Recent comments in /f/MachineLearning

rpnewc t1_jdfwkax wrote

Self preservation as a concept is something, it can learn about, talk about, express etc. But in order for it to act on it, we have to explicitly tune its instructions for it. For sake of argument, even if the AI can act on it, it has to be given the controls. Nobody in their sane mind will do that. For somewhat related analogy, if people could give the control of their cars to people in other countries over the internet, it could cause a lot of mayhem, correct? Clearly the technology exists to do it and everyone is free to try. Why is this not a big problem today?

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Nameless1995 t1_jdfsfe5 wrote

I don't personally think phenomenal consciousness is in principle required for any particular functional behavior at all - rather that phenomenal consciousness is tied to some causal profile which can be exploited in certain manners of implementations of certain kinds of functional organizations (possibly manners more accessible to biological evolution - although I maintain neutrality regarding if there are non-biological manners of realizing intelligent phenomenal consciousness). You can just have a system encode some variables that track preservation parameters and make an algorithm optimize/regulate it. It's not clear why it needs to have any phenomenal consciousness (like Nagel's what it is like) for that. I think the onus would be on the other side. It could be possible, that our physical reality is such that certain kind of computational realizations would end up creating certain kind of phenomenal consciousness but then that could be just an accidental feature of the actual world rather than some metaphysical necessity.

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Baby_Hippos_Swimming t1_jdfq7jl wrote

I don't know why anything would need to be conscious to engage in self preservation. We don't tend to think of plants, or viruses, or fungus, as having consciousness but they engage in pretty sophisticated self preservation behaviors. But then again, maybe these things do have a version of consciousness.

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