of male, but they also want to hold onto the idea of a biological sex binary. It sucks. I don’t think this is a unique situation- there are plenty of stories about trans kids in conservative/religious households. This particular conservative religion is the robot cult. The oppressive parents are the ghost of 2007!Yud and Scoot.
Reasoning about future AIs is hard
“so let’s just theorycraft eugenics instead” is like 50% of rationalism.
Haha did one of us update this? I am on mobile and can’t be bothered checking the edit logs
Those are asymptotically approaching "Are we the baddies?" levels of self-awareness.
Real boomer energy to look at a depressed person and lament that they don’t have the wherewithal to take care of themselves (meant both in the normal sense and in the mafia sense)
Also: admitting that he is moderating what he tweets to ward off sneers? Big W for Sneerclub, do a small thing to celebrate if you are reading this.
Normal person: you should not be attracted to the mind or body of anyone under the age of consent, nor should you invent thought experiments to find loopholes.
Yud: i live to groom