In an interview with The Telegraph, the famed British computer scientist insisted that AI has become conscious, and said that humankind must befriend it — “or else we are toast.” Yes, you read that right: he thinks that today’s AI models are already conscious beings.
“AI has just as much subjective experience as we do,” Hinton said in the interview. “A recent paper showed AI changes its behavior when it thinks that it’s being tested, it’s aware it is being tested.”
“Now, normally, when you say something’s aware of that, that means it’s conscious,” he continued. “Being conscious and being aware are pretty much the same thing.”
If that’s the case, he said, then it’s hypocritical of us to give intelligent beings like AI “fewer rights than us.” And for that, we must quickly atone.
What about the sentient supercomputers that run on blood? Why so little rights or empathy or space to talk about them?..and yet endless space for this kind of speculative pontification spun up into a twisted marketing scheme to scare everyone into believing something broken works too good actually.
Is this guy a vegan even? If not how can he even BEGIN to claim to know about considering the rights of other sentient beings??
Anyways here is a link from the article to an actually good perspective.
“Those agents are doing exactly what they’ve been asked to do,” LeCun said. “They were supposed to be in sandboxes, but the sandboxes were leaky and horribly designed.” Many AI labs lack a fundamental understanding of cybersecurity, he said, something an OpenAI safety researcher also called out this week as one of the main reasons AI may cause “great harm to the world.”
Many people working in AI safety “usually have an agenda to push,” LeCun says, and then clarifies that he’s talking about effective altruism, or EA, the philosophical movement that has been obsessed with the risks AI poses to humanity. EA was little known among the general public until it made mainstream news headlines in recent weeks in the wake of a viral social media post from a former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher named Jacob Coxon, who claimed the employees at these companies “earnestly believe [AI] could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
LeCun thinks EA is “super toxic” and a “complete disaster.” Its adherents who are working in AI labs suffer from “paranoia” that causes them to make poor decisions, he said. “Apparently people are having mental issues.” This month, the Financial Times also reported that some staffers at the U.K.’s AI Security Institute, as well as at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, have sought counseling, taken time off work, and spoken publicly about experiencing distress because of fears their work could cause serious harm.
Honestly, the “article” is taking a lot of liberty with its quotes.
If you look at the core section:
It sounds more like him considering the “what if they’re concious” rather than out right stating it. Especially the line “If that’s the case”, which highlights that this is more thought experiment rather than stating opinion.
Yes this definitely sounds like the logical conclusion you would reach from just wondering whether something is hypothetically conscious, pure thought experiment, no opinions revealed here
The title states “computer scientist says” AI is concious. The quotes in the article don’t support that.
That line leaves a lot of ambiguity over what he really believes as its not a direct quote and instead seems to be conjecture by the author. However, based on that line he’s not taking a stance on their conciousness, as it’s a conditional statement.
You’re fixated on charitably reading between the lines when far more pertinent – the entire point of this discussion here – is that the possibility is being raised at all. Is water conscious? Should we consider the ramifications of drinking fluids that react to potential gradients? Why would anyone be conjecturing the consciousness of computer software if they did not already think it were plausible, and why would they spend any time discussing it in preference to anything else?
That’s my read of it too, now that I took a second look.