So Hinton is taking exactly 1 component of the *potential* frameworks of human understanding, & claiming that 1) that is all of human understanding, 2) that generative "AI" understands in exactly the same way, & thus 3) that generative "AI" understands like humans.
Honestly that's just bad logic.
I still firmly maintain that we don't know what makes consciousness consciousness & that we have way too many examples of things we think "couldn't," "shouldn't," or "mustn't" be conscious on some definition, Being Conscious, for us to ever firmly claim machines "can't be conscious." But i will say…
…if large languange models are conscious, then they're like a depressed, nihilistic toddler raised on a steady diet of 8chan, bad wikipedia edits, and youtube autoplay rabbit holes: a mind with no motivation or desire, without the ability to either discern or care abourt consensus reality or truth.
I'm no carbon-/bio-chauvinist, but the number of things "AI" guys try to reduce to "data architectures" or "Formalized Axioms Only," even in the face of literally decades of work showing those are representations, At Best, & in no way necessarily causal structures, is really shocking & disheartening
Just a note to say that trying to label as "straw man" an argument against claims about "intelligence" and "consciousness" Explicitly made by technologists at major corporations is to both a) be woefully underinformed about the state of beliefs within "AI", and b) misunderstand what a "straw man" is
2004: we are monsters because we do something called autistic thinking that also means we are incomprehensibly stupid
2024: everyone thinks the same and a Macintosh ][ could emulate any brain
