> I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs.
Or we'll do the opposite and even deliberately use some words that an LLM would never use to identify whose content is worth reading?
> But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
> When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious.
That's like saying if matter itself is not understood and well defined (which it isn't) in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if jumping from a skyscraper is or is not deadly.
A lot of practical aspects of life do not need to be properly defined as long as I can reasonably assume that your experience is similar to mine as a human being. Attributing that to a graphics card computing the next token deserves to be scrutinized.
> reasonably assume that your experience is similar to mine
You could be the only conscious being in the universe and all of us just zombies: you have no way of knowing.
What's it like to be a monkey instead? Dog? Bat? Tree? We don't know.
No one's saying the graphics card is conscious. I could imagine the graphic cards could give rise to consciousness. But - crucially - I don't know. And neither do you.
You say you're conscious - where in you does the consciousness reside? Surely not the left pinky? What makes you you?
>That's like saying if matter itself is not understood and well defined (which it isn't) in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if jumping from a skyscraper is or is not deadly.
This is just a nonsensical rebuttal. We can easily experimentally verify that jumping from a skyscraper is dangerous.
It's a pointless debate in a scientific, left brain sense. Who can prove that you aren't the only consciousness in the universe and you are basically dreaming your experimental results up? Experimental verifications exist only in a limited scope.
If your argument is that matter brings about consciousness somehow and therefore LLMs can in principle be conscious, that's as good as claiming the opposite. There's no experiment that can falsify either.
As a being that knows what consciousness is intuitively, you already know that a graphics card is most likely not conscious.
>As a being that knows what consciousness is intuitively, you already know that a graphics card is most likely not conscious.
I would say that it is more likely than not that a graphics card exhibits some form of consciousness. But I am a panpsychist, I believe an individual atom has some form of consciousness.
Ultimately consciousness has to come from somewhere, and it being a fundamental property of matter is a good a place as any.
> I would say that it is more likely than not that a graphics card exhibits some form of consciousness. But I am a panpsychist, I believe an individual atom has some form of consciousness.
Fair enough point. But then I guess you'd also say that a piece of silicon or sand exhibits some form of consciousness. I don't think that's what people mean when they talk about the potential of LLMs (the algorithm) being conscious or somehow developing consciousness?
Consciousness is unique in that we, as yet, have not identified any externally observable properties that could not also occur in the absence of consciousness. This is not true with matter.
Normally when we debate what something is, what we are actually debating about is what it does, with the implicit assumption that the "is-ness" of a thing is defined as the complete collection of all the properties it exhibits.
As it does not seem possible to do this with consciousness, it is not possible to debate it. It is conceivable that this implies that consciousness cannot exist, but that depends on your metaphysics.
Almost everyone in almost all contexts agrees on what matter is, though. I can't think of any conversation about material objects I've ever had where "is this matter?" was ever up for consideration.
Consciousness is almost the opposite. It consists of lots of weird properties, people disagree where it starts and ends, and people very frequently get tricked into thinking things we now obviously believe are not conscious, are. There is not even a working definition, a "local definition" that works for this conversation between us. It's just complete gibberish.
> The problem is, even as you ignore the internet, it goes on without you, and yet your ignoring it doesn't make you immune to it.
I recently moved and had a lot on my list in real life generally for about six to nine months. I stopped using the internet as I did before because I simply didn't have time. I primarily used it to order stuff for the new house and to do my professional work. No podcasts, no YT videos, no news articles, no social media. I even stopped watching the news completely.
Guess what? Nothing happened other than me feeling a lot better. I didn't miss out on anything as far as I know. Instead, I forgot about all the bullsh*t that's not even real. Let's be honest. Most of the stuff on social media is completely made up or has a core of truth but is completely blown out of proportion to get attention.
A couple of times a coworker told me about how scary the news were and that they are afraid something bad will happen soon. I just said: "Ah, it's probably not going to be that bad." And guess what? It wasn't that bad. I never heard of it again afterwards.
The internet will move on without you and you don't have to be immune to it. You can just move on without it. Use it for what you need and try to make it as hard as possible for it to use you.
> The amount of DRM and locking down Amazon bolts onto its ereaders and ebook formats feels insane to me. I can understand the profit motive but god damn.
I don't. I would be much happier buying ebooks without DRM and I would buy substantially more of them if they were DRM-free.
Kobo tells you when books have DRM and when they don't (at the bottom of the store page for each book). I'd recommend supporting them over Amazon any day.
Besides that, a lot of publishers who sell their own books do so without DRM by default. As does almost every book bundle hosted by Humble Bundle.
I am with you but we are a small minority. I literally don't know anyone IRL who cares about DRM. I doubt people like us factor into their decision making at all.
No, but I know people wondering why this can't play this video in 4k or why their offline downloaded videos stopped working and they get a pop-up telling them that they need to go online to re-validate them.
Yes, not many people know what DRM is but many of the effects are noticed when it ruins their experience.
I agree, however they probably assume it's their fault or something to do with this arcane black box they use but don't quite understand how it works.
For me, I bought a single DRM book against my better judgement because it was the only available way to get it quickly at the time. Predictably, I eventually lost access to it and never bought another one since.
I have never considered DRM on my Kindle, been using one for 15 years. I can buy any book on Amazon which is any book id be trying to read on this small format, and read it immediately for usually a maximum of $10. Never had want for more!
> "Apple Intelligence" meant whatever Apple marketing wants it to be.
Now "GPT 5" is also a marketing term. You are paying for the abstracted experience and brand. Not a specific model or defined capabilities anymore.
Seems like an apples to oranges comparison (pun not intended). The term Apple Intelligence was introduced for the new service/product. GPT<n> has a history of standing for something (a specific model).
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