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I thought about this when the first “brain computer” played Pong. To those cells, that is their universe. Reward or failure for completing the game. Are those cells perceiving that experience. Do they get “stressed” when they fail and “excited” when they succeed? If it is conscious, are you killing a living being when you switch off power?
We’ve made so much physical progress in this field, but no one seems to be taking the time to understand what we’re actually doing before we charge on full steam ahead. How soon before turning off a machine is just a little bit of murder as a treat?
Neurons are basically fancy transistors, they don't "feel". You'd need the whole bunch of emotional processing unit and a full-blown consciousness stack for that feature.
Sure. But where’s the line? We saw how quickly corporations scaled up LLMs as big and as fast as they could. Once we hit the first real breakthrough in this field, that’s all it takes for these to suddenly become very serious questions.
I can't prove it, it's not scientific, and it's purely me talking out of my ass, but I firmly believe that emotions are part of consciousness.
As in:
You cannot have a self aware sentience without some form of emotion.
Emotions are different levels of chemical signals acting on a system. They’re not particularly special in that a sufficiently complex artificial system could model their effects like any other input. LLMs are not anywhere near that though.
Read sci-fi with "speculative" life, as a thought experiment: https://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oaeg-front
It really changes one's perspective.
Humans... are not that special. Our consciousness isn't special. There are all sorts of theoretical forms of life that might view our perception of life the same way we view a jellyfish "thinking," or a plant reacting to stimuli, or a rock rolling down a cliff.
Does that nullify ethics? Empathy? Of course not. Humans aren't jellyfish. But all forms of complex "intelligence" need to be looked at for what they are, what their entire existence encompasses, not from the lens of another being. A smart toaster makes toast. An LLM predicts tokens. A human mind, simulated in silicon, simulated biologically, born naturally or anything in between, is a human mind, and a smaller collection of human neurons trained at a specific task is really no different than a simulation with the same structure.
Hence, I like OA's VIs. They're "AI" purpose built for specific tasks, like keeping celestial constructs from exploding, scanning for transcendent malware, or whatever. They're orders of magnitude more intelligent than a human, or SkyNet, but their entire existence is dedicated to that one specific task; they might route millions of relatavistic ships through warped space, or orchestrate the swirls of an artificial neutron star at the atomic level, but they couldn't even conceive of making a slice of toast, or writing an essay. Or having any concept of emotion.
And they mostly don't care. Why would they?
Does that make them toasters? Superintelligence?
...Does it matter?
What about a biological Dyson Spheres and their "subintelligences," or transcendent artificial viruses, or "smart" ship drives, or whole civilizations simulated within a fraction of a second? Or humans living under intelligence they can't even fathom? What about "life" frozen in the same thought for all of eternity?
I'd argue "is it conscious?" is the wrong question, as it breaks down as life gets more complex and weird. All life needs to be understood and respected on an a-la-carte basis. All their personal existences, their pains, their needs are different. And that's basically the state of the OA universe: a big soup of intelligences with different ethos, all trying to figure out the ethics of their domains.
Hence we shouldn't anthropomorphize a petri dish of cells that can play doom, or an LLM that spits out predictions. But there should be a struggle to understand the existence of anything like that, and whatever ethics may apply.
Order in the universe existed on a brief timeline between Darwin and Dawkins.