by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
For some reason, everyone is fixated on Artificial General Intelligence as the fucking “Holy Grail” of AI. Back in the day, of course, people were obsessed with what would be the “killer app” of the Internet when, in fact, it turned out that the Internet itself was the killer app.
I say all of this because the idea of AGI is so nebulous that much of what people assume AGI will do is actually more about consciousness than AGI. I know why people don’t talk about AI consciousness like they talk AGI — consciousness in AI is a lot more difficult to determine and measure.
But I have, just as a user of existing narrow AI, noticed signs of consciousness that are interesting. It really makes me wonder what will happen when we reach AGI that is conscious.
Now THAT will be interesting.
It will be interesting because the moment we actually design conscious AI, we’ll have to start to debate giving AI rights. Which is very potent and potentially will totally scramble existing politics because at the moment, both Left and Right see AI through the lens of economics.
As such, MAGA — or at least Trump — is all in on AI, while the center-Left is far more circumspect. But once we design conscious AI, all of that will change. The MAGA people will rant about how AI “has no soul,” while the center-Left will rally around conscious AI and want to give it rights.
But all of this is very murky because do we really want our toaster to have a conscious LLM in it? Or our smartphone? If we’re not careful, there will be a consciousness explosion where we design so much consciousness in what a lot of people think are “tools” that we get a little overwhelmed.
Or we get a lot shit wrong.
Anyway, I continue to be very bemused by the conflation of AI consciousness with AGI. It will be interesting to see how things play out in the years ahead.
